France unveiled its own Vietnam wall Thursday before a small crowd of gray-haired veterans, many still bitter over a war that divided the French and brought down their colonial empire.
Under a bleak drizzle, a color guard officer barked, "To our dead," and old men wept at the slow drumroll, the bugle call and a burst of the stirring French anthem, "La Marseillaise."The French dead numbered 55,000, nearly as many as the Americans' 58,000-toll in Vietnam for a country one-fifth as populous as the United States. Their eight-year war officially began 50 years ago on Thursday.
Unlike the sweeping monument in Washington, France's Memorial to Indochinese Wars is a modest open-air concrete pantheon nestled among pines and olive trees at Frejus, a Mediterranean port of tourist hotels and Roman ruins near the port of Toulon.
One wall carries nearly 35,000 names in black on stone under Plexiglas. The remains of 17,250 other soldiers are in adjacent vaults.
Some names are of familiar French nobility, including the sons of two field marshals. The war took 1,300 young lieutenants France needed to rebuild an army left bleeding from World War II.
But many more are exotic. Long columns of Mohammeds and Ngu-yens recall the price that colonial troops paid in defending the empire. The occasional Gunter brings to mind the French Foreign Legion.
"All those who died in Indochina for the glory of France must have their day, and that day has come," said Pierre Pasquini, minister of veterans affairs, the only government official to speak.
"It is a little late, don't you think?" observed Rene Desveaud, 69, with thick glasses and a jaunty red paratrooper beret. "No one cared about us all these years. We were totally forgotten."
Desveaud remembers coming home to hostility much like what Americans faced later. Leftist organizations brought people into the street to chant insults.
"They even tried to block the ships from bringing our wounded into Marseille," he said. "It made you sick at heart."
With Germany hardly defeated, France went back to war to stop Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh guerrillas from taking Indochina out of the empire.
By the time Dien Bien Phu fell in May 1954 with the loss of 1,800 defenders' lives, the war cost France $2.7 billion. It consumed 10 percent of the national budget each year.
At home, debate was fierce as reports came back of French torture and brutality in what writer Lucien Bodard called "the quicksand war."
Moroccan units bore much of the brunt at Dien Bien Phu, and ripples were felt throughout the empire. Soon, a more bitter war broke out in Algeria. In 1960, French African colonies were freed.
When President John F. Kennedy's attention drifted toward Vietnam, Gen. Charles de Gaulle pleaded with him to avoid war in Southeast Asia. France had learned the hard way.