Word: indo-china
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...novel only because French Author Pierre-Henri Simon chooses to call it one. Actually, it is an antiwar tract and one of the most eloquent in recent years. It is the author's bitter J'accuse, telling all Frenchmen and the world that France, first in Indo-China and now in Algeria, has given its soldiers ignoble roles in shameful wars. Says the hero's friend: "You can't say that war's our industry, for it nearly always costs us more than we get out of it; but it's our luxury...
Anger & Pride. Then came Indo-China. There, once questioning an intelligent, Paris-educated national who was now fighting for the Communist Viet Minh, Larsan heard a criticism of France that was hard to deny: it was "too generous with us and too hard . . . too intelligent and too stupid." France was perfectly willing to pass on its culture, but Frenchmen were never really willing to accept natives as equals, and so, as in all colonial rule, "a moment comes when there's too much accumulated anger on one side and too hard a carapace of pride on the other...
...Indo-China taught Larsan that it is better for a soldier "not to know too much of what goes on below the surface," but his own trouble as a soldier was that he had become a thinking and feeling man. His personal crisis came in Algeria, where he found war no longer an honorable profession but a vicious police action. He conceded that the rebels were murderous, but could not justify to himself committing murder in vengeance. When he sees his own men wiping out whole villages of unarmed civilians, he protests; by that time, it is perfectly plain...
Dillon made a doubtful start as a diplomat. "Whenever a difficult problem came up." recalls one former embassy staffer, "he got a cold in the head." But as France's problems-notably in Indo-China and with the European Defense Community-grew worse, Dillon stepped up to the challenge of his assignment. He and Phyllis spent an hour daily with a French tutor; within weeks Dillon was visiting the Quai d'Orsay without an interpreter. In a social swim where lavish entertainment was a matter of courses...
Fitfully, Diem once again began playing on the fringes of politics. After the Communists and the French had started their Indo-China shooting war in 1946, he formed a resistance movement against them both; it never amounted to much. The French offered to back him as head of a provisional government at one stage, but they balked when he demanded dominion status for Viet Nam. Finally, amid the bloody fighting, Ngo Dinh Diem packed up and left with an older brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, a Catholic priest, for a trip around the world. Reaching the U.S., Diem paused to rest...