Word: boulevards
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bombardment at Headquarters. For two days and one night the battle sputtered and flamed along the Boulevard Gallieni, a one-mile thoroughfare between Saigon's European quarter-which was ringed off from the shouting by the big French-colonial army-and the cluttered Chinese suburb of Cholon. The nub of the action was a cream-colored Vietnamese headquarters, defended by 100 Nationalists beneath a darkening pall of smoke. From there, TIME Correspondent John Mecklin reported...
...Mortars started up again, but the Binh Xuyen fire was inaccurate. Nationalist reinforcements-a battalion of paratroops-moved expertly, strung out in single files along the boulevard, using the picturesque trees for cover. Scout cars zigzagged towards Binh Xuyen bunkers, slamming at them with 37-mm. cannon fire. Sirens howled. Telephones jangled. A baby wailed. A scout car was hit, its machine gunner twisted dead out of the hatch, and it came screaming back out of the battle in reverse. Yet for all the commotion and concussion, the young Vietnamese Nationalists were calm. Just as one terrorist shell exploded...
Battle on the Boulevard. The mortar shells and the ultimatum were fired at the struggling new state of South Viet Nam (pop. 10.5 million) by a war lord named General Le Van Vien-a man who used to be a river pirate and now runs the Binh Xuyen (pronounced bin soo yen), one of South Viet Nam's exotic alliances of political and religious sects, with its own private army of 8,000 uniformed men. The general often seems like an inclusive version of Murder Inc. and the police force, for his Binh Xuyen controls Saigon's prostitutes...
...last week, Diem rushed outside to check the mortar damage and comfort the wounded. Brushing aside the general's ultimatum, Diem called up Vietnamese army reinforcements to relieve a couple of hardpressed Vietnamese garrisons near by. Thundering to the scene in trucks, the reinforcements were ambushed along the Boulevard Gallieni by well-placed Binh Xuyen machine gunners, but the Vietnamese government troops piled out, unlimbered a 37-mm. fieldpiece, battered point-blank at the Binh Xuyen, and then charged...
Clearly, the main chance here is for broad boulevard farce, but Guinness chose discretion as the better part of comedy...