La 317e Section

La 317e Section, published in 1963, was Schoendoerffer’s first novel. It tells the bleak story of a French second lieutenant, Torres, who escapes with a few French non-commissioned officers and a platoon of Laotian infantrymen from a remote outpost as it falls to the Communist Viet Minh. They fight their way through the rainforest in a desperate attempt to reach another distant outpost that almost certainly had fallen as well. Torres is ill and exhausted as he trudges forward with the weight of his men’s lives on his shoulders. His stoicism never falters. He strives to the end to make the best of an ever-worsening situation. Also, he repeatedly chooses nobility over pragmatism and cannot resist a beau geste — a noble or beautiful but otherwise meaningless act — when extreme prudence should be his watchword.

Torres’ situation was a microcosm of the problem of Dien Bien Phu, if not the entire Indochina war: His ragtag force was too small, and it operated at or beyond the extreme limits of France’s ability to provide support. From the beginning, the reader suspects the story is unlikely to end well. Similarly, one cannot read histories of Dien Bien Phu or Indochina without a sense of impending doom, not just because the historical outcome is known, but also because in retrospect, it is easy to see what French commanders could not or would not recognize or admit: the futility of it all.
A French Army major I had asked about the book (and who confessed that he had “watched and read Schoendoerffer two dozen times”) suggested that La 317e Section remained a reference for aspiring officers because of Torres. They see something of themselves in how neither Torres nor his subordinates question the purpose of the war. The book is about “a bunch of guys who do what they do because they believe it is right,” the major said. There is also, he added, “an obvious sense of fatalism through the story that is very influential in the officers’ culture.”