Word: conge
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...scene was the living room of a Viet Cong representative in Pnompenh, the capital of Cambodia. While reporters, photographers and onlookers milled around, a bespectacled man named Nguyen Van Hieu, the representative in Cambodia of the National Liberation Front and a member of its Central Committee, brought off the elaborately staged affair like an experienced master of ceremonies. In a move obviously calculated to encourage dissent against the Viet Nam war in the U.S., the Viet Cong "symbolically" turned over three U.S. prisoners of war to an American antiwar activist, Thomas Hayden. The hope was, said Hieu piously, that...
...prisoners were Sergeant Daniel Lee Pitzer of Spring Lake, N.C., Sergeant James E. Jackson Jr. of Talcott, W. Va. and Sergeant Edward R. Johnson of Seaside, Calif. Only Pitzer and Jackson were present at the ceremony, sitting behind a long table next to Hieu; the Viet Cong kept Johnson in the next room, explaining that he was too sick with dysentery to appear. The three had been prisoners in the Mekong Delta, and it had taken them, said Hayden, a month to reach Pnompenh from there, "under strafing, bombing and reconnaissance." All three remained in Viet Cong hands after...
Echoes of Korea. Both Pitzer and Jackson made set-piece speeches, obviously memorized, thanking the Viet Cong for releasing them. Jackson, dressed in shorts and sports shirt, said woodenly: "The National Liberation Front made the decision to release me in response to the colored Negro American struggle for peace in the U.S." Pitzer said that "I have not been physically tortured or beaten. I wish to thank the Front for their lenient policy." Though neither sergeant hinted at a condemnation or repudiation of the U.S. war effort in Viet Nam, the circumstances inevitably raised echoes of Korea and brainwashing...
...surprise of U.S. commanders, the Viet Cong stayed around despite their losses. Next night the fighting resumed, in perhaps as weird a contact as either side has made in the war. About 8 p.m. a group of men walked through a U.S. company's command post, one of them with a flashlight in his hand. "Douse that light," snarled a U.S. sergeant major, at the same time noticing that the offender was wearing black pajamas and carrying a Chinese AK-47 gun. But the group kept right on walking, and it was several startled seconds before everybody started firing...
...leaders of the Second Republic, Viet Nam's first elected government in six years. The most impressive fact about the inauguration was that the new government was able to hold two days of open festivities, ceremonies and parades without any significant interference from the Viet Cong beyond a few mortar shells that fell into the palace garden...