Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam
Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam
It was one of the century's turning points, a devastating conflict that altered the fates of three nations: Vietnam, France, and eventually, America. The battle at Dien Bien Phu brought the eyes of the world to a remote village in northern Vietnam, and brought a colonial force to its knees. Forty-five years later, David Halberstam—whose Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the American war helped define an era—returns to Vietnam, and to a time he cannot forget
VIETNAM AIR FLIES THREE TIMES A WEEK FROM HANOI TO DIEN BIEN PHU. The trip takes a little over an hour, and these days the planes are large, relatively comfortable ATR's—a significant improvement, friends tell me, over the Russian Ilyushins that used to make the run and turned it into something of a cliff-hanger.
Aboard the flight today are a handful of Western tourists, more of them French than American (when Americans return to the scene of their war, they prefer to visit the DMZ); a few Vietnamese veterans making pilgrimages; several local officials; and a number of Tai hill people engaged in what passes for commerce in this corner of the country. The in-flight magazine is filled with the advertisements of the new Vietnam: for Louis Vuitton luggage, Citibank, and a handsome new resort in Da Nang ("situated on famous China Beach, now attracting guests from all over the world . . .").
It is a trip I have been wanting to make for much of my adult life. My fascination with Dien Bien Phu began 45 years ago, during the bitter two-month siege of the French fortress there. I was a junior at Harvard in 1954, editing the college paper, and not only did we run a steady stream of articles about the battle—HARVARD PROFESSORS SEE FRENCH VICTORY UNLIKELY—but I read with fascination the leaked stories from Washington suggesting the imminence of American intervention, and with that, the need for vastly increased draft calls. Since I had no intention of going to graduate school, any story about draft calls had very personal implications, and I studied the stories and the maps religiously. I thought often of the young French parachutistes, or paras, who were fighting there, outnumbered five to one, their fate sealed from the outset. They were my age, and it was impossible not to think of the cruel hand they had been dealt.
In time, what happened in Vietnam after the French left and the Americans arrived would be woven into the fabric of my own life. I was to be a charter member of that generation of Americans in whose lives Vietnam remains the central experience, men and women who to this day struggle to see Vietnam as a country and not merely a war.
In 1962, when I was just 28, the New York Times assigned me to Vietnam. I arrived there thinking it would be a great story: that we Americans would inevitably help suppress a Communist insurrection. Instead I became one of a small group of journalists who—in the days before hawks and doves—realized that the war was in fact being lost, and reported as much, drawing the enmity of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In retrospect there was a sweet-sour quality to it all: On the one hand I endured the daily terror of following the South Vietnamese into combat, and the toxic attacks from men in air-conditioned offices in Washington who called me a coward and a Communist because my reporting was so pessimistic. Balanced against that were the richness of my professional friendships and my passion for the story, for Vietnam, and for its people. I was young, single, and in love with my work; this was the assignment I had always wanted. Sometimes I think of those 18 months of my first tour there as the last and perhaps happiest days of a delayed boyhood, when my only responsibility was to do something I loved doing and was well suited to do, in the company of colleagues I revered.
Eventually it all got darker. None of us in 1962 imagined that the American commitment would in time grow to 540,000 men. When I went back to Saigon in 1967, on assignment for Harper's magazine, it was with a much heavier heart. I did not return for nearly three decades, until a brief visit in 1995 to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), where I was moved beyond expectation by encounters with old friends, and by the generous spirit of the Vietnamese I met. Yet, I still did not make it to the north.
As we grow older, certain places do not merely intrigue us, they become obsessions. The battle of '54—a defining event in the theater of my imagination—put Dien Bien Phu on the short list of my remaining obsessions. It was a place which I had never seen but which haunted me nonetheless. I had been to Omaha Beach and Verdun, to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Now nothing beckoned me more than Dien Bien Phu.
