Zampano's ------> French Foreign Legion

[Magda]

These are the Vietnamese photographers.
The Link leads to the website The Digital Journalist, an incredible source of information (look also here) for those interested in the war aspect of House of Leaves and in the connection between war and photography.

The linked webpage shows a page of the book Horst Faas & Tim Page: Requiem. By the photographers who died in Vietnam and Indochina, 1997. Horst Faas worked as leader of the Associated Press bureau in Saigon 1963 - 1974. He is responsible for that the famous foto of the naked girl Kim Phuk Phan Thi who became an icon of the Vietnam war could be published. The potographer Nik Út, who shot the foto, won the Pulitzer price for it.

[heartbreak]

1944 Warsaw 23
1954 Dien Bien Phu 37
1964 Vietnam 23

[The Coma-Man]

Could we assume that Zampano = Navi?

Famed War photographer, who lost the edge after comming home and was almost lost in a big, black hole?

[heartbreak]

I'm not sure that's what we want to conclude.

[LJonesy]

Why, HB?

[heartbreak]

Because I think they are similar not equal. I know splitting hairs right. Sorry.

[heartbreak]

Originally Posted by p. xxii

... Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique, Eliane, Isabelle and
Claudine.

To strengthen this connection. The names are listed in the same order that the forts were attacked in.

Beatrice- March 13th
Gabrielle- March 14th
Anne-Marie- March 17th
Dominique- March 30th
Eliane- March 30th
Isabelle- March 30th
Claudine- March 30th (I think, not 100% sure on Claudine.)

[Short_Fuse]

So they all take place in the 3rd month of a 12 month year?

I smell a fraction...

[Ellimist]

Haha.

[Magda]

Because of a tv feature I was curious and wondered whether also French citizens can serve in the French Foreign Legion. I checked their website and it says, yes, they can. But most of them are not, and in Dien Bien Phu the majority of the FL-soldiers were in fact Germans. But, as I read now, in Dien Bien Phu were some "Belgians" (due to the rules of the nom de guerrre in fact French) who by joining the FL could could redeem themselves (is that correct English?) after they were volonteers of the Charlemagne Regiment or other collaborators of the Germans in WWII. If Zampanó was a FL-soldier he had in any case a nom de guerre because every légionnaire has one. Now is that important for his identity? I don't know, because this is a novel and we don't know how much research went into this detail. I think of Zampanò as a French for some reasons, not only because of La Feuille on page 557. The French side soldiers involved in the hell of Dien Bien Phu were not only members of the FL of course. There were other batallions too, especially the paratroopers, French citizens.

Whenever I read the poem That Place on page 558 I must think of an abandoned battlefield. The French war prisoners of Dien Bien Phu suffered another hell in the Vietnamese war camps and they could not escape, not because of the strict guard or things like that but because of the hostile surroundings.

[heartbreak]

So if Zampano was at Dien Bien Phu and if he is French then its possible he spent time as a prisoner in one of those war camps. Very interesting. Is there more information on what the camps were like?

[Magda]

Here.
PS.: I had the sound off, when I entered the site first. Why do they have this musical kitsch in the background?

[Norkhat]

My grand father, François Bernot, was a very young french paratrooper at Dien Ben Phu,
this is why, reading HoL, I had stranges memories echoing the names Beatrice, Anne-Marie and Isabelle. I had seen maps, charts, heard tales when I was a child.


Out of the 11 271 prisoners made after the battle of Dien Ben Phy, 70% died in captivity. It tells you a lot on the conditions of life, there, doesn't it ?

Camps had numbers, my grand father was in camp 50. I think the Foreign Legion wen to camp 1, but there was a lot a movement, indeed, the walk of 20-30 kilometers a day with a single bowl of rice meant death for a lot of wounded or sick prisoners.

Zampano's cecity, could have been provoked during the battle
(my grand father was hit by a shrapnel, but fortunately wore "two helmets" at the time... don't ask me why but it saved his life), where a heavy artillery fire bombed the french positions. There were heavy casualties on the Eliane hill : the Vietminh had foraged a tunnel under the hill and made it literally explose with 900 kg of TNT.
Dien Ben Phu, because of the arrogance of the French Military who had underestimated both Giap, the number and the determination of the Vietminh was a cruel defeat.
My grand father died when I was ten, left the prisoners camps to serve in Algery, where he clearly confronted his superiors about torture, almost at the cost of his career. The sojourn in the camps marked a man for life.


The camps differ from all the cliché we've seen in movies, there were few guards, no miradors, no barbwire. The prisoners were in such a state of under-nutrishment and such bad health that an escape through the jungle, without water or a map mean certain death. A single accidental wound could mean a long and slow death. Doctors had no instruments and were consigned to their hut.

