INDO-CHINA A War of Gallantry & Despair

From French Union military headquarters at Hanoi, TIME'S Foreign News Editor Thomas Griffith last week cabled this report:

THE unshaven soldier lies back on his pillow and exercises his good right arm. Every so often he twitches his left shoulder too, to exercise it, but where his left arm should be there is a white bandaged pouch like a hornets' nest taped to his body. This foreign legionnaire's left arm was amputated on the battlefield at Dienbienphu.

He is among the lucky few of the wounded who got out early. The others had to wait, lying in foxholes the size of their stretchers, until the skies over Dienbienphu cleared and the planes which could strike at the Viet Minh Communist artillery zeroed in on the airstrip. Outside his ward in the military hospital at Hanoi, the corridors are filled with other wounded, in cots crowded head to foot in a row. The legionnaire talks matter-of-factly of the paratroop drop and of the wound he got only half an hour after landing; no heroism, no bravado, no whimpering, just acceptance of his fate and future. You are reminded of his face often when anger rises in you over the situation in Indo-China. You find yourself resisting the impulse to understand everyone and wishing only that you could stay angry and hortatory.

THE CAMPAIGN

Who Can Be Completely Indifferent?

Indo-China is a swamp war: fought literally in the paddy-fields of the Red River delta, but fought actually in minds that no longer are stirred and in hearts where resignation, suspicion, frustration and a dogged sense of duty are in confused conflict.

Some say sardonically that combat pay is good and that one can do quite well out of this war. It is a war fought on one side largely by indoctrinated press gangs and on the other largely by courageous mercenaries: the heavily German Foreign Legion, the Algerians, Moroccans and other Africans. Others say that the politicians are making a good thing out of it and getting their money out of the country. They complain that one can eat well in serene Saigon (and you can, for the cuisine is French) while ignoring the few at the end of the line who are laying their lives on the line. In the dance halls, the local girls sit in a row, dressed in colored tunics slit high and trousers that look like silk pajamas. Their painted faces advertise that they exist for joyless pleasures. In Saigon officers and officials take siestas. All these things are true. But still, Indo-China is not a very pleasant place to be in, even in the soft and untouched places, for who can be completely indifferent?

Indo-China is a war of gallantry and despair. It is an ideological war like Korea, where the great issues of the day are fought with means that are often pathetically small. It is a guerrilla war like Kenya, where no one knows who the enemy is. The man who serves your food and drives your car may be in one country a Mau Mau and in the other a Viet Minh. It is a colonial war, not so much in reality any more, but still so in the minds of some Frenchmen who have not unlearned the past, and in the minds of some Vietnamese who will not forget it. It is a civil war, too: countryman fighting countryman, often not because of differing convictions but because of the accident of geography and which side was there to conscript him. The Vietnamese nationalists tell you that half or more of the Viet Minh fighters they face are not Communists but other nationalists, who are persuaded of the need to drive the French out. The Vietnamese themselves are positive that the French must give them their independence, and yet go on to argue that the French must stay around, nonetheless, and fight and die for a country they will be asked to leave.

It is a war not of position but of glancing blows against a disappearing enemy. Mount your strength, and the enemy disappear like sparrows. It is a war where the countryside changes hands every night and where the peril of a road can be measured by whether it reopens each day at 7 or 9 or 10 a.m. All over the country each morning, as regularly as shaving, a handful of French or Vietnamese must venture in jeep, truck or tank down the roads, looking for mine or ambush before the buses and beer trucks and handcarts can travel, before the long lines of patient and straw-hatted coolie women, bamboo poles on their shoulders and heavy burdens hanging at each end, can begin their incessant dogtrot down the roadside.

