Word: giap
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bien Phu to make a decisive stand aimed at checking the Communists. Instead, the one set-piece battle of the seven-year Indochina war led to the slaughter of 1,500 Frenchmen and, at home, to the loss of political will to continue the campaign. To General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the attacking forces, who is now 71, the Viet Minh victory was "the toll of a bell heralding the decline of colonialism." The battle at Dien Bien Phu led to the partition of Viet Nam and the establishment of the Communist regime in the north; it also...
...Dien Bien Phu, 18 miles from the Laotian border. It is difficult to imagine the battlefield as it appeared 30 years ago. The French chose Dien Bien Phu because its strategic location seemed to make it the ideal place to cut Viet Minh supply lines and thus to harass Giap's troops into submission. Protected by mountains on all sides, it seemed impregnable. Against heavy odds, Ho's Viet Minh army laid siege for 55 days. Finally, on May 7, 1954, after hauling whole batteries of heavy artillery to seemingly impossible mountain redoubts and tunneling to within yards...
...serious comparison. Jumblatt has perhaps 30,000 tribesmen under his command. General Giap had half a million. Two decades ago we may have mistaken Hanoi for a fifth-rate power. Now we recognize that its talent for militarizing society, a talent it shares with other Leninist states, enabled it to achieve the status of a regional superpower. (Today it has the fifth largest armed force in the world.) Jumblatt is at most a small counter on a much larger board...
...second installment. "The First Vietnam War," the French fight the Vietminh for eight years only to be soundly defeated at Dien Bien Phu, as a French general pointedly recalls a talk with General Vo Nguyen Giap, Vietnamese Defense Minister and instigator of Dien Bien Phu and the Tet Offensive...
...Giap himself states the Vietminh military strategy, "...in war we have to win, absolutely have to win." The episode finishes with the precarious Geneva Accords of 1954, and closes after a story about the French Legionaires landing at Dien Bien Phu. After the legionaires patriotically sing their Legion song, a cadre of Vietnamese respond by chanting La Marseillaise having no song of their...