We Are Soldiers Still: A Journey Back to the Battlefields of Vietnam (16 page)

So what began as a modest but daring thrust into the mountainous border region swiftly grew in importance to both sides. Navarre, a cavalryman, flew in thirty-two tanks, thinking the flat valley would be ideal terrain and that the tanks would be a decisive factor in defeating a lightly armed, poorly supplied enemy. He was wrong. The valley was subject to both a long monsoon season and poor drainage and the tanks spent more time bogged down and broken than they did maneuvering. By the time the Viet Minh launched their final assaults only two of Navarre’s tanks were still operable.

But the key to the French defeat was neither armor nor foot soldiers, but artillery. De Castries had scores of 105mm and 155mm heavy artillery pieces and his artillery commander and second in command of the French force, one-armed Col. Charles Piroth, was supremely confident that any heavy guns the Viet Minh might drag to the tops of the mountains would be few in number and swiftly silenced by his guns and French air attacks. He was so confident, in fact, that the French colonel boasted that not a single enemy shell would ever land inside the French fortress.

What they and Navarre believed to be impossible was happening on the narrow dirt track that led from Dien Bien Phu back to the China border. An army of some 40,000 Vietnamese porters were pushing and pulling twenty-four 105mm American artillery guns along that trail—guns the Chinese had captured from us in Korea—along with more than 300 other artillery pieces, heavy mortars, Russian-made Katyusha rocket launchers, and antiaircraft guns. The porters hauled the ammunition for the big guns and, using the modified bicycles that became famous on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in another war, along with 17,000 horses they moved 20,000 tons of rice to the front to feed the soldiers.

The real surprise, when those guns signaled the attack before dusk on March 13, 1954, was not only that the Viet Minh had artillery but that it was perfectly emplaced and nearly invulnerable to counter-battery fire and air attacks—dug into the mountaintops from the reverse slopes, with only the barrels briefly appearing in small openings to fire and then be pulled back to safety inside the mountain.

When the first enemy shells exploded inside the French fortifications the artillery colonel who had boasted of their invulnerability and invincibility apologized to de Castries and the other commanders, then withdrew to his bunker, lay down on his bed, pulled the pin on a hand grenade, and blew himself up. He knew that the battle only now beginning was already lost—fifty-five days before the end came.

The enemy artillery, and the antiaircraft guns they had also installed on the mountains, closed the airfield at Dien Bien Phu. Dozens of transport planes were destroyed on the strip or shot down, some of them flown by American crews. The long, narrow road to Hanoi had long since been closed by Viet Minh ambushes. Now the 12,000 to 13,000 French and colonial soldiers could only be supplied by airdrops from planes forced by ack-ack fire to fly ever higher: first dropping supplies from 2,000 feet, then from 6,000 feet, and finally from 8,500 feet. Of the 120 tons of supplies dropped daily over the French positions, only 90 to 100 tons landed in the right place on a very good day. The rest—ammunition, medical supplies, wine and food—was used and appreciated by the enemy.

The French had by now been fighting the Viet Minh since the end of World War II, and one would think that their commanders would have a comprehensive understanding of Viet Minh tactics, firepower, tenacity, and fighting ability. The fourth-century B.C. Chinese master of strategy and tactics, Sun Tzu, wrote: “Know your enemy and know yourself and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.” The French commanders didn’t know their enemy and now the brave but doomed garrison at Dien Bien Phu paid the price.

There is no glory in trench warfare. Life is lived underground like a mole, burrowing endlessly in the mud building new bunkers, repairing old ones collapsed by enemy artillery or unfriendly rain. Those condemned to this kind of warfare are the undead, but they have been buried nonetheless. I knew how those poor French-led troops had lived and died. In Korea and at Dien Bien Phu there were communications or commo trenches, six to eight feet deep. Some had duckboards in the bottoms; most did not. When it rained they were a deep muddy mess. There were offshoot trenches leading to fire steps and fighting positions on the spines and slopes of the hills. Also off the main trench were dugouts or bunkers used for command posts and ammunition storage. The surrounding terrain was a moonscape, stripped of any growth and pocked with water-filled pits and holes from thousands of shell and bomb explosions.