Torture could take different incarnations, like remaining all day in the pit, mud to the head, to clean the sanitaries. Prisoners had to do their auto-critic and denounce their comrades, a daily routine that, according to my grand-father, the prisoners organized between themselves (i'll denounce you today, you denounce me tomorrow), to please the guardians, to refuse this political reeducation meant the reduction of the already scarce rations (once a week a chicken for 50 to 80 persons), none of the very few medical supplies and no letters.

Zampano could have also gotten his cecity at the very end of his captivity, when in 1954 France and the Vietminh signed the treaty of Geneva, and when the prisoners were exchanged to the International RedCross.

My grand-father bore the body of a brother in arm, who didn't had any strength left.

I picture Zampano in the jungle, that's the thing with veteran : who could've guess, seeing them old and wrinkled in the city, through what they have been
To what extent they have gone, who they've seen die, who they've killed, the will to escape or survive the camp.

And if they begin to write, what could come under their quill ?

[heartbreak]

Thanks Norkhat!

[Norkhat]

I'd like to add something, concerning the auto-critique.

Because in a way, there's a link between fiction and the camps.

Fiction thru, songs, perhaps old and worn books was one of the only link with the world they had left behind.

There'd even be a "literature" club in my grand father's camp, where they'd roll cigarettes with the paper of some old french communist's journal "Humanity" (l'humanité).

Daily, for months, they had to go through the marxist autocritique that would transform the capitalist mercenaries they were into new men. Some french communist especially made the trip to vietnam to "teach" in the camps. (some, never to be bothered afterward, and protected by their respective academies in france, such was the climate of opposition to the Vietnam war that followed).

You'd have to criticize your life, your deeds, and denounce the incivilities of your comrade.
Delation was encouraged, betrayal a way of thinking (and that'd be one of the immediate darkside of any communist reeducation).

As I told you, in my grand father's camp they would almost organize the autocritique each evening, for the following day.

And there came fiction : they invented crimes to denounce, things to describe, names, dates. From their life in France, from their political background, about religion, about capitalism, communism, the war, anything.
And for the dailylife of the camp they also invented faults "X tried to take more of his share of food", "Y criticized Ho-Chi-Minh" and so on. So the "culprits" could then make their autocritique and thanks their guardians for this reform.

This happened everyday, it was not even the hability to lie, it was to invent fiction, and declaim it, cry it, never believe it, to... survive.

Because in the camp, the torture was also mental, because the battle was also for the minds, (and some were broken, other went insane, other refused to submit and died of under-nutrishment and sickness).

The first letter of my grand father to his family, when he was delivered was :"At last, at last i can "write" to you.". Because his previous letters was all slogans and sunshine.

I dare not imagine the mascarade that took place in the Foreign Legion camp, Legion was supposed to be elite troop, some of them with really shady pasts, but with an incredible faculty to survive : they must have put on quite a show.


SNAFU... situation normal... all fucked up.

[Norkhat]

In captivity, and here again, if Zampano was at Dien Ben Phu, we suppose he underwent captivity,
words acquire a weird dimension.

People would make written or mental lists of what they'd do, what they'd eat when they'd return to France (because the war had to end, someday, they *had* to be traded back... and they clung to that hope)
endless gastronomical menues...

lists could be something to cling to, lists of names, lovers, member of families. List of place they could return to.

Not to own some of those words meant to be really bare.

And if I had this post, it is because I thought of something my grand father told me about dreams.

How you would dream of things that seemed so foreign and far-fetched when you woke up in Indochina.

Dreams so full of so many objects that just lacked, or just didn't belong where you where.

And it made me think of all the things not to be found in the Stairs, in the blue box.

Because, blind people , that became blind during their life, also wake up from vivid dreams to face a void.
(well, full of other things, sounds, smells, scents, touch, but still).

Remember the crossed words
picture that in your dreams
?

[heartbreak]

Thats good stuff Norkhat. The blue box list of stuff that is not in the House, not seen, possibly blind to how much is in our own Houses, picture that in your dreams, but then cross that out, don't picture that stuff in your dreams, maybe because we are blind to other things that are more important, say the gaps and spaces that we don't understand, that arise between us and the people we live with. The seemingly unexplainable things.

One question though, could you explain the reason you refer to the blue boxes as Stairs?

And it made me think of all the things not to be found in the Stairs, in the blue box.

[Norkhat]

because I was absent minded !
I meant, the blue-box-that-say-what-is-not-to-be-found-beyond-the stairs...of-the House... ^^.
this dien-ben-phu thread pulled the memories out of me !

French officers were not immune to poetry (some of them in fact very well read), a book of poetry would be something that'd give substantial food to the mind...

