Jon E. Lewis is a writer and historian. His many previous books include the bestselling The Mammoth Book of the Edge, The Mammoth Book of Polar Journeys, The Mammoth Book of True War Stories, World War II: The Autobiography, The Mammoth Book of Combat and A Brief History of the First World War.

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THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF

The Vietnam War

Edited by Jon E. Lewis

ROBINSON

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Robinson

Copyright © J. Lewis-Stempel, 2015

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-47211-606-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-47211-607-9 (ebook)

Robinson
is an imprint of

Constable & Robinson Ltd

100 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DY

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk

www.constablerobinson.com

Contents

Preface

Part I

In Country

Jules Roy DIEN BIEN PHU

Malcolm W Browne DEATH IN THE RICE FIELDS

James Stockdale TONKIN GULF: EYEWITNESS

James Crumley ONE TO COUNT CADENCE

John Laurence FIRST BLOOD

Charlie A. Beckwith THE RELIEF OF PLEI MEI

Harold G. Moore & Joseph L. Galloway IA DRANG

Various VOICES TO AMERICA: LETTERS HOME

Charlie A. Beckwith “YOU’RE IN BAD SHAPE, BOSS”

Nicholas Tomalin THE GENERAL GOES ZAPPING CHARLIE CONG

Harrison E. Salisbury HANOI: MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION

John McCain III KILLED

Peter Arnett HILL 875

John Ketwig AND A HARD RAIN FELL

Frank Camper RECON

Robert Mason R&R

Part II

Home Front

John Fettermann LITTLE DUCK COMES HOME

Studs Terkel POLICE BREAK UP ANTI-WAR PROTEST

Abbie Hoffman CHICAGO SEVEN TRIAL, THE TESTIMONY OF ABBIE HOFFMAN, YIPPE

John Kifner THE SHOOTINGS AT KENT STATE

Charles Stephens & Mike Misiaszek WINTER SOLDIERS

Ron Kovic BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY

Micki Voisard FLY ME, I’M MICKI

Gustav Hasford SPIRIT OF THE BAYONET

Part III

The End

Anonymous VOICES IN AMERICA: ENLISTMENT

Donald Bodey THIS IS WAR, MAN

John T. Wheeler KHE SANH: LIFE IN THE V RING

Seymour Hersh MY LAI

Maureen Walsh “BURNING FLESH”: THE MEMOIR OF A NAVAL NURSE

Lewis B Puller, Jr. FORTUNATE SON

Various VOICES FROM VIETNAM, 1968–70

Mike Beamon, PHOENIX RISING

Terry Whitmore MY SQUAD

Tim O’Brien IF I DIE IN A COMBAT ZONE

Michael Herr IT MADE YOU FEEL OMNI

David Huddle THE INTERROGATION OF THE PRISONER BUNG BY MISTER HAWKINS AND SERGEANT TREE

Truong Nhu Tang A VIET CONG MEMOIR

Doris Allen ONE WOMAN’S VIETNAM

Gloria Emerson WINNERS AND LOSERS

Bill Frazer LIFE ON THE LINE

Anonymous LEAVING THE NAM

John Pilger THE FALL OF SAIGON: EVACUATION OF THE AMERICAN EMBASSY

Bobbie Ann Mason MEMORIAL

Permissions & Acknowledgements

Preface

War in the “Nam” long preceded American involvement. Following the defeat of Japan at the end of WWII, the “Good War”, France tried to re-impose colonial rule on the country. The French met fierce resistance from Communist guerrillas in the north of the country, whose “hit-and-run” tactics steadily eroded Gallic morale. And General Giap, the leader of the Communist North Vietnamese Army, had more up his sleeve than irregular warfare. In 1954 Giap’s forces surrounded the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu; the encirclement included heavy artillery dragged covertly over the mountains. When Dien Bien Phu fell to Giap after 57 days of siege the French commitment to stay in Vietnam fell with it. France immediately ceded power north of Ben Hai River (near the 17th Parallel) to the Communist Viet Minh; in the south rule passed to a Western-backed regime under the Catholic Ngo Dinh Dien.

If anybody seriously thought the Communists would stay north of the 17th Parallel they were mistaken. By 1959 Ho Chi Minh was sending his “Viet Cong” guerrillas below the border. The response of America was to deploy “military advisors” on behalf of the capitalist South. With the staged “Tonkin Gulf Incident”, in which North Vietnamese allegedly fired on US naval forces American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war ratcheted up. By 1969 542,000 US troops and other military personnel were “In Country”, and to keep the Army at full strength required a draft of eligible males. In other words, conscription, compulsory military service. Now every young American male had the chance of glory. Or was it death?

However raised, the numbers going into the green machine of US Army – who, really, did the bulk of the grunt’s stuff, fighting up close with Charlie, way more than the navy and the fly boys – were never enough. Neither did technology turn out to be the infallible God of American dreams, though it came close to pulling off the miracle. Napalm and the defoliating Agent Orange had their moment in the Asian sun, had their backers, yet “Nam” was truly the war of the helicopter, the sound of rotor blades the war’s theme tune. Well, that and The Doors. Vietnam was the first rock’n’roll war, with the bloody but intoxicating union of Mars and Caliope being perfectly conveyed by the “New Journalism” of Michael Herr. It was a good war for writers.

A good war for special forces too. Or at least, their proliferation. John F Kennedy is lodged in the mind as the man who smartly negotiated the Cuban Missile Crisis and created the Peace Corps. Offstage he birthed US special forces; DELTA, the US Navy SEALs, LRRPs all made their entrance in the world in the sixties. Working the Mekong, the rice paddies, the swamps and rivers the SEALs went out in three-men detachments to kill communists. To “Sat Cong”.

But despite the concept and practice of heliborne recce and assaults (“airmobility”), despite SEALs, despite the smell of napalm in the morning and evening, the North had the will. The fanatical will of ideologues. As the war dragged into jungle skirmish after skirmish and the body bags started arriving stateside, the will of the American people, like the French a decade before, eroded. The war in “Nam” became a burning issue with the counter-cultural hippie movement of the sixties, composed for the most part of middle class white youth. A big tranche of American youth suddenly fell in love with protest politics. Peace, man. Universities, ironically, became battlegrounds. At Kent State protesting students were shot. Students chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ [Lyndon B Johnson], How many kids you killed today?” in reference to reports of indiscriminate shootings, bombings, “napalmings” of Vietnamese civilians by US forces under the reign of Kennedy’s successor. Vietnam: “The Bad War”.

