All night long the battle raged. “A counterattack succeeded,” Geneviève wrote later, “raising again a high wave of hope. One position was regained. Everyone sensed that the night would be decisive…. The French artillery, lacking ammunition, had almost stopped firing while Stalin’s organs fired in relays and increased by tenfold the power of the Vietminh artillery.”
“The battle was now so intense that the injured could no longer reach our unit and had to wait where they fell until the usual lull at dawn,” she described.
Geneviève went to Lieutenant Colonel Langlais’s command post to hear the latest news of the battle so she could relate it to her patients: “I shared with the combatants moments of high hopes, when a position was retaken by our men, and the awful moments, during the heartbreaking adieux of the unit commanders: ‘The Viets are thirty feet away. Give our love to our families. It is over for us.’ My heart tightened as though I were hearing the last words of the condemned.”
“By dawn, all hope had disappeared,” she wrote later. Some of the officers considered breaking through enemy lines that evening in the direction of Laos. But they abandoned the idea. None of the remaining combatants were strong enough to do anything of the kind. Geneviève wrote, “The fighting would cease to avoid the massacre of the wounded.”
She was told that the cease-fire would begin at 5:00 PM, May 7. Around 4:30, as she said good-bye to the officers, she saw that they “were all close to tears.” As one captain shared champagne with the men and Geneviève distributed last cigarettes, she noticed that a “strange silence settled over the valley.”
At 5:30 the Vietminh arrived. They ordered everyone out of the medical unit, even the stretcher cases. Geneviève was horrified by what she saw outside: dead bodies everywhere. The Vietminh ordered the able-bodied medics and wounded to march forward. As they did, their path crossed with “columns of French prisoners marching northwards, their shoulders hunched and their eyes filled with sorrow.”
The Vietminh camp commandant summoned Geneviève for an interview. He commended her for her work and praised his leader, Ho Chi Minh. Geneviève felt he was playing some sort of mind game with her, one she didn’t understand. She kept repeating, “Since you speak of the humanity and clemency of your president, the only humanitarian solution would be to authorize the evacuation of the wounded.”
THE POWS OF DIEN BIEN PHU
Immediately following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, approximately 9,000 French POWs began their march to the Vietminh POW camps, one of them 300 miles away, the other 450. The men marched 12 miles per day for approximately one to two months. Most who began the march with battle wounds died quickly; a multitude of others succumbed to jungle diseases or dysentery from drinking unclean water. Some men attempted to escape but seldom with long-term success—any villagers they would have had to ask for assistance considered them the hated enemy. When the survivors arrived at the camps, they were met by thousands of other French POWs struggling to survive in shockingly rudimentary conditions. While the captives were not subjected to physical torture, if they didn’t fully cooperate with the daily enforced Communist indoctrination, their small rations were withheld.
The POWs were finally released between August and October 1954. Even those who had been in captivity only since May—that is, 3,900 of the original 9,000 veterans of the Dien Bien Phu surrender who had survived the march and imprisonment—were skeletal. They came home to a French public disgusted by the war and its representatives. Like the Americans who would follow them, these veterans were advised to wear civilian clothing to avoid attacks from their fellow citizens. Many suffered with substance abuse and relationship problems after returning home; some even took their own lives.
On May 19 the Vietminh allowed a group of wounded men to be evacuated in honor of Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. Two days later, they told Geneviève she must leave as well. She refused. Up to this point, the Vietminh had allowed her to nurse her patients with what medical supplies they hadn’t taken from her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them. But more to the point, she didn’t want to take up the space of a wounded man in an evacuation plane.
Three days later, however, the Vietminh would not take no for an answer; the international presses were implying that they were holding Geneviève at Dien Bien Phu against her will.
When Geneviève disembarked from the first flight of her trip home to France, in Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos, a group of legionnaires honored her with a formal presentation of arms.
It was night by the time she reached Hanoi. When the plane door opened, Geneviève was temporarily blinded by the flash of cameras. She was big news. The press conference that followed the next morning boiled down to two basic questions: “Were you scared?” and “Were you afraid to die?” Because she was deeply religious, Geneviève said she didn’t fear death. But she did admit to being afraid once: during her initial interview with the Vietminh.
When she arrived in Paris a short time later, she was hounded by the French press and offered money if she would agree to have her story made into a film. She refused the offer and did her best to avoid the press, instead busying herself with what she considered important work: corresponding with the families of men who had been at Dien Bien Phu and who were now prisoners of war. To accomplish this task, she took one month’s leave of absence from the French air force. Although she tried to remember everyone she had met at Dien Bien Phu, she often didn’t recognize them from the photos their families sent; the clean men in these photos looked so different from her unshaved patients.
Geneviève in Luang Prabang, in the paratrooper uniform she wore while staying at Dien Bien Phu, on the cover of the magazine Paris Match. Paris Match
Two months later, on July 26, 1954, Geneviève was in New York City being honored with a ticker tape parade. US president Dwight D. Eisenhower had invited her there and awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Geneviève had felt overwhelmed by the invitation itself but didn’t think she could refuse; this was the first time since 1821 that a foreigner had been invited by an act of Congress to the United States on an official visit.
