Articles > Echoes of Glory

The boom of disco music creeping slowly up the main road may lead you to expect a local wideboy edging towards you in his sports car. More likely it will be a small wooden cart. A mobile junkstore.

About the size of a shopping trolley, the carts are laden with cheap plastic toys, trinkets and cigarette lighters. Set at the front are Japanese boomboxes, doubling as both advertising devices and traffic horns. The ensembles are trundled along by bent and aging men, plying their trade on the streets of Dien Bien Phu.

Dien Bien Phu is to Vietnam what Waterloo is to England or Gettysburg to America. And May 2004 marked the 50th anniversary of a battle royale that saw the collapse of French colonial rule and ushered in the beginning of the disastrous 'American War' (as it is known to the Vietnamese).

With their outposts of empire in disarray after WWII and fearing incursions of Viet Minh guerrillas via Laos, the French chose Dien Bien Phu to build a key strategic stronghold. It was to be the first line of defence against the communist forces threatening their rule of Indochina. But accustomed to short, sharp hit-and-run tactics, France fatally underestimated the will of her enemy.

On 13 March 1954, the Viet Minh attacked en masse. While the colonial power parachuted in Foreign Legion reinforcements, hordes of irregulars in the steep surrounding hills pounded them with artillery, meanwhile tunnelling deep beneath the French lines.

Faced with Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap's relentless tactics and human wave assaults, the aristocratic French commander, Colonel Christian de Castries, finally surrendered on 7 May. The siege had cost 8,000 Vietnamese and 2,300 French lives. Thousands more died in Vietnamese prison camps. Back in France, public opinion on the war in Indochina baulked: it was the beginning of the end of the French empire.

Set close to the Lao border among the mountains, today the settlement is readily accessible to westerners only by a short flight from Hanoi. Disembarking from the modern Vietnam Airlines Airbus at Dien Bien Phu's tiny airport, the visitor must take an uncomfortable motorbike ride to the town centre. The heat is somehow drier and less humid that the rest of Vietnam, but this will not stop the sticky spread of sweat throughout your clothing. Many more wheelbarrow-borne tat stalls, pretty much unique to the wild north west of Vietnam, can be found wheeling around Dien Bien Phu, now the provincial capital. Among the soulless new administrative buildings and wide dusty boulevards, they add to the town's sense of purposelessness, of half-hearted modernity limply confronting the past.

There have been attempts to revitalise the area by the introduction of hundreds of Dao tribespeople, the women resplendent in their colourful red white and blue clothing and elaborate beehive hairstyles. Yet despite this development, compared to the high-octane bustle of Hanoi and Saigon, Dien Bien Phu has the aura of a ghost town.

A wander along the main road inevitably brings you to the war cemetery. Rows of deep grey tombstones, blank but for the communist star (perhaps nine in 10 graves are unnamed) radiate outwards from the main monument, a curious blend of oriental pagoda and Stalinist edifice.

Handfuls of middle aged men, perhaps the sons of the fallen, kneel before the graveyard's understated shrine and light fragrant incense sticks, thousands more of which are clustered in the birdtable-like burner stands. The flat pavilion on the other side of the cemetery wall doubles as a training area for aspiring scooter drivers.

Across the street is a spartan museum. As with many public buildings in Vietnam, on entering it you are greeted by a gilded statue of the man himself, Ho Chi Minh. On display are some of the wooden blocks and bars the Viet Minh used to manhandle heavy artillery guns up seemingly impossible gradients in the jungle, or the very rifles that apparently shot down certain French resupply aircraft.

Outside, a display of Vietnamese military hardware looked like it may have been cleaned and painted some time in the last decade, perhaps touched up a little for the 50th anniversary celebrations. Meanwhile, the French equipment display is clearly suffering, one jeep rotted down to a mere chassis.

While in 1954 Dien Bien Phu was merely a village with a French garrison, its former status is concealed by the fact that a town has been built on top. Take a right just off the main drag however, and you can still find evidence of what happened here. Marked by a stylised stone plaque, the visitor can find for example the place where de Castries' second in command, artillery officer Colonel Charles Pirot, blew his brains out in despair.

The bunker is now little more than a pit, used on occasion as a trash can for cigarette packets and drinks cartons. Across the road stands a market where tribeswomen sit in rows and hide their faces as you walk past. More such relics are dotted around the rice-paddied plain. Further up the road, a burnt out and rusted tank sits incongruously in a local's back yard. In a field of flowers cultivated by women wearing the region's ubiquitous conical hats, a solitary howitzer bakes in the sun. The scene is oddly reminiscent of Flanders or the Somme.

Platoons of disinterested cows saunter around further gun emplacements, once shored up with concrete blocks to preserve the relics but now fallen into neglect. Other weapons of war lie broken and decaying around the rice-paddied countryside, part of life for the local people who simply farm their land around them. Hill A1, the scene of some of the bloodiest fighting, stands closer to the centre, many of its reminders of the battle cut off behind an overgrown and impenetrable barbed wire fence. There is some attempt to preserve Dien Bien Phu's historical heritage, for example a recreation of the ill-lit and sweltering bunker in which de Castries planned and lost his battle. Nearby, the French memorial stands clean and white in a well-tended ornamental rock garden. Most of the major sites are indicated by the pinkish sandstone plaques erected by the civic authorities. But elsewhere, the decay continues.

And, for a town with such pilgrimage potential, there is little even for the Vietnamese themselves. No tourist office, no army of freelance tour guides offering their services as one finds elsewhere in the country. Unlike the Vietnam backpacker trail, there's almost no one who speaks English and few obvious venues to eat other than the sparse street cafes.

It was 50 years ago that Dien Bien Phu saw the end of an ill-judged and poorly-executed campaign against a population that was simply tired of foreign occupation. A moment that ultimately triggered the equally bloody and futile American campaign of the '60s and '70s. Half a century on, the politicians and generals of today would do well to cast their eyes back to the scene of Dien Bien Phu.

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