In retrospect, which is the historian’s conceit, the military outcome in Vietnam was a close run thing. The North tried the big one, the Tet Offensive, in 1968 . . . to no great practical effect, and the loss of over 45,000 of its combatants. The shock of Tet was more terrible than the military consequences of Tet. Yet American nerves were rattled. It was Dien Bien Phu all over again. The will to fight and die in a far away land waned, disappeared. In 1973 America withdrew from its longest war. Perhaps 450,000 Vietnamese, north and south, lay dead. Thirty six thousand Americans had died with them.

And America had psychic wounds which remain unhealed to this day. There is no end.

Part I

In Country
War in Vietnam 1954–1967

Dien Bien Phu

Jules Roy

In 1953 the French Army High Command in Vietnam decided to garrison the hamlet of Dien Bien Phu in order to prevent Viet Minh excursions into neighbouring Laos. The hamlet itself lay in the middle of a geographical bowl, surrounded by a ring of small hills. On these hills the French placed eight strongpoints (allegedly named after the mistresses of the garrison commander, Colonel Christian de Castries).

At 1700 on 13 March 1954 65,500 men from the Viet Minh attacked the outlying strongpoints at Dien Bien Phu. The onslaught was stunning, not least because the Viet Minh, led by Vo Nguyen Giap, had dragged heavy artillery into the area undetected, which they positioned on the rear slopes of the mountains surrounding the French positions. Such positioning of the artillery made it near impervious to counter-battery fire. The first French outpost, Beatrice, fell on 14 March, Gabrielle on the following day. Thereafter Giap’s force could pound the French garrison below with virtual impunity.

Against all the odds the 14,500-strong garrison held out until 7 May. The last French outposts only surrendered after days of fighting, some of it hand-to-hand, some of it trench-warfare in the manner of the Great War.

The battle cost the lives of 3000 French troops. It was also the de facto end of French rule in Vietnam.

This account of the last day of the French stand at Dien Bien Phu is by Jules Roy, a Franco-Algerian writer and air force officer.

AT ISABELLE, ALL the 105-mm. guns but one had been destroyed. On Éliane, where a terrible storm of shells had just broken, Major Botella heard Langlais calling Bréchignac on the radio.

“Young Pierre calling Brèche, Young Pierre calling Brèche, who is that deluge meant for?”

“Brèche calling Young Pierre; it’s for Éliane 2.”

The shelling moved to Éliane 3, then to Éliane 4, while the guns on former Éliane 1 and Mont Fictif opened fire. Langlais sent three tanks still capable of movement over to the left bank, at the foot of the peaks.

At 1815, hard on the heels of their last salvo, the Viets, wearing gauze masks, hurled themselves against Éliane 2. Using radio communication between its companies and battalion command posts for the first time, the 98th Regiment was in position in front of the peaks of Éliane 4.

Botella replied with his mortars and his recoilless guns. The Viets got as far as his command post but were driven back by Vietnamese troops, who, when they had good officers and NCOs, fought as fiercely as their brothers on the other side, just as North Koreans and South Koreans had fought one another. One of their officers, Captain Phan van Phu, saw his company reduced to thirty men.

At 2100 hours, signals orderly Tran ngoc Duoï of the People’s Army went into action with his unit. In the white light of the flares which had taken the place of the moon in its first quarter, he could make out the movements of the counterattacks. In spite of shell splinters in his head and right leg, he refused to allow himself to be evacuated, sheltered a wounded platoon commander and went on carrying out his orders with a limp. When a dynamiter was killed, he took his charge, placed it, lighted it and went back to his mission. The Viet troops were cut to pieces by the mortars, but the following waves covered them and went on.

On Éliane 2, which was held by two companies of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Chasseurs, under Captain Pouget, a Viet jumped in front of Sergeant Chabrier, pointed an automatic pistol at him and shouted, “Give yourself up. You’re done for –” then fell back dead. At 2300 hours a great silence suddenly descended on the position, and Pouget said to himself, “Perhaps they’re going to let us have a bit of peace?” But then, like the spray of a huge black wave breaking almost noiselessly against a jetty, the earth was hurled high into the air by the thousands of pounds of explosive in the Viet mine, and fell with a thunderous din on the roofs of the shelters and into the trenches. The crater which opened under the defenders’ feet and buried them still exists. The vegetation has not returned to it, but the rains fill it in a little every season.

The shock troops, who had been waiting for the signal of the explosion to go into action, felt the earth rumble and hurled themselves screaming at the shattered position. Section Leader Dang phi Thuong, under the orders of the commander of No. 7 Platoon of the 3rd Company of the 98th Regiment, advanced rapidly through the hail of bullets from automatic weapons toward the smashed blockhouses, but found his way barred by the fire from Sergeant Chabrier’s platoon, which mowed the attackers down and toppled them into the muddy crater that the mine had opened. “What a sight for sore eyes!” cried one of the machine gunners. But the weapons ended up by jamming, the stocks of ammunition by running out, and the swarm of Viets overran the position. The 12.7-mm. machine gun on the tank “Bazeilles” was the last to fall silent.

At midnight, the five Dakotas which were to drop the last company of reinforcements asked, in the interests of their safety, that no more flares be sent up. Langlais and Bigeard hesitated. Even if it was dark, how could the pilots make out the tiny dropping zone in the midst of all the fires of the battle? Wouldn’t the Viets take advantage of the darkness to resume the attack? Near the door of the Dakota, the pockets of his battle dress stuffed with whisky for General de Castries and brandy for Langlais, and worried in case he should break his bottles when he landed, Captain Faussurier waited for the green lamp to light up. Finally Bigeard queried Lieutenant Le Page on the radio.

“The flares must come first,” Le Page replied unhesitatingly.

Langlais ordered the planes to turn back, and the men of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Chasseurs, returned to Hanoï, sick at heart. In the shelter of the camp headquarters where Geneviève de Galard was sleeping, sheltered under a table, on a mattress of parachutes, Bigeard felt a certain comfort at the thought that the sacrifice of that company had been avoided; a hundred men could no longer alter the course of events. Calls for help were jamming the lines to the artillery and the radio links with the strong points. As for the enemy radio receivers, they resounded with shouts of victory.

With one of his radio operators killed and the other hit by a bullet in the stomach, Pouget had stopped answering calls from the main position. He had been given up for dead and no more calls had been sent out to him. At four in the morning, he operated his transmitter himself and got through to Major Vadot.

“I’ve reoccupied all of Éliane 2, but I’ve only thirty-five men left. If we’re to hold out, you’ve got to send me the reinforcements you promised. Otherwise it’ll all be over.”

