Hero's Return

INDOCHINA

The Viet Minh Communists delayed several times--once, they said, because rain had hampered their transport. Then, some hours after last week's deadline for exchanging prisoners was past, they handed over their highest-ranking captive: Brigadier General Christian de Castries, 52, the dauntless but defeated commander of Dienbienphu, who had spent four months in Red hands. He seemed years older, much thinner, and his hair was greyer. He refused a stretcher. He admitted that he was not in good shape, but said he was a hard man, that he would be all right after a glass of wine and a few days of rest.

Since he had had almost nothing to eat except rice during his imprisonment, he called for a dish of French fries and downed them ravenously. He cabled his blonde wife Jacqueline, who expected him in Paris in a few days: FREED TODAY, RETURNING TO HANOI. PASSIONATELY, CHRISTIAN.

Only a naval officer and an army doctor met him at Viettri, the exchange point near the Red River. "Where is my staff?" said Christian de Castries. The unpleasant fact was that, in the bitterness of defeat, some senior French officers had refused to go to Viettri on the ground that De Castries' defense tactics at Dienbienphu had been faulty and that he was partly responsible for the fall of the fortress. To reporters, De Castries said that he had never run up a white flag, even when Dienbienphu was overrun. After his capture, he had no water during the first four days and was kept in isolation, guarded by four Viet Minh soldiers. Eventually he was taken before General Vo Nguyen Giap, the crafty Viet Minh commander, but would not reveal what they talked about.

The general spent his first night of freedom on a U.S. landing craft moored in the Red River. He stripped off his drab prison clothes, threw them into the water, donned a fresh uniform with the jaunty red cap of the Moroccan spahis. Next day he sailed to Hanoi and was greeted on the dock by General Rene Cogny, wartime commander in the northern theater, who is still in command pending the Communist takeover. As he embraced Cogny, De Castries burst into tears. "Excuse me," he said. "It's foolish, but I cannot control my emotion." Then Cogny, also visibly moved, whisked the returned hero off to the villa that De Castries had lived in before he went to Dienbienphu.

The Communists returned some 15,000 prisoners; the French sent 63,000 Viet Minh captives back to Communism. This left unknown the fate of about 25,000 French Union troops, including 20,000 Vietnamese, and the Communists showed no sign of accounting for them. Among those freed by the Reds were five U.S. Air Force technicians, captured while absent without leave and swimming at a beach.

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