A garrison of a dozen French and 300 Laotian troops occupied a fortified outpost in the hills above the village of Muong Khoua, across the Vietnamese border from Điện Biên Phủ.

Following the fall of a satellite strong point at Sop-Nao, the troops at Muong Khoua under Captain Teullier fought off a Việt Minh siege force for thirty-six days while supported by air-dropped supplies and air strikes.

[1] In early 1953, the Việt Minh under Võ Nguyên Giáp commenced an invasion of Laos to exert additional pressure on Paris and on the French forces stationed in Indochina.

The village of Muong Khoua itself lay at the western foot of the Mousetrap, protected from the river by a large sandbank, and straddling the road to Phong Saly, another French outpost 50 miles (80 km) to the north.

On the evening of April 3, a Việt Minh battalion entered Laos near Điện Biên Phủ and Nà Sản and reached Sap-Nao.

The survivors, following authorisation from the French captain, retreated during the night of April 9/10 along a round-about route following the assumption by Grézy that the Việt Minh had laid ambushes along the most direct path.

[1] While the French troops from Sop-Nao were making their way via canoe to the mother strong point, Teullier and his forces were feeling what one chronicler referred to as l'asphyxie par le vide ("choking-off by creating a void"), the result of a Việt Minh presence in the area.

[2] Referred to officially as a "relatively small" force,[4] the 300 Chasseurs Laotiens and "handful"[1] of French NCOs and two officers were equipped with three 81-mm and two 60-mm mortars and two machine guns.

This defeat prompted a reversion to previous tactics of slowly "gnawing away" at the French outpost, and Giap ordered the 312th to leave some forces behind to continue a siege while the remainder of the division moved on.

[5] This "air bridge" enabled the garrison to survive, and fourteen days later on April 27 it was still intact; the French High Command dropped a Legion of Honor for Teullier and several Croix de Guerres for his men.

Teullier instructed his radio operator, Sergeant René Novak, to request air-dropped flares and air support, while mortar fire landed on Alpha and the Mousetrap, but not Pi, where Grézy was in command.

By 01:30, the garrison was informed that weather conditions prevented air support, and by 02:30 the Việt Minh forces launched successive assault waves which overran Teullier and his men, including attacks which flanked the position using the nearby sandbanks.

And usually that is exactly what they looked like: worn down to skeletons from hunger and dysentery, sunken eyes, the typical tropical pallor ... their emaciated faces curtained by shaggy beards, and their skins covered with festering sores, from heat rash to leech bites and jungle rot.

Bernard Fall recorded in Street Without Joy: "he was only twenty-five years old, but he looked fifty; he kept on walking like an automaton to the centre of the post before he was stopped by some of the men staring at him as at a ghost.

14, stating "During the night of May 17 to 18, the post of Muong Khoua, which had victoriously resisted since the beginning of the Việt Minh offensive, succumbed under the overwhelming mass of assailants.

[12] The French would use the lessons learned at Muong Khoua and those of the 1952 Battle of Nà Sản in their defence plans at Điện Biên Phủ, while the Việt Minh in turn would employ similar tactics of encirclement and strangulation there.

[5][14] The disappearance of local civilian populations previously friendly towards the French, which served as a precursor to Việt Minh attack, was also remembered by the Điện Biên Phủ troops.