“Where do you expect me to find them?” Vadot answered calmly. “Be reasonable. You know the situation as well as I do. Not another man, not another shell, my friend. You’re a para. You’re there to get yourself killed.”

On the wavelength of the Éliane command network the Viets played the record of the “Song of the Partisans,” and now and then their waiting voices took up the refrain:

Friend, can you hear the black flight of the crows In the plain? . . .

“The swine,” muttered Pouget, “the swine.”

At Éliane, Botella had fifty mortar shells left and a few cases of grenades. The loudspeakers of Bigeard’s radio receivers vibrated: “Dédé calling Bruno, the ammunition’s running out.”

“Brèche calling Bruno, we’re nearly finished.”

On all the hills, the strong points changed hands several times within a few hours: The enemy hurled himself at any breach he made, then fell back in disorder. Dead and wounded dropped to the ground. On the west face, Claudine 5 was overrun, near a tank which could not fire any more.

Sitting out in the open near his radio set, Pouget watched the 120-mm. mortar shells pounding Éliane 4 where Botella was holding out. The ground was cracking open. Pouget saw some Viets running along the crest of Éliane 4, lit up by the flares, dropped by the planes. Down below, Dien Bien Phu was burning and fireworks were spurting from the shell stores. Now and then a few stars appeared through the clouds which filled the darkness.

At 0410, before his eyes, along the whole front of Éliane 2, the Viets stood up without firing. Pouget heard them shouting: “Di di, di di! Forward, forward!”

The survivors of Éliane 2 had one machine-gun charger and one grenade left. Pouget ordered the sole remaining lieutenant and those men who could still walk to return to the main position, and, falling back from one hole to the next, found himself reunited with them at the foot of the peak, in a trench full of corpses which they piled up to protect themselves.

Another shrieking tidal wave surged from the ground and broke over the 5th Battalion, Vietnamese Paratroops, covering Captain Phu; but a handful of Legionnaires and paratroops counterattacked again, recaptured some lost trenches, pushed aside the dead and dying to place their machine guns in position, and brought their fire to bear on the shadows in the flat helmets. Officers who were not yet twenty became company commanders or died when, like Second Lieutenant Phung, they called for mortar fire to be directed on them. Of the 6th Battalion, Colonial Paratroops, twenty men remained alive around Major Thomas. Sergeants gathered survivors together and rushed into the attack. Who would be victor or vanquished when this night came to an end? To help the men hanging onto the last peaks, Langlais withdrew some platoons from battalions in the center and threw them into the action among the burning eastern peaks. Everywhere men stumbled over shattered bodies. In the light of the flares which the wind carried toward the mountains, faces ran with sweat and with thick black ink. On Éliane 2, where since four in the morning nobody had answered Brèchignac’s calls, the groaning of the wounded filled the dawn. Behind the eastern crests, the sky was turning golden.

MAY 7, 1954

On Éliane 10, at the foot of the peaks, day was breaking. The enemy was advancing everywhere, searching the shelters. Besieged in a block-house, Lieutenant Le Page managed to escape with a couple of men. The miracle was that Éliane 4 was still alive, that Brèchignac and Botella were still in command, calling for help. But what help could they be given? Lemeunier went into Langlais’s shelter; he had gathered together a few Legionnaires and was ready to fight his way to the west.

“Not to the west,” said Langlais. “To Éliane 4 where they’re still holding out.”

Langlais emerged from his shelter into the brutal light of summer. In the sky, Dakotas were dropping supplies. In all the trenches leading to the hospital, pitiful files of men trampled on corpses gradually being buried by the mud. Wounded men nobody could attend to any more were left where they lay. Turned loose by the Viets, who had told them, “Go back to your people and tell them we are coming,” some battalion medical officers got through to Grauwin with the half-naked cripples who had returned to the fight a few days before.

On the other side of the river and the shattered ammunition dump swarmed the hundreds of men who had taken refuge weeks before in holes in the river banks in order to avoid the fighting, and whom Langlais compared to the crabs on tropical coasts. Dregs of humanity, deserters – Langlais could not find words sufficiently contemptuous for them. He could have mown them down with machine-gun fire or crushed them with a few 105-mm. salvos, but he turned away in disgust. Like Bigeard now, he was beyond all that. Like Béatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Huguette and Dominique, Éliane had a new lover . . .

Under the bursts of automatic-pistol fire, Pouget had felt the corpses he was sheltering behind tremble. A grenade exploded near his helmet, stunning him. As in a nightmare, he heard a little nasal voice saying, “You are a prisoner of the Democratic People’s Army of Vietnam. You are wounded. We shall take care of you. Can you walk?”

He looked up at his victor in the gauze mask.

“And my comrades?”

“We shall attend to them. Their wounds will be dressed. The medical orderlies are coming.”

Pouget got laboriously to his feet. It was all over for him. He was stripped to the waist, with no weapons or marks of rank, hairy and haggard. Somebody helped him to walk. His radio operator leaned on his shoulder.

Friend, can you hear the muffled cry of the country Being loaded with chains?

He was no longer strong enough even to hum the tune the Viets had been broadcasting all night. Defeated, he refused to resign himself. At the end of the suffering and humiliation that awaited him and were already escorting him, he knew that he was going to find the great explanation and salvation.

Suddenly the artillery in the east opened fire again and the shells started falling once more. Long, deep, whistling notes pierced the general din. Hope suddenly mingled with amazement. Captain Capeyron, Sergeant Sammarco, Corporal Hoinant and a great many others, surprised to see the first salvos fall between the positions, turned toward the west. Voices cried, “It’s Crèvecoeur!” Faces revealed a joy which did not yet dare express itself freely, but which would burst forth a torrent ready to turn against the course of fate and carry everything with it. Yes, it must be the Crèvecoeur column, which the radiotelegraphers had been claiming to be in touch with for days and which they had said was approaching, which was swooping down from the mountains into the valley with an apocalyptic din. Men did not know whether to shriek or weep for joy. They were already hoisting themselves out of their holes when the range lengthened, reached the command posts and crushed the innocents getting ready to meet their saviors. They were expecting Crèvecoeur, but what they heard was the thunder of Stalin’s organs.

Three men dressed in mud, haggard, their faces black with stubble and smoke, staggered up and collapsed on the ground. Bigeard bent over one of them and took his hand. Was he crying? It no longer mattered at this moment when everything had been surpassed, when the grandeur of the ordeal made them giddy, when words were no use except to those witnessing from afar the death agony of Dien Bien Phu. Bigeard, who had never been known to utter a cry of commiseration, simply said over and over again, “Poor Le Page . . .”