Then there was the smell, a foul miasma combined of the odors of latrines, sour-smelling wet clothes and dirty unwashed men, wet sandbags, churned mud, and gunpowder. Under a hot sun this unique perfume was thick enough to cut. Occasionally, in digging trench extensions or new firing positions, long-dead human remains were unearthed, adding yet another layer to the smell. When the monsoon torrents came—in July and August for us in Korea, and from March through May at Dien Bien Phu—for the soldiers buried deep in the earth life became pure Hell. In the Dien Bien Phu Valley twelve feet of rain falls each year, greatly multiplying that misery.

The Chinese we fought in Korea were masters with the shovel—hard-core, heavy-duty professional diggers. So too were General Giap’s Viet Minh, who would later perfect their skills and dig massive miles-long underground complexes beneath the feet of patrolling American GIs in South Vietnam—subterranean military bases so cleverly built and hidden that they survived all attempts to find and destroy them and were still in business when the war ended a decade later.

Though I experienced them many times it is hard for me to describe what it is like to endure a saturation bombardment of heavy artillery in a small impact area. The noise, the dust or mud, the choking smoke, the screaming of the wounded, the sheer terror of it all is enough to unhinge the strongest of men. It is nothing less than a torrential downpour of fire and shrapnel. On Pork Chop Hill our trenches were deep, the dugouts and bunkers and parts of the trenches covered with heavy timbers and sandbags. Once the Chinese got into the system it was hard to find them and kill them in the dark. Only by listening for the sound of weapons or someone talking could the soldiers identify friend from foe. With the barbed-wire entanglements and mines it was not possible to get out of the trenches and maneuver against the enemy in the darkness.

Now Joe and I were here, on the spot, walking that same ground. All the old strongpoints, once gleefully named by French commanders either for their wives or their mistresses—Dominique, Isabelle, Beatrice, Gabrielle, Eliane, Huguette—are now heavily overgrown by the encroaching scrub brush and jungle. But many of the old trenches and firing positions remain. They are fenced off against the general public because of the danger of old unexploded shells and mines, but we were free to explore them.

At the time of the great battle there were only a few hundred inhabitants of the valley, but now Dien Bien Phu is a provincial capital and home to more than 100,000 people. The trenches and positions around and west of the airport have been erased and replaced by peaceful rice paddies where small boys herd the water buffalo. The city has grown up to the east and south of the airfield. The old Bailey bridge that spanned the Nam Youm River between Eliane and Huguette, the French command bunker, is gone, replaced by a similar stronger steel bridge. The rusting remains of an old Quad-50 machine-gun system stands silent guard over the bridge on the northwest side of the river. Two hulks of French M-24 tanks likewise guard the re-created French command bunker where de Castries surrendered.

In the desperate fifty-five days of fighting General Giap’s force of nearly 50,000 soldiers suffered 23,000 casualties—8,000 killed and 15,000 wounded. De Castries’s force suffered 2,242 killed and 6,463 wounded during the campaign, some of them replaced by reinforcements who were parachuted into the battle. A total of more than 6,500 prisoners, including thousands of wounded, were recorded by the Viet Minh and then marched off into captivity as prisoners after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, suffering a brutal experience that American POWs would likewise endure at the hands of the same Vietnamese Communists beginning a decade later. Those judged able-bodied were force-marched some 250 miles to detention camps. Hundreds died along the way of starvation and disease. A total of only 3,290 were repatriated after the Geneva Conference formally ended the war four months later. The fate of an estimated 3,000 prisoners from Dien Bien Phu is still unknown.

While we were there Joe and I drove out Provincial Route 41 and a portion of Route 19, over which Giap’s porters supplied his forces, to see the general’s headquarters—or what is purported to be a re-creation of his headquarters. Contemporary photographs in Fall’s book about Dien Bien Phu show Giap in a headquarters near a waterfall. What we were shown was a location a three-quarter-mile hike up a concrete path, with a small stream on the left, in a heavily wooded draw. A tunnel through a finger of the draw leads from the staff area to a small, spartan re-creation in concrete of a palm frond shelter that was labeled Giap’s office and sleeping area. Even today Route 19 is narrow, full of hairpin turns, the shoulders heavily eroded by the monsoons. The Viet Minh must have had a terrible time keeping it open and repaired for the army of porters hauling supplies during the buildup and siege.

