Dien Bien Phu Vietnam

Here in remotest Vietnam, amid the ghosts of a defeated French army, Indochina's most famous battlefield sits in a jungled mountain valley, largely forgotten by all but historians and a handful of Vietnamese visitors. Although the town keeps waiting for tourists, few ever come, and the battlefield, as pristine as it is ignored, may not be able to hold out much longer against a threat that seems unusual in such a far-off place--urban encroachment.

Allen L. Pope risked life and limb to fly CIA supply missions in 1954 to besieged French forces in what is now Vietnam. But the thing he recounts most vividly is not the danger he faced. It's the bravery of the French troops. "They never raised the white flag," he says. "There were men without hands, men without legs, men without feet, men that were blinded. They were catching hell." They caught it at Dien Bien Phu, a cluster of villages in a valley ringed by mountains near the Laotian border.

Allen L. Pope risked life and limb to fly CIA supply missions in 1954 to besieged French forces in what is now Vietnam. But the thing he recounts most vividly is not the danger he faced. It's the bravery of the French troops. "They never raised the white flag," he says. "There were men without hands, men without legs, men without feet, men that were blinded. They were catching hell." They caught it at Dien Bien Phu, a cluster of villages in a valley ringed by mountains near the Laotian border.

Here in remotest Vietnam, amid the ghosts of a defeated French army, Indochina's most famous battlefield sits in a jungled mountain valley, largely forgotten by all but historians and a handful of Vietnamese visitors. Although the town keeps waiting for tourists, few ever come, and the battlefield, as pristine as it is ignored, may not be able to hold out much longer against a threat that seems unusual in such a far-off place--urban encroachment.

John roderick, an Associated Press correspondent who won acclaim for his reports on Mao Tse-tung and other communist guerrilla leaders while living with them in their cave headquarters in the mid-1940s, has died. He was 93. Roderick died March 11 at his home in Honolulu after a struggle with heart problems and pneumonia, friends and family said.