He was weeping for a whole body of knights massacred in vain because a general had flung his army into the enemy’s trap, giving in to the bluster of those who had urged him to throw himself into the wolf’s jaws. Among those who would be cited among the dead and the prisoners, how many names represented the flower of that army, sacrificed turn and turn about, for centuries past, for great causes and solemn idiocies! Bigeard had a vague suspicion that the disaster taking place had achieved nothing but a crucifixion, of which countless former high commissioners, secretaries of state or prime ministers were already washing their hands with affected delicacy. Obsessed by the idea of the coolie’s pole on his shoulder, he could not yet imagine what was waiting for him. Who could tell? The diplomats were gathered together at Geneva; everything might be arranged at the last moment. He did not know that the men by whose fault battles are lost are not those whom they kill. Without suspecting it, it was himself that Bigeard discovered beneath the masks of clay and blood drying on his lieutenants’ faces.

“Stop shelling . . .” Brèchignac had just asked Bigeard to spare Éliane 4 a bombardment that would kill off the wounded when he received a report from Botella that any further resistance was impossible. Botella then called Bigeard.

“Dédé calling Bruno, Dédé calling Bruno . . .”

It was the same metallic voice which used to announce, “Objective reached.” Bigeard pressed the transmitter switch.

“Bruno here.”

“Dédé calling Bruno. It’s all over. They’re at the command post. Goodbye. Tell Young Pierre that we liked him.”

A click. A curter voice: “I’m blowing up the radio. Hip hip hooray . . .”

It was nine o’clock. On the heights surrounding Éliane 4, in the rice fields in the ravines, swarmed a host of little armed men, dressed in coarse green cloth, with sandals cut out of tires on their feet, helmets of interlaced bamboo decorated with the ruby of a red star on their heads, and gauze masks over their faces, who came running out of their hiding places in the forests and mountains. They reached the crests of Éliane in a huge roar which was carried along in waves by gusts of wind as they arrived on the summits. Spreading out over the sides and ridges of the Élianes, they uttered shouts of triumph and raised their weapons in a victorious gesture at sight of the yellow curves of the river and the plowed fields of the entrenched camp. On the double crest of Éliane 4, they could be seen jumping over the ruined trenches, crossing the tangled barbed-wire defenses, and stepping over piles of corpses lying on top of one another in the macabre reconciliation of death, or stretched out on their backs, their arms open, their faces eaten by flies, their mouths still full of a last groan, men fallen from their crosses, nailed to the pulverized ground among the wretched wooden supports of the shelters, or swimming in the slimy mud.

In the face of this swarm of human insects sprung up from all sides, the artillery of the entrenched camp, nearly out of ammunition and gun crews, remained silent. It had three hundred 105-mm. shells left and ten 120-mm. Fighters dived out of the sky, dropped bombs, fired their machine guns and spread disorder for a moment, but the swarm gradually resumed its advance when the planes disappeared after the ten minutes at their disposal. Botella decided to stay at his command post, but ordered Second Lieutenant Makowiak to rejoin the main position with a few uninjured men and a few wounded who could still walk. Soon afterward, the Viets surrounded him and took him into their lines. Section Commander Dang phi Thuong, second-in-command of Platoon No. 7 of the 98th Regiment, returning to the action to give Éliane the coup de grâce, saw him go by, surrounded by guards, bare-headed and balding, on his way to the first regrouping center where he would find Brèchignac and Pouget, mute with misery. At Opéra, Bizard was holding out and getting ready to launch a counterattack against the Élianes, but Langlais incorporated him into the defense system of the main position.

Capeyron, who was searching near Éliane 2 for some men from his company who had gone up there during the night, was hit by some grenade splinters which slashed his left wrist and groin like a razor.

At ten o’clock, from his office in the citadel at Hanoï, Cogny called Castries. The storms moving over the whole region crackled in the receivers. The conversation, which might be the last contact with the entrenched camp, was recorded in the radio room.

“Good morning, my friend,” said Cogny. “What resources have you got left?”

Castries’s voice was clear, slow, deliberate; a little shrill, as it always was on the telephone. Now and then, he searched for a word, corrected himself, repeated himself. Cogny punctuated his remarks with muffled words of acquiescence.

“The 6th Battalion, Colonial Paratroops, the 2nd Battalion, 1st Parachute Chasseurs, and what was left of the Algerian Rifles.”

“Yes.”

“In any case, there’s nothing to be done but write the whole bunch off.”

“Yes.”

“Right . . . At the moment, that’s what’s left, but greatly reduced of course, because we took, we drew on everything there was on the western perimeter in an attempt to hold out in the east . . .”

“Yes.”

“What’s left is about two companies from the two BEPs put together . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . three companies of Moroccan Rifles, but which are no use at all, you realize, no use at all, which are completely demoralized . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . two companies of the 8th Assault . . .

“Yes.”

“. . . three companies of BT2s, but that’s only to be expected because it’s always that way, it’s the Moroccan Rifles and the BT2s that have the most men left because they don’t fight.”

“Of course.”

“Right, and out of the 1st Battalion, out of the 1st Battalion, Foreign Infantry, there’re about two companies left, and about two companies of the 1st Battalion, 13th Demibrigade. It’s . . . they are companies of seventy or eighty men.”

“Yes. I see.”

“Well, there you are . . . We’re defending every foot of ground.”

“Yes.”

“We’re defending every foot of ground, and I consider that the most we can do . . .”

Static suddenly interrupted the transmission.

“Hello, hello,” Cogny repeated.

“Hello, can you hear me, General?”

“. . . that the most you can do?”

“. . . is to halt the enemy on the Nam Youm. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And even then we would have to hold the bank, because otherwise we wouldn’t have any water.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Right, So, well, that’s what I suggest we try, I’ll try to bring that off, ah, I’ve just taken, I’ve just seen Langlais, we’re in agreement about that. And then, damn it all, I’ll try, I’ll try, conditions permitting, to get as many men as possible out toward the south.”

“Good. That’ll be by night, I suppose?”

“What’s that?”

“By night?”

“Yes, General, by night of course.”

“Of course. Yes.”

“And I . . . I need your permission to do that.”

“All right, fellow.”

“You give me permission?”

“I give you permission.”

“Anyway, I’ll hold out, I’ll try to hold out here as long as possible, with what is left.”

Castries paused for a while, then intimated that he had nothing more to say.

“General?”

