Volume 6, Number 4 · March 17, 1966
Vietnam: The Undiscovered Country
By Bernard B. Fall
Les Americaines face an Vietcong
by Fernand Gigon
Paris, Flammarion
Un million de dollars le Viet: la seconde guerre d'Indochine
by Jean Lartéguy
Paris, Raoul Solar
The best and most balanced reporting on Vietnam today is written by French-speaking writers. This is not because Swiss or French observers have better official sources of information than their American colleagues: They emphatically do not, since there are many briefings in Saigon 'For American Eyes Only.' But there are still great numbers of Vietnamese for whom French is a second language, particularly the mountain tribesmen (the so-called Montagnards)—and the Vietcong. Predictably, therefore, books which derive from direct contact with the French-speaking Vietnamese are likely to have a degree of authority and insight which is often quite lacking in much American reporting. To judge by the coverage of the American popular press and television, the second Indo-China War seems as two-dimensional as the wars between the Normans and the English represented on the Bayeux Tapestries. We are shown armadas of flitting helicopters and armored vehicles and ships maneuvering heroically in obscure military actions. If not the Bayeux Tapestries, then it is a spectacle staged by Darryl F. Zanuck. The enemy soldiers, on the other hand, are either invisible—shadows on an infra-red sniper-scope, blips on an anti-personnel radar screen—or they are seen as piles of corpses whose small size and unmilitary clothing make them indistinguishable from the surrounding civilian population.
Review, 2345 words
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