Covert U.S. Aviators to Get French Award

[Rose Siding]

WASHINGTON -- Allen L. Pope risked life and limb to fly CIA supply missions in 1954 to besieged French forces in what is now Vietnam. But the thing he recounts most vividly is not the danger he faced. It's the bravery of the French troops.

"They never raised the white flag," he says. "There were men without hands, men without legs, men without feet, men that were blinded. They were catching hell."

They caught it at Dien Bien Phu, a cluster of villages in a valley ringed by mountains near the Laotian border. Communist rebels on higher ground pummeled the French with artillery in an epic battle that marked the end of French colonial rule in Indochina and foreshadowed the U.S. experience in Vietnam.

Next week, nearly 51 years after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the seven surviving American pilots who braved those perilous skies -- but later were essentially disowned by the CIA -- will be awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, or Legion of Honor, France's highest award for service....MORE....

http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-cia-pilots,0,159020.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[Catch22Dem]

1. Wow, incredible.

Read more about Dien Bien Phu if you haven't already. An incredible story to be told there. THanks for sharing this.

[Johnyawl]

4. read "Hell In A Very Small Place"...

...by Bernard Fall. Excellent book on the subject. I read it while in the Marines, right after my tour in Vietnam. It broke my heart. A colossal waste of good men by political leaders living in the past.

Bernard Fall was killed in 1967 in Vietnam while covering the Marines.

[Catch22Dem]

5. Hey thanks

I'll look it up now.

[Catch22Dem]

6. Hey Johnny, you might like this too...

The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien

"They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing--these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight. They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767902890/qid=1108517511/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/102-6390836-7142556

[Kagemusha]

2. Some believe there were no brave French troops ever.

Just a silly misreading of history. France had lots of brave people, who charged machineguns. Bad leadership does bad things to brave people.

[Benhurst]

3. Yes, bad leadership does do bad things to brave people, as

I fear we are beginning to discover as a nation.

[hack89]

7. Some at Dien Bien Phu were German SS veterans

serving in the Foreign Legion

[Johnyawl]

8. There were also Algerians, and Africans..

...colonial troops from France's other colonies.