During the exhausting three-week tour that followed, the American press began to call Geneviève the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu.” Whenever she was asked to speak, she said something along the following lines: “I haven’t earned this honor, because I only did my duty…. My thoughts, at this moment are with all those who are still over there and who, far more than I, have earned this honor that you offer.”
Geneviève returned to Paris, but when her contract with the French air force expired on July 15, 1955, she decided to go back to New York for training at a rehabilitation center there. Then she returned to Paris and put her new skills to work, helping survivors of Dien Bien Phu who were learning to live with prosthetic limbs.
In 1956 Geneviève married Captain Jean de Heaulme, whom she met while in Indochina (but who had not been at Dien Bien Phu).
Decades later, they returned to Vietnam, but Geneviève couldn’t bear to visit Dien Bien Phu. During this trip, she encountered more Vietnamese people than she had during the war. Though she could not respect Vietnam’s government, she did greatly admire its people, who, she said, “have suffered so much throughout their history and manifest their attachment to the land … and who want to show to all the nations a … civilization of their own.”
Geneviève and Jean had three children and three grandchildren and today live in Paris, where Geneviève still receives communications—via letter and in person—from veterans of the battle and others interested in her wartime experiences. She is also regularly invited to attend official military ceremonies.
The de Heaulmes are members of Vietnam Esperance, an organization designed to help Vietnamese Catholics and that built a chapel for them near Dien Bien Phu. The organization recently received permission from the Vietnamese government to build a church in the center of the village.
In 2003 Geneviève wrote her memoir,
and it was translated into English in 2010.
LEARN MORE
The Angel of Dien Bien Phu: The Sole French Woman at the Decisive Battle in Vietnam by Geneviève de Galard (Naval Institute Press, 2010).
“Geneviève de Galard: The Angel of Dien Bien Phu,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HK3Zeeg3wA.
French-language video testimony by Geneviève, with subtitles and images.
Hell in a Very Small Place: The Siege of Dien Bien Phu by Bernard B. Fall (Harper Collins, 1966).
Part II
1957–1964
NGO DINH DIEM’S CIVIL WAR
ONE MAN’S DECISION WAS largely to blame for turning the First Indochina War into the second. The man was Ngo Dinh Diem. His momentous decision? Refusing to allow his people to vote in the 1956 national election.
Formerly Bao Dai’s prime minister, Diem had been able to declare himself president of the new Republic of Vietnam on October 26, 1955, only because he’d rigged an election in his favor. But because a national election would be impossible to rig—he wouldn’t be able to manipulate votes in the north—and because it was clear that Ho Chi Minh, the other candidate, would beat him in a landslide, Diem decided to prevent the South from participating in the election. He knew there were many Vietminh in the South waiting for the opportunity to fight for a unified Vietnam. So while Ho Chi Minh’s government was conducting its land reform—murdering Northerners who were deemed disloyal to the Communist cause—Ngo Dinh Diem’s government was doing the same in the South, killing anyone suspected of being loyal to the Vietminh.
To accomplish this, Diem passed laws allowing suspects to be tried and executed by a military tribunal without any access to appeals. Military personnel roamed the countryside on the lookout for suspects, who, when found guilty, were executed immediately and publicly, often in gruesome ways.
These laws and actions were harrowingly successful. By 1956 Diem’s government had destroyed 90 percent of all Vietminh networks in the South. But this success was laced with failure; the Diem government’s brutality drove many Southerners who would not have otherwise joined the Vietminh into their ranks.
Although the Vietminh in the South were eager to fight, Ho’s government in Hanoi cautioned patience; perhaps Diem would soon self-destruct. But Diem wasn’t going anywhere. The United States was propping him up. By the late 1950s there were 1,500 US military personnel in South Vietnam—officers, soldiers, helicopter pilots—whom Diem’s government referred to as “advisors.”
Ho’s government in Hanoi decided it was time for serious action. In 1960 he created the National Liberation Front (NLF). The NLF’s purpose was to overthrow the Southern government, then unify the nation, and it had its own army, called the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). But as early as 1956, both the US Information Services in Vietnam and Saigon newspapers referred to all Vietnamese fighting against the Diem regime as the Vietcong (VC), which was short for Viet Nam Cong San, or Vietnamese Communist. This name distinguished them from the Vietminh, the guerrilla force that had gained the profound respect of many Vietnamese people during the First Indochina War.
The VC worked tirelessly to overthrow the Southern government. They employed guerrilla warfare tactics against the Southern government soldiers—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN)—and the Americans and also sought to win the hearts and minds of the Southern people.
One way in which Diem tried to counteract the increasing influence of the VC in South and South-Central Vietnam was the construction of “agrovilles.” This system forced farmers off their ancestral lands and into newly built villages where they could be watched and guarded, often while their former land was destroyed to keep the VC from using it. By 1961 the effort was renamed the Strategic Hamlet Program.