Just 15 miles out of Hanoi, on the crucial supply road to Haiphong, our car is suddenly halted. Trouble ahead in the next village: the Viet Minh have ambushed some trucks and four Frenchmen have been killed. The tanks must clear the road; there will be half an hour's delay. Finally we are allowed to move ahead again, and we meet the tanks heading back to the nearby fort, like fire trucks ready for the next alarm. Before us in the highway sits the ambushed truck, its cab split apart, its load a charred twist of metal, its tires still burning. Near by, with automatic rifles perched on the green mounds that separate the paddies, crouch Vietnamese guardsmen, looking out across the flat fields. Several miles away, a black plume of smoke rises, and three French planes make successive dives at a field while a fourth circles overhead, spotting. Have they sighted the Viet Minh who made the ambush on this road, or another band? Just a few hundred yards from the flaming truck, coolies are working knee-deep in the mud as if nothing has happened, never looking up from under their straw hats. Are some or all or none of them Viet Minh? Have they guilty knowledge? Who knows?

THE VIETNAMESE

"We Must be Trusted to Govern Ourselves"

Vietnamese officer, high in the armies trained by the French, told us in Saigon: "Of every 100 people in this country, 90 are waiting and have no opinion, two are Viet Minh and eight are for us. The 90 fear the two Viet Minh and give them information, or do not inform on them. They fear the French too, but they do not fear us. We must become stronger. Bao Dai must act . . ."

Except for a few Vietnamese, no one seems to have a good word for Bao Dai, Viet Nam's French-backed chief of state--not the Americans, not the French. They say he is intelligent or clever--but that he will not act; that he is Slave No. 1 to the national habit of attentisme, or wait-and-seeism; that he will not give necessary power to politicians who would be strong enough to rally the country, but prefers to balance off sycophantic, corrupt and bickering politicians while relying on the U.S. and France to save his skin. He hunts big game while villages burn.

The French say that they are ready to give Bao Dai's government complete internal sovereignty, insisting only that it stay within the French Union. The favored commercial position which the French would like to maintain, if fairly negotiated and not imposed, seems reasonable in view of the lives the French are asked to lose on behalf of a free Viet Nam. Yet certain doubts will not die. The policy may be sincere--and so may be the conviction that Bao Dai's government is incapable of governing with honesty and vigor.

"We must be trusted to govern ourselves," a schoolteacher said with earnest conviction. "That is the only way. We look at India and the Philippines, and think that if the Americans or the English had occupied our country we would be free now. But we do not hate the French any more. We would like them to stay here as our big brothers but not as our masters. The masses of the people here work their lands and worship their ancestors and do not think about politics. They obey only the ones they fear. But we intellectuals, we have all changed. At first we thought that the Viet Minh were nationalists, but now we know they are Communists and we do not want them. Now we realize that the French must stay here and advise us. But it is a hard thing to explain to the people that the only way they will get their independence is to join with the French."

The schoolteacher used to live a few hundred yards from a high-school teacher of French and history--who is now General Giap, the Moscow-trained commander of the Viet Minh forces. When they look at Giap, the French recognize that the Vietnamese not only make good soldiers but are good officer material. "Giap is first-rate," said a high French officer. "If we had him, we'd put him in charge of the Vietnamese army." Everyone agrees that the French are making a genuine and energetic effort to create a Vietnamese army, but they started 28 months ago and they should have started five years ago. The result is an inevitable shortage of field-grade officers. The misdeeds and mistrust of past years hang everywhere over Indo-China.

THE FRENCH A Special Kind of Pride

Arriving in Indo-China, the stranger has one question on his lips--why don't the French fight through to victory?--and stays to ask himself a quite different one: What keeps the French here at all? If Indo-China goes, the French have no significant strategic considerations left in Asia. The war costs them more than any economic advantages they can get from it. They are fatigued and frustrated by eight years without victory. Yet Frenchmen continue to plant crops, build houses and, though it may seem whimsical, to make plans.

The official and optimistic explanation of French ambitions in Indo-China is heard from men like Commissioner General Maurice Dejean: it is that the French have held successfully this year and can win militarily in two more years; by that time the Vietnamese will have an army good enough so that the French can pull their own troops out, and Viet Nam will have sovereignty almost comparable to that of British Commonwealth nations. At Geneva, this explanation continues, the French only want to find out China's terms for sealing off its border; the French have no intention of capitulating. Implicit in this explanation is the continuance of a certain kind of controlled and limited war. Ask either Vietnamese or Frenchmen whether large-scale American aid would be welcomed, and the usual answer is that such aid would turn Indo-China into another Korea. They define Korea as a greatly stepped-up war, with vast devastation and loss of life, and in the end only stalemate again.

