Word: conge
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Call up Eddie Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief of Saigon, firing his snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait...
Adams has always felt uncomfortable about his picture of Loan executing the Viet Cong officer. What the picture does not show is that a few moments earlier the Viet Cong had slaughtered the family of Loan's best friend in a house just up the road. All this occurred during the Tet offensive, a state of general mayhem all over South Viet Nam. The Communists in similar circumstances would not have had qualms about summary execution...
...scene then briefly changes to a swamp in Vietnam where that group of American soldiers is quickly shot down by the Viet Cong. It changes again to a high school graduation in 1989 where the commencement speaker tells his audience in words hauntingly reminiscent of that wartime sergeant that the class of '89 is the best America has to offer and that by struggling hard, they can forge an America that the world will respect once again...
...ensuing conflict, the Viet Cong were able to cast themselves as defenders against a foreign invader, a time-honored role in Vietnam since the Mongol invasions in the middle ages...
...past masters of the technique, the Viet Cong had a term for it: Danh va dam, dam va danh -- fighting and talking, talking and fighting. By adopting that pattern of feints and jabs, the P.L.O. in the Middle East, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador have managed to keep Washington's foreign policy off-balance and on the defensive. Only now is the Bush Administration beginning to make moves that may allow it to capture some momentum...