There are at least two separate issues here. You may need to check the "Import Options" box upon placing your Word file to tell it to keep stuff like section breaks. If you've not looked at it, it's a useful dialog (including mapping Word styles to InDesign styles).
However, Word's handling of some kinds of special characters is sub-optimal. Check out thesethreads for more information.
Long story short, you will have to perform some hygiene in Word before importing anything. I don't know if using ID is worth your time, because I don't know why you're placing this Word doc into InDesign in the first place, but placing long Word docs with heavy formatting into ID is the kind of task that will probably not be easy for someone without plenty of practice. There are many kinds of potential problem. I've been placing Word translations into InDesign for (eek) something like a decade now, and I'm still learning tricks and duct-tape solutions and VBA workarounds. It's deeper than it looks.
(99% of the problems in this kind of workflow are inherent in the structure of Word files. The only way to avoid them is to severely restrict the varieties of formatting techniques used in the Word document.)