From the mid-1950s through the 1970s, the concept of a region named Indochina regained currency in the term"Indochina War" (often distinguished between its"First" and"Second" phases against the French and against the Americans, respectively). Popularized mainly by the mass media, the term was convenient in its imprecision, signifying as it did an armed conflict which successively engaged the two Western countries and their allies in the geophysical space of three national entities(more or less accepted by the internationa community as such, in any case): Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, which had all been colonized by France to one degree or another in the 19th century, and which shifted fluidly across natural and man made borders" in a tropical terrain which, especially in its jungles and rural areas, privileged guerilla rather than conventional warfare