Word: conge
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...face of a continued Communist offensive. Government positions were abandoned with scarcely a fight. Leaderless, demoralized troops dropped their weapons and joined hundreds of thousands of civilians in a panicky southward flight. In the most stunning Communist victory in more than two decades, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops and tanks on Sunday overran Danang, the country's second largest city. According to reports by South Vietnamese officials, this victory gives the Communists nearly complete control of the entire northern half of South Viet Nam; Saigon's forces now hold only a number of coastal enclaves...
...speed and suddenness of the South Vietnamese collapse. The country that had fought the Communists to a stand-off since the Paris Accords of January 1973 now seemed to have lost the ability and will to resist; its defenses simply melted away before North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The Communists had not yet penetrated the vital Saigon region, and there was still hope that the government would be able to defend the capital. But many Viet Nam experts, who two weeks ago were predicting only limited losses for Saigon during the current dry season, now could not entirely discount...
...population of more than 1.7 million people-to the attacking Communists. Dusty district roads and coastal highways were choked with countless thousands of frightened civilians clutching their possessions and fleeing their homes in the largest exodus since Viet Nam was divided in 1954. Meanwhile, reinforced North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces mobilized what appeared to be their most devastating offensive since the Easter attacks...
...refugees fled for a variety of reasons. Some may have feared that government bombing attacks would follow Communist absorption of their lands; indeed, in the months just after the Paris Peace Agreement, Saigon subjected Viet Cong-held areas to frequent air raids. Others, especially merchants or landowners, may have feared that the Communists would confiscate their property or worse, arrest them as "exploiters of the people." Residents of Hue in particular have not forgotten the mass executions that took place when the Communists controlled the city during the 1968 Tet offensive. Most of the refugees simply seemed to be afraid...
...intervening years have served to create a perhaps inevitable barrier between Thieu and the people he leads. These days, he rarely uses the Presidential Palace on Cong Ly Boulevard, which is barricaded from the rest of Saigon by sentry boxes, steel barriers and tangles of barbed wire. He moves behind a curtain of almost total secrecy, constantly switching locations between a series of private addresses within and outside the city. Since the attack on Ban Me Thuot on March 10, he has not appeared in public or even been photographed...