"Too soon" for U.S. war memorial in Vietnam
DIEN BIEN PHU - Towering over this former French colonial outpost is Vietnam's biggest war memorial, honouring those who fell in the country's first war of liberation. Soaring 16 metres high and weighing 220 tonnes, it is worth bearing in mind as communist Vietnam this month celebrates the 30th anniversary of victory in its later conflict with the United States and its allies.
While April will resonate with American-era names like "Khe Sanh" and "Tet Offensive", for most Vietnamese, even those born after 1975, it is the May 1954 defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu that is buried deepest in their souls. "It was a victory for colonised countries all over the world," said General Vo Nguyen Giap, the 94-year-old military chief whose tactics subdued first the French, then the Americans who followed them.
French tourist Laurent Christophe from Nice, who was not yet born when the battle took place, says the fall of Dien Bien Phu was the moment when France realised it was not a "king." "We realised we were the same as everyone else. It taught us humility."
The defeat of a major European power by communists and nationalists in a conventional military encounter stunned the world, convinced France to pull out of Indochina and eventually led to America's own Vietnam quagmire. Looking back on Dien Bien Phu through the city's official displays of the battle is to enter a time warp and realise how differently the Vietnamese viewed their successive wars with the French and the Americans. The old photographs and Madame Tussaud-like tableaux of General Giap's headquarters in the hills outside Dien Bien Phu could be relics from World War One, let alone World War Two.
There were atrocities in the 1950s to rival any that the Vietnamese claim against the Americans but here the displays, unlike those in southern Vietnam where the Americans fought, are more about Vietnamese victory than suffering and French defeat.
At the Dien Bien Phu museum, there is the transcript of General Giap's message to the French military saying he had heard they were sending many troops and planes to what was then just a village near the Laotian border. "I welcome you," he wrote in a touch of humour, or maybe even chivalry, rarely seen in the conflict with the Americans. There are no displays in Dien Bien Phu to match the gruesome sights at remembrances of American war horrors -- B-52 bombings, napalm and Agent Orange -- in the south of the country.
Too soon for U.S. momument
Perhaps most surprising of all, just a kilometre (a few hundred yards) from the bunker where French General Christian de Castries surrendered on May 7 after a siege of several months, is a piece of soil that will be forever France. Unmarked from the outside, enclosed by a whitewashed wall, stands a memorial dedicated to the French soldiers who died at Dien Bien Phu.
Inaugurated in 1994, on the 40th anniversary of the battle, it is a graceful and well-tended site where French survivors of the battle and French tourists sprinkle soil they have brought from their homeland. I ask Phung Van Khau, 73, who fought at Dien Bien Phu and was twice wounded there, if he could ever envisage a similar monument to U.S. soldiers. "Not yet," he says. "It is too soon."
"But maybe, in the future, if the Americans have a plan for a monument then I think the government and Vietnamese people would one day consider it. But his comrade at Dien Bien Phu, Pham Phu Bang, who went on to fight the Americans in the south from 1966 to 1968 in Vung Tau province outside Saigon, an area mainly controlled by Australian troops, disagrees. With the impish smile of an old soldier who has seen most of the good and bad things in life, Pham says his reasons are solely pragmatic.
"The Americans would want to build a bigger monument than the French," he says. "And the Australians would want a monument. And what about the Chinese and Russians who fought with us?" So there'll be no "Big Kangaroo" monument in Vung Tau then, I say. Pham laughs uproariously.
By Brian Williams - Reuters - April 15, 2005
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