On our return to town we briefly visited the Military Museum, a poorly maintained building at the end of an overgrown walkway. Outdoors there was an area of shot-up remains of French vehicles, aircraft, and artillery pieces in bad shape; the Viet Minh mortars, ack-ack guns, and artillery were pristine. The centerpiece of the museum was a huge terrain model of the battlefield and surrounding mountains half the size of a tennis court. Across the street is one of three military cemeteries where thousands of Viet Minh dead from Dien Bien Phu’s battles are buried, their names inscribed on a memorial wall erected in 1994 during the fortieth anniversary observation. Nearby is the entrance to the hilltop position the French named Eliane. We briefly visited that position; then moved on to Beatrice; then Gabrielle, and finally the re-created de Castries command bunker near the airstrip. Beatrice and Gabrielle were both overrun and captured by the Viet Minh on the first two days of battle, March 13 and 14, respectively.

Our visit was hurried and I asked permission to return the following day with the Vietnamese translator Tien and the official minder assigned to our party. We hiked up the steep path to Beatrice, where the old trenches are now only three to four feet deep, filled in by forty-five years of erosion. From there we went to Gabrielle, the northernmost and most isolated of the strongpoints. The elongated hilltop position was crisscrossed with old trenches mostly hidden by thick thorn vines and high elephant grass. We could not traverse the position and finally went around the hill to the south end, where a monument to the victors stands not far from old dugouts that once held heavy French mortars.

Our next stop was Eliane, the last major position overrun by the Viet Minh as they attacked toward the French supply dump, hospital, and de Castries’s command bunker. A monument atop the hill describes its importance in the battle. On the south side a huge hole, partly filled with water, marks where the Vietnamese tunneled under French positions and packed in hundreds of pounds of explosives, which they detonated at the beginning of the final assault.

General An, then a major, commanded the regiment of the 16th Viet Minh Division, which assaulted and captured Eliane. General Man, then a brigadier general, was the division commander. Colonel Thuoc, then a sergeant, was an assistant squad leader in An’s regiment. All of them had studied in a very hard school before we had our first meeting in November 1965 in the Ia Drang Valley.

Our Dien Bien Phu trip was to be capped, when we returned to Hanoi, with a promised three-hour interview with General Giap about this battle. But we found that he was in the hospital and unable to see us. Joe and I decided to use the extra three days in Hanoi calling on General An’s widow and family and having dinner at the homes of General Man and Colonel Thuoc. At the An home we were warmly welcomed by Mrs. An, her two businessman sons in suits and ties, and her daughter, a medical doctor and a major in the People’s Army of Vietnam. A spacious living room had been turned into a combination shrine and museum to the memory of General An, who died of a heart attack three years after our visit to the Ia Drang battlefields. I grieved for my old enemy and new friend at the time, and wrote to his family offering my sympathy for their great loss. My feeling of loss grew out of my respect for an officer and commander whose career in many ways mirrored my own. When we arrived in Hanoi I sent a message to An’s family asking if I might call on them to pay my respects. On the advice of our Vietnamese translator, Joe and I brought a bouquet of white lilies and a large packet of incense.

When we arrived we were ushered into a large living and dining room. Along one wall was a Buddhist shrine with a large portrait of An before a table containing fruit, flowers, and incense holders. We added our flowers and I lit the bundle of sandalwood incense. Next to the shrine was a large glass-fronted display case containing the general’s dress uniform, his medals, albums of photographs An had taken during his long career, the letter of sympathy I had written, the wristwatch I had given him in the Ia Drang, and a copy of
We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
we had inscribed and signed and sent to him when it was first published. Mrs. An sat us down and proudly showed us several large photo albums depicting the impressive state funeral General An was accorded as a real hero of Vietnam’s revolution and wars. Thousands of soldiers marched at An’s last review. I hoped his final resting place was among soldiers and that some of his old comrades from Dien Bien Phu and the Ia Drang were nearby to keep him company.

Our dinners at the homes of General Man and Colonel Thuoc were likewise cordial and filled with discussion of their memories of the Dien Bien Phu battle. We were received warmly as old friends. General Man was by now retired from active duty and living with his daughter and her husband and several grandchildren. All traces of his previous formality were gone. He had traded his general’s uniform for a natty sports coat and an open-collared shirt. I thought back to our first interview with him and how, afterward, Joe chuckled as we walked back to our quarters in the two-rat Army hotel. He said he had a vision that one day Man’s engineer son would burst in shouting to the old revolutionary: “Dad, you’ll never guess who is the new country manager for IBM.”