A Brutal Sex Trade Built for American Soldiers

[Bo Zarts]

7. Bordel Militaire de Campagne - BMCs (mobile brothels)

The French Foreign Legion institutionalized prostitution in WW-1. That is well documented.

But the official use of BMCs continued, and during the Legion's disasterous garrison of Dien Bien Phu (Vietnam), or "Hell in a Very Small Place" as Bernard Fall called it, the army's BMC parked its caravans on the banks of the river that ran through the beseiged camp.

Bernard Fall and Jules Roy both wrote of the BMCs in their histories of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. But there was no mention of the fate of the women when the gamble failed, and 10,000 French soldiers were marched (or carried) off to prisons on May 7, 1954, in what became North Vietnam.