Unredacted:

Even in the supposedly pacified areas of Cochinchina and Annam the French military occupation was purely notional. Memoirs convey a Wild West frontier atmosphere, with European civilians and administrators routinely going armed with Sten guns, and never venturing far without exchanging the latest information on which villages and roads were safe and which should be avoided. In practical terms the French Army controlled only a shifting pattern of invisible islands in the human landscape. The spaces between were roamed not only by the Viet Minh but also by various other armed groups, only some of which had direct connections with either the Communists or the Franco-Vietnamese forces. The wartime activities of the French, Japanese, British, Americans, Nationalist Chinese and Siamese had scattered South-East Asia with weapons and the vacuum following Japan's surrender was exploited by local warlords, drug smugglers, freebooting deserters, and the partisans and ragged militias of many groups and causes.

From THE LAST VALLEY Dien Bien Phu and the French Defeat in Vietnam by Martin Windrow, page 95. Here Windrow describes the situation from around 1946 on as France tries to reestablish its colonial rule in Indochina (leading up this most famous battle/defeat in 1953-54).

Many years ago I read Bernard Fall's Hell in a Very Small Place, considered by many as the definitive book on DBP and cited with reverence by chroniclers of later Vietnam adventures like Michael Herr. So, when I saw Windrow's book I asked my self why I would want to bother. But Windrow's book is in many ways superior. He spends much more time filling in the historical background leading up to the French decision to "call Giap out" (my choice of term).

When I read this passage "Even in the supposedly pacified areas..." I couldn't help thinking of parallels to the current day, and your answers said that there are many more.

The "turning point" clue I mentioned in my last post (I think) was the role of (US-supplied) Fairchild C-119 "Flying Boxcars" at Dien Bien Phu. I remember seeing these interesting planes fly over my suburban home in the early 60s (from Hanscom AFB, or Otis AFB in Massachusetts or maybe Pease in New Hampshire, I don't know). C-119s were provided to the French for DBP by the US and were flown by American pilots of the CIA-owned Civil Air Transport, so, in terms of when the U.S. first had active combatants in Vietnam, 1953 could be considered the year the U.S. entered the war