Word: frenchmen
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...enemy is. The man who serves your food and drives your car may be in one country a Mau Mau and in the other a Viet Minh. It is a colonial war, not so much in reality any more, but still so in the minds of some Frenchmen who have not unlearned the past, and in the minds of some Vietnamese who will not forget it. It is a civil war, too: countryman fighting countryman, often not because of differing convictions but because of the accident of geography and which side was there to conscript him. The Vietnamese nationalists tell...
Just 15 miles out of Hanoi, on the crucial supply road to Haiphong, our car is suddenly halted. Trouble ahead in the next village: the Viet Minh have ambushed some trucks and four Frenchmen have been killed. The tanks must clear the road; there will be half an hour's delay. Finally we are allowed to move ahead again, and we meet the tanks heading back to the nearby fort, like fire trucks ready for the next alarm. Before us in the highway sits the ambushed truck, its cab split apart, its load a charred twist of metal...
...quite different one: What keeps the French here at all? If Indo-China goes, the French have no significant strategic considerations left in Asia. The war costs them more than any economic advantages they can get from it. They are fatigued and frustrated by eight years without victory. Yet Frenchmen continue to plant crops, build houses and, though it may seem whimsical, to make plans...
...nations. At Geneva, this explanation continues, the French only want to find out China's terms for sealing off its border; the French have no intention of capitulating. Implicit in this explanation is the continuance of a certain kind of controlled and limited war. Ask either Vietnamese or Frenchmen whether large-scale American aid would be welcomed, and the usual answer is that such aid would turn Indo-China into another Korea. They define Korea as a greatly stepped-up war, with vast devastation and loss of life, and in the end only stalemate again...
Hagridden by fear of Germany, influenced by Molotov's propaganda bluff that EDC "cannot fail to lead to World War III," more and more Frenchmen are attracted by the notion of a global package deal: a cease-fire in Indo-China for rejection of EDC. Jacques Soustelle, a power in the Gaullist party, said last week: "If France should obtain a cessation of hostilities and, at the same time, reject EDC, she would gain at both tables...