Word: dien
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From late 1956 to mid-1959, Saigon was still a haunting, lethargic beauty exuding an undertone of wicked excitement. The French, lately humiliated by Vo Nguyen Giap at Dien Bien Phu, skulked about, bitter and distrustful of the new top-dog foreigners from the U.S. You heard stories about district chiefs being garroted by the Communists, but the violence seemed isolated and distant. More immediate was the prospect of an interview with President Ngo Dinh Diem, which meant that you had to visit the bathroom beforehand because he sometimes kept you six straight hours. The thing was to be Diem...
Though President Eisenhower, rejecting his vice president's advice, decided not to give the resurgent French a couple of nuclear bombs, shortly before the fall of Dien Bien Phu, it was the United States that encouraged Ngo Dinh Diem to cancel the nation wide elections to reunite a divided Vietnam that had been called for in the Geneva agreement of 1954. After helping Diem wrest control of the South Vietnamese army, the United States continued to support him as he used it to break up and destroy competing religious-political sects, disband traditional village councils, and force peasants to leave...
...ability to achieve total military victory within a few months, if not sooner. In the past month, General Van Tien Dung, the NVA'S Chief of Staff and a disciple of the legendary Vo Nguyen Giap (mastermind of the Viet Minn's 1954 victory at Dien Bien Phu and of the 1968 Tet offensive), has demonstrated an impressive ability to coordinate infantry, artillery and armor. Indeed, the Communist Southern headquarters (COSVN) is now describing 1975-rather than 1976, as previously declared-as the "Year of Final Victory...
...without chronology there can be no perspective, and without perspective there is no history. The viewer is thus left with a winding gallery of glimpses. Some of those glimpses are indelible. The late Georges Bidault, ex-Premier of France, remembers the time before the fall of Dien Bien Phu: "John Foster Dulles asked me, 'And if we were to give you two atomic bombs?' " An intelligence officer recalls the distaste American soldiers had for mutilating bodies. Instead of terrorizing North Vietnamese with human eyes stuck on the back of a corpse (a psy-war trick), the Americans made...
...liaison between the underground and De Gaulle's London headquarters. Named army chief of staff in 1953, he made the final unsuccessful French appeal for American intervention in France's colonial war in Indochina. When Ho Chi Minh's troops overran the French fortress of Dien Bien Phu, Ely assumed command in Indochina, and it was he who announced in Saigon the Geneva accord dividing Viet Nam at the 17th parallel. He later played a key role in De Gaulle's effort to disengage from Algeria without provoking civil war in France...