Seems like at one point they bragged about the only difference between a general and a grunt was a red star on the cap.
Did they stick with that, or do they have chevrons and pins and medals and sashes?
Where did you get this?
I dunno - from the looks of this photo, Giap didn’t buy at the Gap.
The US doesn’t have particularly fancy uniforms for Generals. The dress uniform is the same as other officers. It might look a little more ornamented; stars are fancier than a single gold bar; and they generally have a lot more decorations than lower ranks, but the uniform is the same.
The field uniform appears to be plain camouflage with cloth stars and the name on the pocket just lake everyone else.
Dunno about the truth of the OP, but here is a pic of Vietnamese Defense Minister Pham Van Tra and other troops circa 2000 FWIW.
Maybe on the field uniform; and probably the* VC * had no distinction of uniforms/ranks – but I think the NVA did show rank on their service uniforms and at various times, including now, has had dress uniforms. As you can see from the picture linked above, it is a rather modest, sober style but it’s still recognizably a “Class A” service-dress type of uniform, with badges of rank and post and the possibility of dressing it up even more (as the aide just behind shows). Sure, you have to be close eenough to see his shoulderboards to know his rank, but you can tell he’s no raw private.
I believe it was China, Cultural Revolution period, that took the “revolutionary army” system to the extreme and just had everybody wear exactly the same Mao Jacket/Mao Cap with no marks of rank or billet other than a badge for upper command.
Quite a few “revolutionary” armies ditched the traditional rank system and adopted egalitarian dress, though still with some sort of badge to denote who was what. The more radical ones would replace the whole private-to-general scale with something that went just “fighter”, “leader”, and “commander”; the Cuban and Central American (like the Sandinistas and the FMLN) revolutionary armies followed that style. Still, when they actually took over, for a short while they’d maintain that structure and style, wearing some sort of indicator of who was what (e.g. stars on comandantes; and then after a while they figured this was no way to manage personnel for a standing Army and they’d set up a more reasonable rank structure, often a nontraditional one using your job description rather than a traditional rank title, but still with actual badges of rank. Something similar happened to the Bolsheviks in the early USSR; traditional ranks and styles of uniform were reestablished in mid-WW2.
As mentioned, the US military’s general/flag officer uniform is usually the same as for all other officers, just with the logically greater accretion of pin-ons – and subtle touches like wearing two strips of braid on the cuff and down the trouser seam, rather than one.
It was actually the Soviet Red Army that abandoned distinctive uniforms. It was re-instated after the battle of Stalingrad, where the pleasure of wearing little bits of string and braid was rediscovered. The Chinese did the same thing during the Cultural Revolution but were not the first.
I was thinking the VC was the basis for the current Viet army.
And they may have meant battlefield gear and I wouldn’t have noticed a distinction.
something along these lines
Being non-military I thought the only difference for dress duds was color.
Didn’t Napoleon and Wellington, go into battle in fancy get-ups?
There is a good reason not to have distinctive uniforms as combat wear. It isn’t a good thing to identify officers who then become targets for snipers. During WWII an insignia was painted on the front of the helmet, gold bar, silver bar, etc. They became known as “aiming stakes.” Officers didn’t really like to have people comming up to them and saluting and everyone near the guy carrying the radio was antsy.