So the French fight a kind of war within their own means. They accept substantial American aid but insist on deciding what kind and determining its uses, and have an irritating way of making only minimal public acknowledgment of it. In an age of atom and jet. there is no thought of the atom bomb and not a jet in the country. Over the only existing live war against the Communists, the weapons are those of World War II: U.S.-made B-26s. Bearcats and Corsairs. Talk of American air armadas to a French air commander, and he answers that he hasn't the bases, hasn't the crews and hasn't the mechanics to service them. And he adds that, except for the occasional battle of position, like Dienbienphu, he hasn't the targets. The enemy is all around, but hardly to be seen.

Why do the French fight? Because they are doing a job for the free world? Perhaps--but this is not the dominant factor. Duty? For the mercenaries and for those who carry on without expectation of victory, yes. But the answer one hears most is pride. It hardly seems enough, except that this is a special kind of pride. It is compounded of qualities like the insistence of De Gaulle in World War II on parity with Roosevelt and Churchill; it recalls France's insistence on a special German occupation zone and its determination to be acknowledged as a world power--as one of the Big Three. Now that Germany is resurgent, that power and pride are endangered. If France were to withdraw from Indo-China, it would in effect contract itself to a nation with only an African empire, and even in Africa the nationalists would draw lessons from IndoChina's example. It is this pride that makes the French soldier a much-admired man out here, but this pride also gives to France's performance in Indo-China its own particular character. It is why no one, for example, talks of "turning the war over to the U.S.," for that, while not a disaster like a Communist victory, would also be an admission of France's failure as a world power. So France fights its precarious and parsimonious war, keeping it to a size that it can itself control.

THE PROBLEM "You Cannot Win Unpopular Wars"

The difficulty is that not all Frenchmen in Indo-China share Dejean's optimism about the outcome. Some give the impression of having thought out the relative benefits and harms of every degree of victory or defeat. Here is how many of them talk. Says a handsome officer with a good combat record: "Maybe the French did not do enough in time. But no longer can the French win militarily because French public opinion will not wait long enough for that. It would take until 1955 or 1956. If there is no solution at Geneva, French public opinion will want to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh. It is a tragedy because now, if they had a free choice, the Vietnamese would not vote for the Communists. But there is no patriotism in Viet Nam--it is not even a country. The intelligentsia have taken on the worst of the Western ways and have lost the best of their own civilization. Perhaps because I am French I say this. But colonialism is not important any more. Everyone understands that the French want to leave here. But there is no leadership in the Vietnamese people. And so there will be an appeasement. The Communists, if they are clever, will first have a non-Communist government like Burma, and the French will leave with honor. And what can the American Congress do about it? It will be angry and helpless. When the time is ripe, the Communists will have Indo-China."

Or take the French correspondent sitting in the press camp at Hanoi. He too is convinced that the war is not militarily winnable. Why do the French continue? "Because they cannot get out," he answers. "Two or three years ago, the French made a study of evacuation and decided it was not possible. That is why--I think I paraphrase the French Premier correctly--people used to say there were two solutions and now are unanimous there is only one: negotiation."

An American correspondent remarks: "But the military war can be won, the way any war can be won, if you are willing to pay the cost." A British correspondent interrupts: "The way you did in Korea?" The American does not answer and the French journalist continues: "You demand, everyone demands, history demands that we fight on out here. But there is something about Asian wars these days. They cannot be won in the old ways. You cannot win unpopular wars. We are up against something too big."

This attitude among men of good will is part of the scene of Indo-China. But it is the attitude of resignation, not of surrender. The soldiers fight on in this unnerving war knowing that the enemy may be all around them, and not sure that their friends are behind them. There remain, too, those Vietnamese nationalists who have chosen dangerously against Communism, and having chosen, deserve defending. So much remains to be done, but so much has already been done. And so much is lost if Indo-China is lost.

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