“Yes, all right.”

“That’s it . . .”

“From the ammunition point of view, have you . . . is there anything to be recovered?” Cogny asked very quickly.

“Ammunition. That’s more serious, we haven’t any.”

“There isn’t anything that . . .”

“We don’t have any, you see. There are still a few 105-mm. shells, but . . .”

A sentence in the transcript is undecipherable. Castries may have referred to 155-mm. shells, for all those guns were unserviceable.

“. . . they aren’t any use here.”

“. . . for the moment. And as for the 120-mm., the 120-mm. shells . . .”

“Yes.”

“I still have, I must still have, between 100 and 150.”

“Yes.”

“Which are all over the place, you see.”

“Yes, of course.” Cogny repeated.

“Which are all over the place. We can’t . . . it’s practically impossible to collect them. Obviously the more you send, the better, eh?”

“Yes.”

“So we’ll hold out, we’ll hold out as long as possible.”

“I think the best thing,” said Cogny, talking fast, “would be for the Air Force to put in a big effort today to bring the Viets to a halt.”

“Yes, General. The Air Force must keep up its support, eh? Nonstop, nonstop. Yes, and about the Viets, I’ll put you in the picture as to how they stand.”

“Yes.”

“In the east the Viets have thrown in everything they’ve still got.”

“Yes.”

“Including two regiments of the 308th Division.”

“Really? Yes.”

“You see? On the western perimeter at the moment there isn’t anything, there can’t be anything but the 36th Regiment.”

“The 36th, yes, I think so too.”

“Just the 36th Regiment, eh? The 102nd Regiment . . .”

Suddenly he was cut off.

“Hello, hello,” Cogny repeated in a panting voice while the technicians tried to re-establish contact.

“Can you hear me?” Castries continued.

“The 102nd Regiment, you were saying?”

“Yes, General.”

“The 102nd Regiment?”

“Just that they’ve been thrown in on the eastern perimeter . . .”

“Yes.”

“. . . the 102nd Regiment and the 88th Regiment.”

“That’s it.”

“You see? Plus what . . . plus what remained of the 312th . . .”

“That’s it. Yes.”

“. . . and now the 316th.”

“Yes.”

“You see?”

“They’ve thrown everything in on the eastern perimeter,” said Cogny.

“But you see, as I foresaw, the 308th, as I think I’ve already mentioned, escapes me, you see, as usual.”

“Yes, that’s it . . . Good, well, what about the withdrawal to the south?” asked Cogny. “How do you envisage it? Toward Isabelle or a scattered movement?”

“Well, General, in any case, in any case they’ll have to pass south of Isabelle, won’t they?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But I’ll give orders, I’ll give orders to Isabelle, too, to try, to try to pull out, if they can.”

“Yes. Right. Well, keep me in the picture so that we can give you the maximum air support for that operation.”

“Why, of course, General.”

“There you are, my friend.”

“And then, why, damn it all, I’ll keep here, well, the units that don’t want to go on it . . .”

“That’s it, yes.”

“. . . the, how shall I put it, the wounded of course, but a lot of them are already in the enemy’s hands, because there were some in the strong points, Éliane 4 and because . . . and Éliane 10.”

“Yes, of course.”

“You see? And I’ll keep all that under my command.”

“Yes, fellow.”

“There you are.”

“Good-bye, fellow.”

“I may telephone you again before . . . before the end.”

“There now, good-bye, Castries, old fellow.”

“Good-bye, General.”

“Good-bye, fellow.”

Castries put down the receiver. Two hundred miles away, Cogny did not look at the officers standing silently around him. Sweat was running down his forehead. Hanoï lay crushed under the heat of the storm which refused to break.

At midday, Bigeard went to see General de Castries.

“It’s all over,” he told him. “If you agree, I’ll get out of here at nightfall with my men. But we’ve got to make the Viets think that we’re still holding out, and to do that the artillery, mortars and automatic weapons have got to keep on firing. Leave a good man here – Trancart, for instance.”

“No,” replied Castries. “I won’t give that job to anybody. I’ll stay, Bruno, old fellow. Don’t worry; we’ll keep on firing all night. At daybreak we’ll cut our losses.”

At 1300 hours, Captain Capeyron took up position on Junon with fifty-four Legionnaires. Sergeant Sammarco, at whose feet a 75-mm. shell had landed without exploding, said to a pal, “If we get out of this alive, we’ll get blind drunk for a fortnight.” In readiness for the sortie, Sergeant Kubiak emptied the flasks of rum in the “Pacific” ration crates into his water bottle. Langlais, Bigeard and their staff officers had some hot soup. Together they studied the situation and summoned the battalion commanders who were going to take part in “Operation Bloodletting.” Tourret, Guiraud and Clémençon were unanimous in the opinion that it was impossible. However slim the chances of success, for they were completely cut off, they would have to make the attempt, but the Viets occupied the whole of the left bank, except for the bridge which they were trying to capture, and, like broken-down horses on the point of collapse, paratroopers and Legionnaires were at the end of their tether. One of the two boxers had been knocked out.

At 1530, accompanied by Bigeard, Lemeunier and Vadot, Langlais went to see General de Castries. He did not know that a telegram sent from Dien Bien Phu at 1400 hours had fixed the cessation of hostilities for seven the next morning. At Isabelle, where there were still two thousand shells left for a solitary 105-mm. gun, Colonel Lalande had permission to attempt a sortie. Castries was free to decide Langlais’s fate and that of the remaining officers and men. He said to Bigeard, “You’re going to pay dearly for all this, Bruno. You ought to try to make a break for it with a few men.”

Who could possibly pull off that sortie? Perfectly calm and self-assured, Castries agreed that within five miles all of them would be overcome by exhaustion. Castries dismissed the officers and remained alone with Langlais. Exactly what they said to each other has been forgotten. Between the remarks exchanged with Bigeard, or by radio with Cogny, everything has become confused. Besides, what can they add to what was? Even monks end up, under the influence of communal life, hating one another.

