French literature has several times mentioned the "Buffalo Park", a BMC in Saigon. In the Indochina War, the French used women from the Ouled Naïl tribe of the highlands of Algeria. BMCs were known to have a significant role in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and were an avenue of attack by female Viet Minh sympathizers. There was a vast BMC in Saigon known as "the park of the buffaloes", and in January 1954, a BMC containing Vietnamese and Algerian prostitutes was flown to Dien Bien Phu. Here, the prostitutes became nursing assistants for the French garrison during the siege, though they were sent for re-education by the Viet Minh after the garrison fell.