At Dien Bien Phu in 1954 the French committed fatal tactical stupidity; 14 years later the Americans made the same battlefield mistakes. Kanika Datta reviews two books on the wars in Indo-China
Had it not been for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Vietnam would have been dormant in recent memory and the appeal of these two books may have been limited to military history aficionados. But the publishers of both — one fiction, the other non- — have leveraged the contemporary link with mercenary zeal. Ted Morgan’s Valley of Death is subtitled: “The Tragedy of Dien Bien Phu that led America into the Vietnam War,” though the account stops a decade before a rigged incident prompted the US to commit troops there. The back cover of the review copy of Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn baldly reads: “Relevant: Given the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq”.
Neither book needs such hard sell. Written by, respectively, a former French conscript and former Marine who served in Vietnam, both are compelling accounts of lasting relevance. To read them in chronological order is to gain a contiguous view of Vietnam’s serial tragedies and the ineptitude of Cold War geopolitics.
Valley of Death details the six-week battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954 that finally forced the French to exit Indo-China. After World War II France, shamed by its defeat in 1940 and collaborationist political regime, sought to bolster its national ego by brutally regaining its Indo-China empire (ironically with British help). The country’s post-war government failed to gauge the surging popularity of the Vietminh liberation movement led by a wispy, Western-educated and highly intelligent peasant called Ho Chi Minh and the efficacy of its guerrilla-style warfare under the tutelage of Mao’s military advisors.
France was being cornered militarily and politically, a truth only its imperialist governors and “chateau generals” failed to see. Morgan describes the growing disconnect: “The Vietminh led a monastic life, while in Saigon, the glittering social scene was awash in champagne dinners, women with low necklines, golf and tennis, and the rumor mill. The Vietminh waged war. The French command deployed troops from their air-conditioned offices.”
Nothing demonstrated this disconnect better than the decision to take a stand at Dien Bien Phu, a plateau near the Chinese border. French commander Henri Navarre had selected it to cut Vietminh supply lines from China and as a diversionary tactic from the Haiphong delta, a critical French resupply base for the Vietminh-dominated north.
Navarre was neither a combat general nor had he served in Asia (he was, in fact, a career intelligence officer). Those deficiencies showed in his selection for battle exposed mountain tops that could only be re-supplied by air because the surrounding jungle was a Vietminh stronghold. Navarre was pitted against Vo Nyugen Giap, Ho’s close associate and bête noire of both the French and Americans. The French defeat was also written in the choice of commander at Dien Bien Phu — Christian de Castries, an aristocratic playboy whose incompetence was matched by the impeccability of his uniform even as the Vietminh closed in on his well-stocked underground bunker.
The contours of this history are not new but its readability lies in the wealth of research and in the telling. Morgan’s deftly juxtaposes the surreal political theatre in Europe and the USA with the savage desperation of the jungle battles, a reality he evokes by drawing, for the first time, on the letters, diaries and personal accounts of soldiers and commanders. He describes, for instance, how delegates to the Geneva conference on Korea and Indo-China enjoyed gorgeous weather, gourmet meals and unmatched views of Mont Blanc even as Dien Bien Phu increasingly resembled “a battleground from the Napoleonic wars”.
For Indian readers the point of interest is the British response. US President Eisenhower was caught between the options of intervening in a colonial war as the French were pressing him to (American pilots flew re-supply aircraft to Dien Bien Phu on a commercial basis) and subscribing to the infamous “domino theory” propounded by the hawks in administration. Viscerally averse to intervention after the Korean stalemate, Eisenhower’s solution was to gain international consensus. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden, however, was unwilling to play poodle — for fear of displeasing Nehru. “It was essential,” he wrote, “not to alienate India by our actions in a part of the world which concern her closely.”
Matterhorn proves the well-worn adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. It is set 14 years after Dien Bien Phu. But this time it’s the American marines that are fighting to defend a plateau, near the demilitarised zone separating North and South Vietnam, supplied only by air and surrounded by dense jungle infested with the North Vietnamese Army…
If Valley of Death is underpinned by academics, Matterhorn is all atmospherics, a literary combination of Platoon and the bleakly funny television series M*A*S*H.
It took 30 years in the writing by Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar who left Oxford to fight in Vietnam.
This is the story of Waino Mellas who starts out as a platoon commander in a Marine division. Mellas is a fresh-faced high-school graduate who enlisted in the initial flush of idealism and inexorably found himself “a real Marine officer leading a real Marine rifle platoon and scared nearly witless”. This is a ground-up view of the Vietnam War, the one where the grunts bear the brunt of the bad decisions by cynically ambitious generals in a war in which everyone has forgotten why they’re fighting. The novel unfolds around Mellas’s steady disillusionment as he moves up the ranks vacated by officers lost in battle.
Anyone who has read Michael Herr’s Dispatches will know that all of this is received wisdom about Vietnam. But the reason this late offering remains gripping and authentic reading despite a loosely woven plotline is Marlantes’s spare shorthand prose (for which a glossary is thoughtfully provided), the taut, black humour and, refreshingly, the absence of mawkish sentiment.
His account of a patrol report in which one gook — slang for NVA regulars — was probably killed (there was no body to prove this) highlights a bizarre, Dilbertian aspect of the war. “So one probable became a fact.... The commander of the artillery battery, however, claimed it for his unit. The records had to show two dead NVA. So they did. But at regiment it looked odd — two kills and no probables. So a probable got added….”
As the report moved up the chain, infantry and artillery commanders added their own kills and probables to pad their performance. So, by the time the report reached Saigon, the kill rate had swelled miraculously. “Now it looked right. Ten dead NVA and no one hurt on our side. A pretty good day’s work.”
Matterhorn is an important addition to Vietnam literature because it presents the dehumanising minutiae of everyday warfare against the wider sweep of political and social change that was convulsing America in the sixties. Bravo Company is a microcosm of that transition, with its Black Power brotherhoods, the casual racism and the social tensions between hard-scrabble small town America and the East Coast elite. It says much for Marlantes’s slow-burning talent that he has managed to turn out a classic in a crowded field.
VALLEY OF DEATH
THE TRAGEDY AT DIEN BIEN PHU THAT LED AMERICA INTO THE VIETNAM WAR
Author: Ted Morgan
Publisher: Random House
Pages: xxvi + 726
Price: $35
MATTERHORN
Author: Karl Marlantes
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Pages: viii + 600
Price: £12.99
