Word: colonel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire to Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Brando was best when playing characters in torment. Unfortunately, that torment spilled over into his life. According to Peter Manso, author of the 1,118-page Brando: The Biography (1994), Cheyenne's suicide is not the first in Brando's life. "There have been about five girlfriends who have committed suicide," Manso says, "and another three or four who tried. So this is not foreign to him at all." Still, Brando, 71, was deeply affected by the death of the girl he once called "the most...
...bureaucratic farce: while Minh waited inside the palace for someone to surrender to, NVA troops milled around on the grounds waiting for an officer of sufficiently high rank to show up and receive the surrender (according to their regulations, this could be done only by a colonel or general). Colonel Bui Tin says he was the man. He walked into Minh's office around 11:30 and found that Minh had already written out a surrender that he had read over the Saigon radio...
Nguyen Huu An, then an NVA major general, tells a different story. He says he entered the Presidential Palace at 11:30, only to find that "the men who had taken the surrender, Lieut. Colonel Bui Van Thong and Deputy Commander Pham Xuan The, had taken Big Minh to the radio station to read it. Colonel The had drafted the surrender for Big Minh, but when Minh looked at it, he complained that The's handwriting was so bad he couldn't decipher the document. So he asked The to read it to him or write...
Preparations for the final assault were well under way by Thieu's resignation. Responding to an urgent request from the forces in the South for more ammunition, Hanoi had sent thousands of trucks racing down the coastal highway loaded with rockets and shells. Bui Tin, a colonel and journalist for an NVA newspaper, arrived in Danang on April 21, en route from Hanoi to join the final push. Two days later he flew south on a helicopter that, he says, "was filled with new military maps of Saigon that had been rushed into print and flown from Hanoi" to guide...
Army Captain Stuart Herrington, deputy to Colonel Harry Summers on a small American military team that had been negotiating with the NVA, remembers that the scene inside the embassy also "was a monstrous mess. Adjacent to the back wall were four or five buildings and a pool. People started coming out of the woodwork in that area. I saw people surrounding the swimming pool with suitcases. Who were they? They were families and extended families of the embassy Marine guards, employees, the Vietnamese contract guards. Everybody who worked in that embassy had Vietnamese people their consciences told them they couldn...