I was asking my father for a bit of help with my homework, sticking newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook. He was flabbergasted when he saw that the subject was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the event in 1954 which marked the end of the French presence in Indochina. It was just over twenty years later, as the Americans were retreating from Saigon. I was studying the French withdrawal from its colonies as history whereas he felt he was still living through it.
