Ninety-year-old French veteran William Schilardi surveys the landscape from the hill where he once fought after a steep climb up a muddy path through heavy rain in Vietnam’s Dien Bien Phu.
“Look at the beautiful view… But there are corpses here,” he said, looking down at the old French trenches still visible beside him.
Three French war veterans returned to the site of the bloody conflict ahead of Tuesday’s 70th anniversary of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which unfolded over weeks in 1954 and ultimately brought an end to the French empire in Indochina.
Alongside them at the commemorations on May 7 will be France’s Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu, marking the first time that Vietnam has invited a government minister from the former colonial power to attend official celebrations.
French Secretary of State for Veterans and Remembrance Patricia Miralles will also attend.
The visit brought back both joyful and difficult memories for Schilardi, Jean-Yves Guinard and Andre Mayer.
“We’ve remained very attached to this country,” 92-year-old Guinard told AFP. “Because it’s a country where the people are clever, brave and hard-working.”
“This does not mean we forget. I come in the name of my fallen comrades.”
The former colonel insisted on walking to the top of Him Lam hill — known as Beatrice Hill by the French — on Monday despite the downpour that turned the path slippery.
Schilardi recalled the knife and bayonet fights in the trenches dug across the hill, stretching almost from top to bottom.
The walk up the hill had brought back memories and intense flashbacks, he said.
“In the trenches, I saw corpses… I can’t tell you more”, he said, his throat tightening with emotion.
Both men were helped up the hill by Vietnamese soldiers, who held their arms firmly.
‘The sobs, the cries’
Beatrice Hill — each French strongpoint in Dien Bien Phu bore a female first name — fell during the first hours of the Viet Minh assault on the mountain outpost in Vietnam’s northwest, near the Laos border, launched on March 13, 1954.
The colonial forces quickly realised they had underestimated the firepower of their enemies: Viet Minh forces had lugged cannon in pieces through hundreds of kilometres of jungle and across mountains.
The 56 days of shelling and direct clashes left 13,000 dead or missing on both sides. More than 3,000 of them were soldiers of different nationalities fighting under the French flag.
“This atmosphere of humidity and rain had deeply penetrated us” by the time of France’s surrender, Schilardi recalled.
He said he could hear “the sobs, the cries” of the battle as he climbed the hill.
Almost 70 percent of the approximately 10,000 men taken prisoner when the French camp fell died as they were marched away from Dien Bien Phu or placed in detention camps.
‘Remarkable welcome’
Residents and tourists crowded around the three veterans pushed in wheelchairs outside the Dien Bien Phu Victory Museum in the centre of the city.
A Vietnamese family dressed in the yellow and red of their country’s flag posed for a smiling selfie with Guinard.
“The welcome is remarkable!” Guinard told AFP.
Le Tien Bo, a 64-year-old Vietnamese former soldier, pushed through the crowd to shake hands with one of the veterans.
“It’s a sign of friendship. They were on the opposite side against us, but it was during war. Today, they are welcome in Vietnam,” he said.
Schilardi and Guinard said they looked forward to reconciliation with a country they still hold in their hearts.
Both worked in organisations that tried to build bridges between the youth of the two nations after the war.
But it was impossible for them to forget those who fell at Dien Bien Phu.
“It has taken me my whole life to understand what I lived through,” said Schilardi.
“It was hell.”
