Word: dienes
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...there were indications that the Chinese were encountering tougher terrain and tougher resistance than they had perhaps expected. Presumably, they had the might and numbers to penetrate as far as they chose. But could they extricate themselves from the historic quicksand with similar ease? The gravestones at Dien Bien Phu. The carcasses of Marine helicopters near Danang. Other place names, other landmarks testify to the tragic fortunes of outsiders who visited Viet Nam in the past and later wished they had never come. In meting out their "lesson," the Chinese?like the French and Americans before them?could find Viet...
...Colonel Hakim Félix Ellellou, Kush's Muslim-Marxist President, such imports are ideological and theological blasphemies. Yet Ellellou himself has had his head turned by the West. At 17, he left his native village to join the French colo nial army. He served in Indochina before Dien Bien Phu and spent the middle '50s studying liberal arts in Wisconsin. Back home, married to a white college sweet heart, Ellelloū rose through the ranks under a French-puppet king and then emerged as the leader of the coup that put him in power...
...perched atop a 1,000-ft. crag. Half a century later, another Foreign Legion battalion defeated 10,000 devil-worshiping Dahomey troops, including units of ferocious, bare-breasted women who shot, knifed, bayoneted and bit off the noses of the legionnaires. Even in France's humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the legionnaires electrified their adopted country by their heroism in the face of overwhelming enemy forces...
Algeria was the last colonial war, although, as Author Horne observes, the situation that created it has certain parallels to Rhodesia and South Africa. Embittered by its recent defeat at Dien Bien Phu, the French army was determined not to let it happen in Algeria, and twice the war was nearly won. In 1957 the feared paratroopers of General Jacques Massu, using torture on a scale that shocked and sickened Frenchmen, destroyed the F.L.N. underground network during the Battle of Algiers. Two years later, punishing French raids shattered the morale of starving, undersupplied F.L.N. units in rural strongholds...
...many peasants did the Viet Minh mobilize to help bring dismantled heavy artillery, piece-by-piece, over mountains for the final siege on the French at Dien Bien...