It was an utter failure. The people within the villages’ gates were kept away from VC influence, yes, but at the cost of everything most precious to them. Diem failed to understand that for an enormous percentage of Vietnamese people, land represented a historic and sacred sense of duty, family, and religion; most worshipped their ancestors, who were buried on their land.
Plus, the money that was supposed to support the people within the agrovilles usually found its way into the pockets of corrupt government officials. The subsequent shortages caused illness, starvation, and death in the villages, and those inside increasingly viewed the agrovilles as prisons. The failed Strategic Hamlet Program, along with the general brutality of the Diem regime and its enormously high taxes, was directly responsible for sending even more South Vietnamese directly into the ranks of the VC.
The United States had initially hoped to tutor Diem in the ways of building a democracy but realized too late that he had his own ideas about how to run his country. Americans grew impatient with his corruption and ineptitude, especially when, on June 11, 1963, an elderly Buddhist monk burned himself to death on a busy Saigon intersection in protest of the Catholic Vietnamese president’s anti-Buddhist laws, which had been in place since the French occupation.
When the horrifying image of the burning monk hit the international presses and more just like it followed in the ensuing weeks, the entire world—including US president John F. Kennedy—asked what had driven all these monks to commit gruesome public suicides.
Throughout the rest of the summer, as the Diem regime cracked down on continued Buddhist protests (and as Diem’s infamous sister-in-law, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, publicly referred to the monk burnings as “barbeques,” offering to provide matches and gasoline for more), embarrassed US officials pleaded with Diem to listen to the complaints of the Buddhist community. Barricaded within his opulent presidential palace, Diem refused.
The Kennedy administration was through with him and secretly supported a coup that on November 1, 1963, ousted Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, from power. The brothers were killed in the coup, although President Kennedy had personally requested that their lives be spared.
The United States hoped that Diem’s successor would be someone its government could enthusiastically support. He wasn’t, nor were his successors as coup endlessly followed coup. The Southern government seemed hopelessly incapable of maintaining a regime stable enough to stand up to the VC. Perhaps it was time for the Americans to give up, go home, and allow the inevitable to happen.
They weren’t about to do that, especially when Lyndon B. Johnson became the US president after the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, just three weeks after Diem’s execution. The following year was an election season wherein President Johnson would run against Senator Barry Goldwater, a staunch anti-Communist. President Johnson, like most American politicians at the time, dreaded to be seen as anything less than a declared enemy of Communism and its international spread.
Johnson certainly didn’t want his presidential legacy to be the Vietnam War. Instead he hoped to be remembered for his Great Society, a series of laws expanding the welfare state and designed to end poverty and racial injustice. But in his determination not to lose the Vietnam War, he became responsible for escalating it. If the Southern government couldn’t stand on its own, he would “Americanize” the war; that is, he would increase US involvement.
His opportunity came on August 2, 1964, when he was told that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had fired on the USS Maddox in international waters in the northern Gulf of Tonkin. It is now widely and seriously doubted that any Vietnamese shots were fired, but at the time, the US Congress had no doubts; in a nearly unanimous vote, it passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the power to wage war without actually declaring it.
The Americanization of the Vietnam War was about to begin.
LE LY HAYSLIP
“Freedom Is Never a Gift”
PHUNG THI LE LY’S CLEAREST and earliest memories were of war. One day she and one of her older sisters, Lan, were playing together in the street near their home in Ky La, a village in central Vietnam, when the ground began to shake. All around them screaming village
rs ran for cover. Lan grabbed Le Ly and pulled her into a trench by the side of the road and nervously sang:
French come, French come,
Cannon shells land, go hide!
Cannon shells sing,
Like a song all day!
French soldiers occasionally strolled into Ky La, but “even the friendly ones made us sick with horror,” Le Ly wrote later. Part of this was simply due to their differentness: a tall man with Caucasian features seemed terrifying to an Asian child.
The French soldiers were also frightening because they weren’t always so friendly. They knew that many villagers—including Le Ly’s family—were helping the Vietminh and so, to keep them from doing this, French soldiers destroyed village after village. Once, when the French were rumored to be on their way to Ky La, Phung Van Trong, Le Ly’s father, sent his family away to safety. Trong stayed behind and waited for days in a nearby river, knowing that if he was found, he would be accused of being a Vietminh. From a safe distance, he watched the French destroy the village. After they left, he managed to salvage enough furniture and tools to start over.
Trong’s land—and his freedom—meant everything to him. One day, when Le Ly’s five older siblings had moved out and her mother, Tran Thi Huyen, was gone for the day, Trong took his youngest daughter to the top of a hill behind the house where they could see the land all around the village. He told her about the cruel Chinese and French occupations.
“Freedom is never a gift,” he said to Le Ly. “It must be won and won again.”
Le Ly thought he was telling her to become a soldier. Trong laughed. No, he said; her job was to stay alive, help keep the village safe, and care for their large parcel of land so they—like everyone else in Ky La—could continue to grow rice. Then she would have children of her own who could pass on the family stories and tend the shrine of their ancestors. “Do these things well, Bay Ly,” he said, calling her by the name her family members used, “and you will be worth more than any soldier who ever took up a sword.”
Courageous Women of the Vietnam War Page 4