Vintage 1960's NLF Party Badge - Viet Cong - Destroy America - Early Vietnam War

Very Rare - Original Badge - First NLF Party Badge - 1961

Thi Dua, Quyet Chien, Quyet Thang, Giac My

Emulate, Resolved to Fight, Resolved to Win, Dstroy America

Very Rare pin badge of the National Liberation Front. Issued on formation, 1961 - Vintage NLF Pin

Extremely Rare - 1961 Badge - First NLF Party Badge

Measures - 1.2 inch high ( cms)

NLF - National Liberation Front

The Việt Cộng, also known as the National Liberation Front (NLF), was a communist political organization with its own army – the People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF) – in South Vietnam and Cambodia that fought the United States and South Vietnamese governments, eventually emerging on the winning side

It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized peasants in the territory it controlled. Many soldiers were recruited in South Vietnam, but others were attached to the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), the regular North Vietnamese army.

During the war, communists and anti-war activists insisted the Việt Cộng was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of Hanoi. Although the terminology distinguishes northerners from the southerners, communist forces were under a single command structure set up in 1958.

North Vietnam established the National Liberation Front on December 20, 1960, to grow insurgency in the South. Many of the Việt Cộng's core members were volunteer "regroupees", southern Việt Minh who had resettled in the North after the Geneva Accord (1954).

Hanoi gave the regroupees military training and sent them back to the South along the Ho Chi Minh trail in the early 1960s.

The NLF called for southern Vietnamese to "overthrow the camouflaged colonial regime of the American imperialists" and to make "efforts toward the peaceful unification".

The People's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam (PLAF)'s best-known action was the Tet Offensive, a massive assault on more than 100 South Vietnamese urban centers in 1968, including an attack on the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

The offensive riveted the attention of the world's media for weeks, but also overextended the Việt Cộng. Later communist offensives were conducted predominantly by the North Vietnamese. The organization was dissolved in 1976 when North and South Vietnam were officially unified under a communist government.