These two men so different in character and methods no longer had any grounds for dispute. Who bore the responsibility for the fall of Dien Bien Phu? Neither of the two. Outstripped by events, Castries had failed to react at the right moment, but he had not wanted this post for which he was completely unsuited. He had not deceived anybody; others had been mistaken about him. He had been honest enough to warn Navarre, “If it’s a second Na San that you want, pick somebody else. I don’t feel cut out for that.” And he had lacked the necessary humility to see that he ought to be replaced. Cynical and frivolous as he was, was it his fault also that he didn’t like Langlais and Langlais didn’t like him? Was Langlais also to blame if, preoccupied with the patrols he had been ordered to organize every day, he had been unable to rehearse the counterattacks intended to recapture outposts which nobody expected to fall? To imagine that he should have demanded the necessary time and resources from Castries and Gaucher is to be wise after the event. It is necessary to go back in time, to breathe the atmosphere of optimism which reigned among the garrison, to hear the roar of Piroth’s artillery when it fired its salvos into the mountains at the slightest alert. Who had had any premonition, at the time, of the disaster which had just occurred? As for his animosity toward Castries, that was only skin-deep. Langlais had made offensive remarks on several occasions about Castries’s reluctance to leave his shelter, but if everybody paid homage to Langlais’s spirit, who hadn’t quarreled with him and suffered from his anger and bad temper?

“It’s all over,” said Castries. “We mustn’t leave anything intact.”

A brief access of emotion suddenly misted over Castries’s eyes and froze Langlais’s icy features. When Langlais saluted, Castries stepped forward with his hand outstretched, and Langlais, without saying a word, threw himself into his arms.

About 1600 hours, in the course of a radiotelephone conversation, Lieutenant Colonel de Séguins-Pazzis offered Colonel Lalande the choice between a pitched battle and an attempted sortie toward the south. Lalande was given no indication that the main position would not hold out until the following morning. He chose a sortie at nightfall, issued the orders prepared for that purpose, and sent out reconnaissance patrols toward the south, along both banks of the Nam Youm, to gauge the resistance the enemy was likely to offer. Since the direction of the sortie had been altered from the southwest to due south, there were no maps or guides available. Moreover, only one track seemed to be practicable, by way of Muong Nha, Ban Ta Mot and Ban Pha Nang, and Lalande had to change his plan.

On returning to his command post, Langlais gave orders for the destruction of all weapons, optical and signals equipment. Bigeard remained aloof from all this. The news spread at once that surrender was imminent. Sergeant Sammarco had the barrels of rifles and machine guns thrust into the ground for the last cartridges to be fired. With incendiary grenades they soldered the breeches of the 105-mm. guns or melted the mortars and the bazookas. The ammunition was thrown into the river. The engines of the tanks which were still in working order were raced without any oil. The chaplains gathered together their chalices and holy oils. Grauwin buried a few bottles of penicillin with markers to indicate their position.

The fighting began again and the Viet battalions gradually advanced toward the center, surrounding paratroop units which fell immediately. There was no longer any question of fighting. Already, on the left bank, white rags were being waved among the Moroccans and the river-bank population. Dressed in green, with motley scraps of parachute material in their helmets and their duck trousers rolled up to the knees, the Viets appeared from all sides, in a silent, overwhelming flood. The river was crossed at 1700 hours. Hearing his battalion commander utter an oath, Sergeant Kubiak turned toward Castries’s command post over which a huge white flag was waving. It suddenly occurred to Captain Capeyron that he ought to burn the 3rd Company’s flag. Bending over the fire which his Legionnaires had hurriedly lit, he had just seen the last letters of the word “Loyalty” embroidered on the silk eaten up by the flames when the Viets arrived. A Viet officer gave the order: “Hands up!”

Capeyron did not obey. Some Viets came up and kicked him in the buttocks. Some Legionnaires broke ranks to intervene. Pale with humiliation, Capeyron restrained them.

“Don’t move. It’s too late.”

In all the trenches on Éliane, the Viets began piling up the corpses from both sides and covering them with earth. On the summit of Éliane 2, they erected a sort of bamboo cenotaph, thirty feet high, which they decorated with white silk parachutes.

Algerians and Moroccans who had remained in hiding for days and nights on end came out into the open, waving rags and, naturally choosing the word which in all the armies of the world has always meant the end of fighting and the fraternization of former enemies, shouted, “Comrades!”

Company Commander Tho, entrusted with the task of establishing a clearing station, found the prisoners unusually docile; most of them stretched themselves as if they had been lying down for a long time and did breathing exercises. They were sent to the rear in groups of ten or so, without guards, simply being shown the way to the first collecting center. The head of the surgical block at Him Lam, Dr. Nguyen duong Quang, a pupil of Professor Tung, had tents made of parachute material put up to shelter the wounded, and started for the hospital.

“Here they come.” These were the words you heard everywhere. In his shelter, Langlais hurriedly burnt his letters, his private notebook, the photographs of the woman he loved and even his red beret. He kissed Geneviève de Galard and gave her a message for his mother while his staff officers destroyed the command archives and the typewriters. He put on his old bush hat, which made him look like a melancholy sailor in a sou’wester. Why had he burnt his red beret when Bigeard had kept his? It was because he was afraid the Viets would use it as a trophy; unconsciously, he also wanted to spare what he held dearest in the way of military uniform the humiliation of defeat. Born for action, he suddenly found himself deprived of everything and at a loss as to what to do, whereas Bigeard, without decorations or marks of rank, but with his red beret pulled down over his head, was already preparing his escape; he rolled a nylon map of the highlands round his ankle and thought of hiding in a hole, under a pile of parachutes. Why shouldn’t he succeed in escaping?

Little by little, the camp started swarming with activity, while clouds of smoke rose into the air and the ground shook with the explosions of material being blown up. Demoralized by the savagery of the fighting and by the bombardment which had gone on without stopping since the evening of May 1, thousands of haggard men, who had been drinking the yellow river water out of buckets since the purification plant had been destroyed, regained hope of surviving. Spontaneously, as if they had been slaves all their lives, they formed up in columns, knotted little squares of white material to the ends of sticks, and allowed themselves to be driven toward the northeast along the sides of Route 41 beneath the contemptuous gaze of the Legionnaires and the paratroopers. These were not the pictures of the disaster which would be taken a few days later by cameramen rushed to the spot to reconstruct, with docile North Africans disguised as paratroopers, the scenes the Vietminh had dreamed of. How many were there, at that moment, who preferred captivity to insolence? Ten thousand? And are we entitled to think that Dien Bien Phu would never have fallen if they had fought like the other two thousand who were preparing to force a way out?

The guns destroyed, the sandbags ripped open, the shelters in ruins, the burned-out trucks lying in puddles of yellow water – everything showed that the defeat was complete. Dirty parachutes covered the hills and the valley, hung on the river banks, clung to the parapets of the bridge and the barbed-wire entanglements like torn spiders’ webs. There could no longer be any doubt about it: all was lost. Some, like Sergeant Sammarco, said to themselves, “It wasn’t worth the trouble of killing so many people.” Most remained silent. Corporal Hoinant, who had never seen anybody but his chief, Major Guiraud, could not understand anything any more. He had been told that it was essential to hold out until the Geneva Conference was over, and now they had just given in. As for hoping, he had abandoned all hope since he had been deceived with the assurance, repeated every day, that Crèvecoeur was on the way.

