The Last Valley Quotes

“For 56 days they had given everything, endured everything; they had achieved the impossible, not once but again and again. They deserved to win; and if they were now being robbed of victory, then the real thieves weren't the People's Army, the 'rats of the Nam Youm', or anyone else in the filth of this last valley, but men who slept between clean sheets far away.”
― Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

“Unlike the huge majority of the current generation in the West, the men on both sides at Dien Bien Phu did not live at a time or in places where they enjoyed the luxury of disregarding [that war is what human beings do]; and we, who are lifelong civilians, have not earned the right to sit in judgement over them.”
― Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

“It is one of the central human tragedies that war is not an aberration-it is what human beings do.”
― Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam

“Shortly before midnight General de Castries’ situation report to FTNV stressed the lack of reserves, the terrible fatigue of all his units, and his absolute need for a complete and solid battalion to be parachuted on the following night if GONO was to survive. By dawn the night would have cost him 331 men killed and missing and 168 wounded – the equivalent of a battalion.”
― Martin Windrow, The Last Valley: Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam