In November 1963, Burchett embarked on his ‘greatest journalistic enterprise since Hiroshima’. He spent six months travelling in the jungles of South Vietnam with ‘Vietcong’ guerillas in areas controlled by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam. He lived with the NLF fighters throughout this period, marching with them, inhabiting their network of tunnels, and dodging attacks on them.

The articles, photographs and the book, Vietnam: Inside Story of the Guerilla War that resulted from this historic visit propelled him back into the front pages of the Western news media and publishing houses. His discussions with the tribespeople in the mountains and the ordinary Vietnamese in the lowlands of the country were new to Western audiences, and combining these insights with his interviews with American POWs gave this book a unique value as a record of the war, and marks it as one of Burchett's best.

In the early 1960s the US began to apply the principle of ‘Special Warfare’ in South Vietnam to fight the Vietcong. The father of this theory was General Maxwell Taylor, who was advisor to President Kennedy when he first began to advocate it in 1961, and later became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The program involved Ngo Dinh Diem's Saigon regime supplying cannon fodder, the US supplying equipment and advisors, and peasants and ethnic minorities being relocated into ‘strategic hamlets’ to separate them from the guerillas. As the following chapter indicates, however, the NLF had a network of hamlets of their own.