Word: conge
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...found myself thinking about this recently as I sat in the Saigon office of Le Hong Thanh, a former Viet Cong colonel and now director of a Vietnamese film-distribution company. As always, I was in town on a fault-finding mission, but here in the land of our former enemy, I kept getting derailed by the extravagant civility of my hosts. Thanh, having already provided the twin amenities of green tea and air conditioning, was just then regaling me with a prolonged description of what might best be described as extreme screening...
...Virginia Democrat, was sitting on Air Force One sipping soda with several congressional colleagues. They were flying to Bosnia with President Clinton, and the conversation turned to land mines. Robb related an experience he had as a Marine in Vietnam. His unit was escorting supply convoys passing through Viet Cong-held territory, and the mission included searching for mines by poking bayonets into any disturbed soil. One afternoon, an engineer several yards in front of Robb struck a detonator with his bayonet. "He was literally vaporized right in front of my eyes," Robb remembered. "We searched for 30 minutes...
MEMORIES OF THE VIETNAM War, for those who did not serve in it, tend to be drawn from the image bank of television footage: a U.S. soldier applying a Zippo lighter to a peasant hut; a Saigon official shooting, on camera, a suspected Viet Cong terrorist through the head. But before the war escalated into a staple item on the nightly news, a much smaller conflict had played itself out in South Vietnam. This one pitted U.S. military brass and members of the Kennedy Administration against a small group of young print reporters assigned to cover a communist guerrilla insurrection...
Then what went wrong? Why did these reporters slowly lose their faith in a war they were eager to cover, even at the risk of their own lives? Prochnau blames Washington and Saigon for an unworkable strategy against the Viet Cong and for a refusal to listen to journalists who discovered it wasn't working. The more the officials tried to bamboozle or stonewall reporters, the more they drove them to dig for themselves and to unearth a disaster in the making...
...covered up our noise. For once, our point squad spotted the V.C. before they spotted us. For once, we did the ambushing. We nailed them. A hail of fire dropped several V.C., and the rest fled. We approached gingerly. One man lay motionless on the ground, the first Viet Cong that I could definitely confirm we had killed in action. He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes. The man was slightly built, had coarse, nut-brown features and wore the flimsy black short-legged outfit we called pajamas. My gaze fixed on his feet...