Word: airstrips
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...months had passed since Communist General Vo Nguyen Giap conquered the Thai country lying between Red China and Laos (see map). Instead of throwing all his forces against several hundred thousand French Union and Vietnamese troops bottled up in the Red River delta and in the airstrip at Nasan, Giap began probing the defenses of Laos with his Viet Minh commandos. In his exquisite white palace overlooking the palm-fringed Mekong River, aging (67), crew-cropped King Sisavang Vong told the French: "This is my country; this is my palace; I am too old to tremble before danger." Not until...
...haired Foreign Legionnaire: "We now have the oldest war in the world." To the "Moles of Nasan" the usually frugal French commissary sent Australian beefsteaks, fried potatoes, vegetables, fresh bread, Algerian wine and 3,000 bottles of champagne-one bottle for every four men in the dusty, embattled airstrip. Thai and Vietnamese troops got frozen meat, dried fish and rice; the North Africans had wine, live sheep and goats, brought in by airlift. In a dugout mess 25 feet underground, Nasan Commander Two-Star General Jean Gilles passed out cigars and liquors to his staff. Said bearlike General Gilles...
Said General Jean Gilles: "We only pray they will attack us." The commander of Nasan waved his hand around the encircled battlefield: the dusty mile-long airstrip and the score of 500-ft. hills around it. Every hill and every valley was a network of barbed wire and dug-in strong points; with its 12,000 French troops, air-supplied by a constant shuttle of planes, Nasan was like a military anthill. French officers likened it to the classic French position at Verdun, the great turning-point battle of World...
...dozens, but still they came on. By 3 a.m. they had overrun two hilltop posts on the perimeter's north face, finishing off the Moroccan and Thai defenders with knives, bayonets, machetes, grenades. Within minutes the Viet Minh were putting mortar fire on Nasan's vital airstrip. Next day the attackers had backed off of one hill, and French paratroopers recaptured the other...
...French Union forces had lost 200 dead, and the Communists more than 500. The French claimed a victory, but it was at most an inconclusive one. Sad-eyed General Raoul Salan was convinced that even if the airstrip became unusable, the French could still supply Nasan's defenders indefinitely by airdrop...