“Come out with your hands up . . .”

If the fortunes of war had gone the other way, Hoinant and Sammarco considered that the victory of the paratroops and the Legion would have been more harshly imposed on the defeated side. Neither of them had witnessed the humiliation inflicted on Captain Capeyron and, through him, on all the vanquished. They noted the correct behavior and lack of hatred of the Viets, who said to them, “The war is over.” Perhaps. Commandos jumped down into the trenches, holding their noses because the smell was so atrocious, and ransacked the command posts in search of documents. Others, in token of their joy, threw grenades into the river, where they exploded with a muffled noise. Grauwin inspected the uniforms of his medical orderlies and distributed armlets on which red crosses had been painted with Mercurochrome.

“Whatever you do,” Grauwin told his team, “don’t leave my side.”

In Hanoï, where he had heard Castries outline the situation to him once again, Cogny had the signal switched to the floor below, to General Bodet, whom Navarre had left on the spot to represent him and who wanted to bid Castries the official farewell, worthy of the Commander in Chief and his brilliant deputy.

Bastiani, Cogny’s chief of staff, intervened.

“Wait a minute,” he said to Cogny. “You didn’t mention the question of the white flag.”

Catapulted out of his seat by a terrible premonition, Cogny rushed downstairs and burst into Bodet’s office just as Navarre’s deputy, in his shrill little voice, was saying to Castries, “Good-bye, my friend. And all the very best. You’ve put up a good fight.”

Cogny pushed him to one side and snatched the receiver from his hand. Navarre had never conceived the possibility that the white flag might be hoisted. In his directive of April 1, he had declared that under no circumstances was the idea of capitulation to be considered.

“Hello, hello, Castries? . . . Hello, Castries?”

“General?”

“Look, man, naturally you’ve got to call it quits. But one thing certain is that everything you’ve done so far is superb. You mustn’t spoil it all now by hoisting the white flag. You’re overwhelmed, but there must be no surrender, no white flag.”

Did Castries suddenly realize the extent of his blunder? Probably nobody will ever know, and General de Castries and Séguins-Pazzis will take their secret to the grave. What is striking about the recording of this conversation – and the copies I have heard have been cut at precisely this point – is Castries’s embarrassment after Cogny’s injunction and the argument he uses to justify himself. To justify himself for what if not for having hoisted the white flag?

“Ah! Very good, General,” Castries replied after a pause, in a heart-broken voice. “It was just that I wanted to protect the wounded.”

“Yes, I know. Then protect them as best you can, letting your [. . .] act on their own [. . .] What you’ve done is too fine to be spoilt like that. You understand, don’t you?”

“Very good, General.”

“Well, good-bye, fellow, see you soon.”

There was no “Vive la France!” as the commander of the entrenched camp was reported saying. Radio operator Mélien, who was putting the signal through from an office near Castries’s, concluded for the benefit of his opposite number in Hanoï, “The Viets are a few yards away. We’re going to blow up the transmitter. So long, fellow.”

The white flag which Sergeant Kubiak had seen flying over Castries’s command post while Bigeard and Langlais were getting ready in their shelters to receive the Viets was hurriedly taken down.

Cogny informed Madame de Castries of the fall of Dien Bien Phu and asked her to keep the news secret. In Cogny’s anteroom Mr. Hedberg, a journalist on the Expressen, was waiting.

There was the sound of feet running over the roof of the shelter. When Platoon Commander Chu ta Thé’s squad reached the superstructure of Castries’s command post at a gallop, did it unfold and wave the red flag with the gold star that day, or was the scene reconstructed later? On the French side, nobody knows. The only flag that Sergeant Kubiak saw flying over Castries’s command post was the white one. He stated this in writing, and the official periodical of the Foreign Legion published his story in its issue of April, 1963, without anyone protesting.

When the Viets entered the command post and pushed aside the door curtain, Castries was waiting for them standing, unarmed, his sleeves rolled up. He had changed his shirt and trousers and, as usual, was wearing his medal ribbons. The parachutist Sergeant Passerat de Silans, who belonged to Langlais’s signals section, maintains that at the sight of the submachine guns aimed at him Castries cried, “Don’t shoot me.” This doesn’t sound like Castries, who may have said, in an attempt to change the squad’s threatening attitude, “You damn fools, you aren’t going to shoot, are you?”

Grauwin glanced toward the sap and caught sight of Castries, pale under his red forage cap, a cigarette between his lips, dazzled by the sunlight. He was promptly driven away in a jeep to be questioned by the Viet Military Intelligence. Did Grauwin also see, as he would subsequently write, Langlais, with his frozen, unseeing face, and Bigeard, his head bent under his beret, swept away in a crowd of prisoners? Langlais and Bigeard had come out together, without putting their hands up, but at a different time from Castries, whom they would not see again for ten days. Grauwin, his heart pounding, went down to the hospital. A Viet soldier, his legs covered with mud, his belt hung with grenades, appeared and gestured toward the sap.

“Outside!”

In the operating theater, where Lieutenant Gindrey of the medical service was bending over a torn body, men lay groaning on stretchers, waiting their turn. Followed by Geneviève de Galard and his medical orderlies, Grauwin came out onto the terreplein, where some wounded men, who had just been put down near some rotting corpses, watched him go by like salvation disappearing from sight.

In the vicinity of the command post, the Viets called for Langlais, who went toward them.

“That’s me.”

He was surrounded and Bigeard followed him, walking among his staff. The Viets also shouted, “Bigeard! . . . Where is Bigeard?”

His hands thrust deep into his pockets, Bigeard went on walking in the long column, anonymous and walled up in a silence from which he would not emerge for days, ready to seize the slightest opportunity to escape. They could look for the wolf Bigeard themselves. He carried nothing on him, not a single packet of cigarettes or tin of rations, while some prisoners were bent under suitcases stuffed with food. His faithful orderly, knowing what he was like, had taken a carton of Lucky Strikes for him from Castries’s command post. No doubt Bigeard knew that he was down on the canvas, but he was already getting to his feet. The fight wasn’t over. Nothing was over as long as life went on flowing through his veins. This business was not simply an affair between the West and the rebels, the Expeditionary Corps and the People’s Army; it was a scrap between the Viets and himself. How had these little men, the youngest of whom looked like boys of fifteen and who had always avoided battle for fear of meeting their match, managed to win? How were fresh humiliations to be avoided in the future? What lessons were to be learned from this affair and from this army of ants which had fought on empty bellies but with their heads full of the ideas and the hope with which they had been crammed? These were the questions which haunted him. He, too, had heard the “Song of the Partisans” all night on the Viet wavelength. He felt sick at heart.

