Word: nam
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With Knowledge of Folly. For the free world, the settlement legitimized a crushing defeat already suffered. Through spirited bargaining, France's Premier Pierre Mendès-France kept his hold on a few degrees of latitude across Viet Nam's waist, won a few extra months of respite for free Viet Nam. But these were no more than bargaining old bones, tossed to the West by the Communists to get a deal. If the Reds swallowed only part of Viet Nam now, they could afford to wait for the rest. By the swapping of a few parallels...
Mendès plunged ahead with a new confidence. Before, he had let it be known that he would consider partition of Viet Nam at the 16th parallel (the Communists demanded the 14th). But on his return, he proposed division at the 18th (see map, p. 22), which is 140 miles to the north of his first boundary. "The American signature is surely worth a parallel or two," he told Viet Minh Foreign Minister Pham Van Dong cheerfully...
...Captivity. After the battle the Communists split their worn-out prisoners into two groups about 3,000 strong: they marched one group northeast towards the Red China border, the second 400 miles southeast to prison camps near Haithuon, on the coast of Red-held Viet Nam. The second group, to which these repatriated prisoners belonged, was ravaged by dysentery and malaria; the marchers got only 800 grams of rice and gruel a day, with occasional dried fish and peanuts. There were no medical supplies, although many of the walking wounded still bore shrapnel within their bodies...
...gallant Vietnamese still tried to inspire defiance. Plump little Dr. Hoang Co Binh, head of the new Committee for the Defense of North Viet Nam, sent loudspeaker cars around the city "to improve the morale of the people" and he pledged himself to raise three new Vietnamese battalions; he also ordered all civil servants to sing the National Anthem every day. "The Viet Minh are not as strong as we have pretended they are," he told the Vietnamese who would listen...
...Saigon's safer atmosphere, Viet Nam's new nationalist Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem tried to inspire defiance. He formed a Cabinet of eager young Vietnamese who had never truckled to the French. "A cease-fire," warned Diem, "should not lead to partition, which no Vietnamese wants and which can only lead to a new and more murderous war." Unhappily, for Diem and for his people, he seemed to be talking against the wind...