Word: bien
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...what she calls "real" apple cider and dishes her sister-in-law prepares with rabbit and lamb. Do the Soltners ever argue about the relative superiority of their regional kitchens? "That was settled long ago. We decided that the best food is Alsatian," says the husband. Soltner is "bien attache," say relatives, well attached to family, food, and language. "He has never lost this sense of his roots," brother-in-law Pierre notes...
General Giap, 72, one of the most successful military tacticians of the past 40 years, orchestrated the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Tet in 1968 and the conquest of the South. But he was replaced as Defense Minister in 1980 and dropped from the Politburo in 1982, possibly because he was too outspokenly pro-Soviet. That was heresy to Hanoi's xenophobic leaders, despite their alliance with Moscow. Giap remains on the party's Central Committee, however, and last May met with reporters at the 30th anniversary of Dien Bien...
...decades of American engagement in Indochina as a litany of "too little, too late." He wishes Truman had forced the French to bring about an independent, non-Communist state. That having failed, he believes President Eisenhower ought to have sent in air support to relieve the French at Dien Bien Phu; as Ike's Vice President, Nixon says, he counseled that "our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden." He condemns President Kennedy for the overthrow of Diem, which he argues led to political instability from which South Viet...
...visit by foreign journalists, Hanoi brings out several military heroes of the Dien Bien Phu siege. Lieut. Colonel Van Luyen, 52, who commanded an artillery unit, shows the newsmen the refurbished French command bunker where the Viet Minh proclaimed their victory by waving a red Vietnamese flag from its corrugated and sandbagged rooftop. Farther out lie two of the eight major French perimeter command posts, code-named Beatrice and Eliane by the garrison commander, General Christian de Castries. After three decades, U.S.-made artillery, including 155-mm and 105-mm howitzers, which were supplied to the French by Washington...
...press conference in Hanoi, the legendary General Giap, a smiling but still tough, grand fatherly figure who engineered the victory, attributes the Vietnamese military triumph to "a succession of surprises" that forced General Henri Navarre, the French commander in chief in Indochina, to make a stand at Dien Bien Phu. "Why were we successful?" he asks. "President Ho Chi Minh found a path: the combination of the struggle for national independence and the struggle for socialism." In a nearby sugar-cane field, close to where hundreds of French soldiers are said to be buried, the Vietnamese are erecting a modest...