Delegates gathered in Tây Ninh province to establish the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, uniting communists, nationalists, and other opponents of the Diem government under one umbrella organization. Backed by North Vietnam, the NLF became the political face of the insurgency that Americans would call the Viet Cong, fighting a guerrilla war that lasted fifteen years and drew the United States into its longest conflict of the 20th century.
Under jungle canopy near the Cambodian border, roughly sixty delegates representing workers, peasants, intellectuals, and ethnic minorities hammered out a ten-point program calling for the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem's government and the eventual reunification of Vietnam. The North Vietnamese Communist Party had authorized the front's creation months earlier, but it deliberately presented itself as a broad nationalist coalition rather than a purely communist vehicle, hoping to attract southerners disillusioned with Diem's increasingly authoritarian and nepotistic rule.
The NLF's military wing would become known to American soldiers simply as the Viet Cong, masters of tunnel warfare, ambush, and psychological pressure who neutralized much of America's technological advantage in the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam.
Washington, still just sending advisers under President Eisenhower, barely registered the founding at the time. Within five years, though, the United States would have hundreds of thousands of combat troops fighting an organization born in that clearing, a conflict that would kill an estimated 1.3 million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans before the war's end in 1975.