Foreign News: INDO-CHINA A War of Gallantry & Despair

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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"