I wonder about that Apollinaire leaf... La feuille

remember Apollinaire was in the war (WWI), hence "the assassinated poet" (le poète assassiné) because he was hit by a shrapnel, that left a starry scar. He also wrote about the battlefields...

but that's another story, isn't Apo ?

[heartbreak]

Oh I think I see what you mean now. I always thought the blue boxes were referring to what wasn't in the part of the House past the Navidson's living room, but the footnote isn't referenced until after they reach the bottom of the stairs so it could only be referencing what is not in that part of the House after descending the stairs.

[Slow Dog Noodle]

Great book review for HOL fans in last week’s Economist. I was skiing in Telluride so I couldn’t post it then, but it looks like no one beat me to the punch. It gives a nice historical background to the situation that a fictional Zampano may have found himself in. Two things I immediately noticed which made me think of HOL:

1: The hilltops of Dien Bien Phu referred to by the girls’ names

2: The second to last paragraph, describing the author of the book – Ted Morgan. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of elegant connections HOL seems to make to the outside world.

Originally Posted by The Economist

Valley of Death: The Tragedy at Dien Bien Phu That Led America into the Vietnam War. By Ted Morgan. Random House; 752 pages; $35. Presidio Press; £25.

DIEN BIEN PHU was an isolated outpost in the mountains of Vietnam, a 20th-century colony where the French were at war with the national liberation movement, the Vietminh. No longer ragged guerrillas, the Vietminh by the early 1950s were armed by the Chinese with the latest weaponry. In the spring of 1954, as the leaders of East and West—John Foster Dulles and Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov and Zhou Enlai—met in Geneva to decide the future of French Indochina, Dien Bien Phu was garrisoned by 10,000 soldiers of the French Republic.

Most of them were not French. They were Algerians, Moroccans, Africans, Vietnamese, along with a few elite French paratroops. There were also four battalions of the Foreign Legion, their officers French, but most of their men Germans, many of them survivors of the Russian front. There was also an official “mobile campaign brothel”. The girls would soon be needed as nurses.

General Giap, the Vietminh commander, has been compared to his own model, that other artilleryman, Napoleon. On March 13th he launched his attack, firing 60 shells a minute on the French perimeter. Without attracting suspicion, General Giap’s skinny soldiers had dragged hundreds of guns over the mountains and hidden them in deep firing positions. The Vietminh attack came as a complete surprise.

For just under two months Dien Bien Phu was cut off. The fortified hilltops, christened by the French with girls’ names such as Anne-Marie, Claudine and Eliane, were reduced one by one. First the garrison lost the airstrip, which meant it could only be reinforced by parachute. Soon the trenches and the hospital were places of horror. The Foreign Legion and the paras fought like tigers. Hundreds of Vietminh dead lay unburied in front of the wire.

On May 5th General Giap moved in for the kill. In three days of fighting as murderous as any of the legionnaires had seen at Stalingrad, the last trenches were overrun. Thousands of men were killed in those last days, and thousands more were taken prisoner. Four hundred were forced on a “death march” to a prison camp 400km (250 miles) away. Later some compared the march and the camp to Dachau or Buchenwald. Others asked what else a third-world army, whose soldiers received only handfuls of rice, could have done with so many more mouths to feed.

Dien Bien Phu became a symbol of multiple import. It signalled the end of French colonial rule in Asia. Even more than the Japanese victories in the second world war, it announced the end of white supremacy over the continent and the beginning of the rise of the East.

For France it was a name of shame, a tragic coda to the long story of French military glory. For America, it was a presage of the agony of Vietnam. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Arthur Radford, wanted to save the French camp with a few atom bombs. Sometimes Dulles seemed to agree. They were kept from this ultimate folly by the steady, if irritated, attitude of President Eisenhower. “You boys must be crazy,” he said. American policymakers were in two minds. They wanted to end colonialism, but they wanted even more to prevent the Asian dominoes falling to communism.

This story is magnificently told by that interesting changeling, the man who calls himself Ted Morgan. That is an anagram of the name with which he was born, Sanche Armand Gabriel de Gramont. Scion of the noblesse and son of a resistance hero, Sanche de Gramont fought in the French army in Algeria, went to Yale and worked as a reporter for Newsweek. When he became an American citizen he chose a name, he said, that would give less trouble to telephone operators and express the democratic spirit of his new patrie.

With great skill Mr Morgan has woven together the tragic grandeur of the battlefield, the sufferings of the prisoners, the folly of the high command and the bland treacheries of politics and diplomacy. Dien Bien Phu has become a symbol. But before that it was “a cemetery where thousands are buried, with heroism and gallantry on both sides”.

Ha. I just noticed the publisher of the book when I pasted this in.

[heartbreak]

Originally Posted by Slow Dog Noodle

Ha. I just noticed the publisher of the book when I pasted this in.

The blue House does kind of make it stand out.