And so last spring I finally arrived in Hanoi en route to Dien Bien Phu, almost 45 years to the day since the last French strongpoint had fallen to the Vietminh. During the American war, North Vietnam had been a separate country, one that we in the south could never visit. I had typed the word Hanoi hundreds of times in dispatches and articles and books, in phrases such as Hanoi thinks, Hanoi believes, Hanoi wants. In those days it seemed not so much a city as a dark and unknowable home to Them
It was one of the century's turning points, a devastating conflict that altered the fates of three nations: Vietnam, France, and eventually, America. The battle at Dien Bien Phu brought the eyes of the world to a remote village in northern Vietnam, and brought a colonial force to its knees. Forty-five years later, David Halberstam—whose Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the American war helped define an era—returns to Vietnam, and to a time he cannot forget
VIETNAM AIR FLIES THREE TIMES A WEEK FROM HANOI TO DIEN BIEN PHU. The trip takes a little over an hour, and these days the planes are large, relatively comfortable ATR's—a significant improvement, friends tell me, over the Russian Ilyushins that used to make the run and turned it into something of a cliff-hanger.
Aboard the flight today are a handful of Western tourists, more of them French than American (when Americans return to the scene of their war, they prefer to visit the DMZ); a few Vietnamese veterans making pilgrimages; several local officials; and a number of Tai hill people engaged in what passes for commerce in this corner of the country. The in-flight magazine is filled with the advertisements of the new Vietnam: for Louis Vuitton luggage, Citibank, and a handsome new resort in Da Nang ("situated on famous China Beach, now attracting guests from all over the world . . .").
It is a trip I have been wanting to make for much of my adult life. My fascination with Dien Bien Phu began 45 years ago, during the bitter two-month siege of the French fortress there. I was a junior at Harvard in 1954, editing the college paper, and not only did we run a steady stream of articles about the battle—HARVARD PROFESSORS SEE FRENCH VICTORY UNLIKELY—but I read with fascination the leaked stories from Washington suggesting the imminence of American intervention, and with that, the need for vastly increased draft calls. Since I had no intention of going to graduate school, any story about draft calls had very personal implications, and I studied the stories and the maps religiously. I thought often of the young French parachutistes, or paras, who were fighting there, outnumbered five to one, their fate sealed from the outset. They were my age, and it was impossible not to think of the cruel hand they had been dealt.
In time, what happened in Vietnam after the French left and the Americans arrived would be woven into the fabric of my own life. I was to be a charter member of that generation of Americans in whose lives Vietnam remains the central experience, men and women who to this day struggle to see Vietnam as a country and not merely a war.
In 1962, when I was just 28, the New York Times assigned me to Vietnam. I arrived there thinking it would be a great story: that we Americans would inevitably help suppress a Communist insurrection. Instead I became one of a small group of journalists who—in the days before hawks and doves—realized that the war was in fact being lost, and reported as much, drawing the enmity of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. In retrospect there was a sweet-sour quality to it all: On the one hand I endured the daily terror of following the South Vietnamese into combat, and the toxic attacks from men in air-conditioned offices in Washington who called me a coward and a Communist because my reporting was so pessimistic. Balanced against that were the richness of my professional friendships and my passion for the story, for Vietnam, and for its people. I was young, single, and in love with my work; this was the assignment I had always wanted. Sometimes I think of those 18 months of my first tour there as the last and perhaps happiest days of a delayed boyhood, when my only responsibility was to do something I loved doing and was well suited to do, in the company of colleagues I revered.
Eventually it all got darker. None of us in 1962 imagined that the American commitment would in time grow to 540,000 men. When I went back to Saigon in 1967, on assignment for Harper's magazine, it was with a much heavier heart. I did not return for nearly three decades, until a brief visit in 1995 to Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), where I was moved beyond expectation by encounters with old friends, and by the generous spirit of the Vietnamese I met. Yet, I still did not make it to the north.
As we grow older, certain places do not merely intrigue us, they become obsessions. The battle of '54—a defining event in the theater of my imagination—put Dien Bien Phu on the short list of my remaining obsessions. It was a place which I had never seen but which haunted me nonetheless. I had been to Omaha Beach and Verdun, to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. Now nothing beckoned me more than Dien Bien Phu.
And so last spring I finally arrived in Hanoi en route to Dien Bien Phu, almost 45 years to the day since the last French strongpoint had fallen to the Vietminh. During the American war, North Vietnam had been a separate country, one that we in the south could never visit. I had typed the word Hanoi hundreds of times in dispatches and articles and books, in phrases such as Hanoi thinks, Hanoi believes, Hanoi wants. In those days it seemed not so much a city as a dark and unknowable home to Them
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