Word: ao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...They twitter and sing," wrote Novelist Graham Greene of the women of South Viet Nam. In their diaphanous silk ao dais, they can readily appear as delicate and inconsequential as so many songbirds. In fact, Vietnamese women are birds of a very different feather. Heiresses of an ancient tradition of matriarchy, they have become, under the pressures of two decades of war, Asia's most emancipated women. They fight, politic, run businesses and their families and, through their husbands, probably control much of South Viet Nam's endemic corruption...
Simultaneously, the movie industry was staging a comeback. Attendance, which had dropped off sharply after the war, began to increase slowly after the turn of the decade. In 1956, the Saxon, formerly a legitimate stage theatre known as the Majestic, opened with a 70 mm. Todd-AO production of Oklahoma! A year later, the Gary introduced itself with Gigi. Road shows of that magnitude became the foundation of Sack's enterprises. Last year, nine road shows accounted for 43 per cent of gross admissions. Movies may not have become better, but they had become profitable...
...Cong retribution for consorting with Americans, now alter the traditional toast, chin-chin-to your health-to chin-chin, Ho Chi Minh. They also bring a change of clothing to work so that they can slip out of their conspicuous B-girl tight pants and into the traditional flowing Ao-Dais for the evening trip home to the suburbs...
...other high-frequency plaintext vowels, a, i and o, tend to avoid one another. A contact chart would show that three of the most common letters in the ciphertext -O, U and A-are the most mutually exclusive. OA appears twice, OU once, and UO, UA, AO and AU not at all. But NU appears five times in the cryptogram. It happens that the most frequent English vowel diagraph is ea. Thus it is a good bet that U = a. Similarly, since the combination io is most frequent among the three dissident vowels in English, assume that it is represented...
...anonymously addressed letters in geographical arrangement stand around for anyone to go through (nobody does). The letters come from school children and little old ladies usually and aren't the type soldiers are eager for. There are stacks of old magazines, junky concession stands, and a "boutique' selling ao-dais 'for your girl back home.' Though the place was full, there was a depressing silence once the jukebox and pingpong noise was eliminated. People stared blankly, watched old football games on Armed Forces TV or browsed through Life Magazines...