Ted Morgan, Valley of Death - The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu that led America into the Vietnam War Random House, New York, 2010 ISBN 978-1-4000-6664-3 Page 16 Vietnam was a land of villages, whose fields, irrigated by the nourishing silt of the deltas, produced two rice crops a year, after labour-intensive planting and harvesting. The iconic scene: a peasant wearing his conical hat, bent over a wooden plough pulled by a water buffalo. Each village, surrounded by a bamboo wall, was a self-contained entity, with its mutual-aid society for matters such as funerals, as well as craft guilds and clubs. The colonial system created two unequal societies with a chronic inability to understand each other. The 50,000 French saw all that they had done for the locals - the number of educated Annamites, the roads and harbors that brought them so many fine French products. The 23,000,000 Vietnamese saw what colonization had done to them - the high rate of illiteracy and the forced labor, known as corvées, to build and repair the roads "for their own good". The government monopoly that taxed salt, one of the few staples the villages could not produce, made it ten times as expensive as it would have been on the free market. The rise of moneylenders and middlemen in rice sales led to foreclosures and a decline in status when landowners became tenant farmers. According to a century-old Vietnamese fable, the Frenchman was a blood-sucking leech. Zitat Ende Das Werk ist eine exzellente und erst noch spannende Darstellung der neueren Geschichte "Indochinas" und zeigt mit klaren Worten auf, wie die Amerikaner durch die gewohnt größenwahnsinnigen und unfähigen Gallier - deren unsägliches Vichy-Regime hier für einmal aus der richtigen Sicht beleuchtet wird! - und ihr Totalversagen in Dien Bien Phu immer weiter in Vietnam verwickelt wurden. The author is a Pulitzer-Price-winning investigative journalist