Before the Attack
AT the military airport at Hanoi at 7 ,a.m. to wait for a plane on the shuttle service to Dien Bien Phu, the great entrenched camp on the Laos border, which is meant to guard the road to Luang Prabang, the capital of Laos. There is a daily fog over the camp which lies in a plain surrounded by Viet-held mountains. At 11 a.m. we got away. Among the passengers two photographers in camouflaged uniforms. They seem to me comparable to those men who go hunting big game with cameras alone. attack. I will not have Na-Sam mentioned in the mess." His chief of staff hastily asked me if I had seen Claude.l's Christophe Colonzbe when I was last in Paris.
Before dark fell the mortars tried, out their range. The evening star came out to the noise of the shells. I had a sense of unreality. There the Viet Minh were, able to observe the arrival of every plane, every movement in the camp from the encircling hills. They knew our strength better than we knew theirs. We were like actors in an arena.
The French had so planned their defences that if the Viet attacked—and the most likely hours were between four and ten in the morning when the heavy morning fog began to lift —they would have_ to pass down between three small fortified hills that stood like sentries at the entrance to the plain. They would be enfiladed here, they would be enfiladed there, but I just couldn't believe that anything was even going to happen.
Previous page
