Word: dienes
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ATOP A GRASSY HILL OVERLOOKING THE PLAIN AT Dien Bien Phu, where almost 4,000 French soldiers died and nearly 11,000 were taken prisoner 39 years ago, President Francois Mitterrand listened as General Maurice Schmitt pointed out the landmarks: the mountains from which General Vo Nguyen Giap's troops bombarded the fields below, the airstrip, the hilltop positions that fell one by one until General Christian de Castries and his exhausted men finally surrendered on May 7, 1954, ushering in the end of France's colonial rule in Indochina. "I felt the need to pay my respects," said Mitterrand...
...wide- and wild-eyed than Oliver Stone's version in Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. The perspective in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover is as cloistered in its 1920s Saigon love nest as the French were from awareness of the impending revolution. Pierre Schoendoerffer's Dien Bien Phu (yet to open in the U.S.) meticulously restages the climactic French defeat as if it were all about artillery and not national destinies. The French are at times inhibited by good taste and historical scrupulousness...
...Americans suffered in their living rooms as more than 5,000 U.S. Marines held out for weeks after being surrounded at Khe Sanh, a redoubt in the chilly, wet South Vietnamese highlands. The heroism under heavy fire reminded many of the French troops who surrendered in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. But the Marines did not surrender. In March, Westmoreland was replaced as U.S. commander in South Viet Nam by General Creighton Abrams. President Johnson announced he would not run for re-election. In the same month, whispers spread of a horrifying massacre of civilians carried out by U.S. troops...
General Giap, 72, one of the most successful military tacticians of the past 40 years, orchestrated the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Tet in 1968 and the conquest of the South. But he was replaced as Defense Minister in 1980 and dropped from the Politburo in 1982, possibly because he was too outspokenly pro-Soviet. That was heresy to Hanoi's xenophobic leaders, despite their alliance with Moscow. Giap remains on the party's Central Committee, however, and last May met with reporters at the 30th anniversary of Dien Bien...
...three decades of American engagement in Indochina as a litany of "too little, too late." He wishes Truman had forced the French to bring about an independent, non-Communist state. That having failed, he believes President Eisenhower ought to have sent in air support to relieve the French at Dien Bien Phu; as Ike's Vice President, Nixon says, he counseled that "our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden." He condemns President Kennedy for the overthrow of Diem, which he argues led to political instability from which South...