Word: aikman
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Swissair to fly the 58 to Hong Kong; the airline was technically violating the law, since the Vietnamese had no proper landing clearance or onward transportation. Never fearing, Mills cheerfully paid out $8,100 of his own for the group's passage. As Mills told TIME Correspondent David Aikman: "I would have bought tickets to Guam, but I didn't have enough money. I thought we would be sent on to Guam as soon as we got to Hong Kong...
Already safely out of Indochina were the other men who had covered the disintegration of Cambodia and South Viet Nam for TIME: Peter Range, William McWhirter, David Aikman and former Phnom-Penh Stringer Steven Heder. All looked back on two months of dangerous work during which they often dodged rocket-borne shrapnel while moving among insurgent armies and panicked refugees; they took sad professional satisfaction in being able to report the end of the tragic story. News of the evacuation also stirred memories among the correspondents who have reported Indochina's wars for TIME since our Saigon bureau opened...
Fortunately," reported TIME Correspondent David Aikman, "the operation is almost entirely good-natured. The bearded sailors have won the admiration of everyone for their endurance. They worked the first 24 hours without a break, then went into regular 12-hour shifts. Joshing with the kids and youths, flirting with the pretty Vietnamese girls, they and the Seabees seemed to think it was all a worthwhile lark-which turned out to be just the right attitude to make the Vietnamese feel at home." One sailor decided at midweek to marry the Vietnamese girl whose clothes he had helped wash...
...prove out, but they tended to obscure the fact that the majority of refugees represented the middle class or the privileged elite of South Vietnamese society, the ones with foreign educations and foreign employers. A few were even rich. A volunteer worker at Camp Fourtuitous told Correspondent Aikman of seeing several Vietnamese with suitcases crammed with jewelry and money. According to gossip, one suitcase contained $1 million in cash. "Out of envy or boredom," wrote Aikman, "many Vietnamese in the camp chose to believe this...
...base noncommissioned-officers' club for a glass of beer, American citizens quickly protested that they were being treated like prisoners. "They won't let me out!" one American complained by telephone to a stateside relative. Said Jacques Carbonel, waving a red official U.S. passport at Aikman: "If I don't show up at my job in Washington on Monday, my boss simply won't believe that I have been held here." Joseph O'Neill, a construction superintendent with a Vietnamese wife and two children, said in disgust: "I helped liberate this place during...