For the moment, shutting out everything around him, his shoulders hunched so as not to irritate anybody, he watched through half-closed eyes for any relaxation of the guards’ supervision so he could escape into the mountains with a few companions, as Second Lieutenant Makowiak would do, reaching an outpost in Laos. From the generosity of the People’s Army, Bigeard expected nothing. Defeated, he would suffer the lot of the defeated, without ever accepting it. “Poor bastards.” He kept repeating this insult to punish himself and the simpletons who had thought they were bound to win because their camp was stuffed with artillery and heavy machine guns and received supplies every day by air from Hanoï. Perhaps he remembered that at Agincourt, too, the French had despised the enemy and had prepared for battle with the same arrogant self-assurance. But above all else, there must be no tears such as he had seen on the faces of some of his comrades. Victory over the ants of the totalitarian regimes was won in other ways; as for the victory parade, led by a band through the streets of a capital, which some officers had vaguely dreamed of, once the Viets had been laid out in the barbed-wire entanglements, Bigeard laughed at the idea. Here it was, the victory planned by the staffs of the Expeditionary Corps and approved by the government. He did not know that in a few weeks the prisoners would be gathered together and made to march all day long, with bowed heads, in columns of eight, a procession of shame escorted by little men armed with automatic pistols, in front of the cameras of the Communist world; but when he was asked to take part in the reconstruction of the capture of the command post, he would reply, “I’d rather die.” And the Viets would not insist.

If the Viets were calling for Bigeard everywhere, it was because they wanted to see at close quarters the wolf finally in captivity with the sheep. How could they recognize him with nothing to distinguish him from the men plodding like a procession of caterpillars toward the northeastern heights?

Under a sky suddenly empty of planes, the little group of doctors crossed the bridge. The last packages of the seventy tons which twenty-eight Dakotas had dropped during the morning were spread out; 105-mm. shells, food supplies, small arms, pharmaceutical products, canned milk, everything henceforth belonged to the victor. On the other bank the medical team was stopped and Grauwin was ordered to return to care for the wounded. Dr. Nguyen duong Quang had just inspected the hospital, which he had found far better equipped than his own; he had noted that the Vietminh soldiers were treated on an equal footing with the French. Touched by Grauwin’s sadness, he had some coffee brought to him.

At 1755 a dispatch from Cogny asked Colonel Lalande at Isabelle to tell him his plans for the coming night. Lalande was still unaware that the main position had fallen. He learned it only at 1830 from the decoding of a message and the sudden opening of a bombardment which blew up his ammunition dumps, cut his telephone wires and set fire to his dressing station. After which the Vietminh radio told him on his own wavelength, “It is useless to go on fighting. The rest of the garrison are prisoners. Give yourselves up.”

About 2000 hours, guided by the Thais who had not yet dared to desert and wanted to disappear into the country, the 12th Company of the 3rd Foreign tried to escape along the right bank, following the curves of the river. Radio contact was poor and it was difficult to follow its progress. From the firing which broke out, it was possible to locate more or less accurately the points where it had met Viet resistance. A little later, the 11th Company set off between the track and the left bank. About 2100 hours, silence seemed to indicate that it had succeeded. One by one, in the total darkness, all the units followed, laboriously extricating themselves from the barbed-wire entanglements and the muddy trenches. The noise of fighting came from the south, where the 57th Regiment was barring the way with one battalion on each side of the Nam Youm. At 2300 hours, Captain Hien, who with a third battalion was blocking the junction of the Nam Youm and the Nam Noua, where Route 41 met the track from Laos, was ordered to return. An attack created disorder among the bulk of the units, cut them off, split them up and overwhelmed them. Soldiers of the People’s Army and the Expeditionary Corps mingled with one another. Voices shouted, “Don’t shoot. You will be well treated.” Colonel Lalande then decided to try to hold out on the spot and ordered his units to return to Isabelle, where utter confusion reigned.

In Paris, it was nearly five o’clock. M. Joseph Laniel, the Prime Minister, mounted the tribune of the National Assembly to announce, in a voice which he tried to keep steady, the fall of Dien Bien Phu. All the deputies, except those on the Communist benches, rose to their feet. The stupor of defeat suddenly weighed upon the city, where the papers were publishing dispatches which had arrived out of order, mutilated by the Saigon censorship. A special edition of France-Soir carried a banner headline spread over eight columns: “DIEN BIEN PHU HAS FALLEN.” Le Monde announced that the plane of Bao Dai, who had been accused for some days of delaying the evacuation of the wounded by his stay on the Côte d’Azur, had narrowly escaped an accident. The weather was fine that Friday afternoon, and the chestnut trees in the Bois de Boulogne and along the quays were in flower. The theaters and movie houses would be open that evening as usual.

About one o’clock in the morning of May 8, a small group of French-speaking Viets waving a white flag advanced toward the command post of Isabelle. “Let us pass,” they told the soldiers who stopped them. “We want to see your commander, Colonel Lalande.” Colonel Lalande agreed to see these envoys, who told him, “All further resistance is useless. Don’t be stubborn.” Lalande then gave orders for a ceasefire.

For Bigeard and Langlais the darkness was falling, whereas it seemed to Captain Hien as if a long night had come to an end. Everywhere the news of the victory spread like wildfire from village to village. Professor Tung, on his way toward the hospitals in the rear, had learned it at 2000 hours. Already people were shouting, “It’s all right. We know.” The entrenched camp looked like a huge flea market where the victors were dividing their booty of bars of soap, flashlights and canned foods. Lights were shining in the basin, where there was no longer any fear of air raids which would kill as many French as Viets. Yet planes continued to fly over the region, ready to drop flares or bombs on the poor stars in the valley.

General Navarre’s former aide-de-camp was marching with ten thousand prisoners toward the Tonkin camps. The Viets had tied his hands behind his back because he had refused to answer their questions. Throughout the world, where Waterloo had created less of a sensation, the fall of Dien Bien Phu had caused utter amazement. It was one of the greatest defeats ever suffered by the West, heralding the collapse of the colonial empires and the end of a republic. The thunder of the event rumbles on.