Vietnam War: NVA and Marijuana?

Factual Questions
1

I have been reading Tom Clancy’s book co-written with General Carl Stiner (ret) about the Amercian special forces over the years.

In a portion of the book about Vietnam an anecdote deatails that during the Vietnam war, each NVA soldier carried a small baggie of marijuana and full companies would smoke before major battles.

Can anyone verify this? And if so, what would be the NVA reasoning behind this practice?

For starters, Marijuana sigfinicantly reduces motor control and reaction time. It also has visible effects on aggression. Things that would be counter-productive to soldiers going into battle and I would think put the NVA soldiers at an even greater disadvantage than they already were.

2

For those who are wondering, I think “NVA” refers to North Vietnamese.

Not the National Vulvodynia Association, or the National Volleyball Association, Nationale Volksarmee or people from Northern Virginia.

3

More specifically, it refers to the North Vietnamese Army, not just any North Vietnamese and also not the Viet Cong.

4

I can’t verify the authenticity of the claim (and it sounds like a legend), but different people respond to THC in very different ways, for some it’s a debilitating inebriant for others… well not so debilitating. For some people, the main negative side effect is improper attention (not being able to concentrate on the right things, etc.) which is not an issue during war (you’re not going to get distracted from war)

I mean if they did do this, I would imagine the reasoning was that war can be a pretty glum and depressing thing, and in of itself has a psychological effect that can be battled with THC.