4, the French had all but lost the struggle for Indochina. In retrospect, that seems clear now. But they did not see it that way at the time, and the war would go on, bloodily, for the next forty-five months. Through that time they would try to bring about the kind of set-piece battle in which Western armies excelled, the conventional stand-up slugfest in the open— one, they hoped, that would prove decisive (which battles rarely are). It became the obsession of each successive commander in chief. In the spring of 1954, they would achieve their wish in a mountain-ringed valley whose Vietnamese name, Dien Bien Phu, might be translated as “Seat of the Border County Administration.” But by that time, Giap was pursuing the same aim. As Douglas Porch has written, “perhaps the greatest strength possessed by the Viet Minh was patience.” Giap, ever the model Communist military leader, followed Mao Tse-tung's three-step prescription for victory in revolutionary warfare, and in the process added some elaborations of his own.
