Word: danang
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...worth of military equipment. Said a Pentagon officer: "We might just as well send the stuff directly to Hanoi?then it wouldn't get damaged." The U.S. was appalled by the brutal way in which South Vietnamese marines, many trained by the U.S., stormed an American evacuation ship leaving Danang, looting, raping and killing refugees in a wild scramble to escape. Many Americans became preoccupied with helping refugees, especially children, though even here catastrophe seemed inescapable: a plane carrying South Vietnamese orphans crashed after takeoff from Saigon...
...defeated soldiers posed almost as great a danger to security as the Communist divisions inexorably sweeping toward the coast. In some places, groups of soldiers acted more like conquerors than the remnants of a routed army. Just before the Communists took Danang, there was looting, pillaging, murder and madness. In their panic to get away, soldiers elbowed past women and children to board the planes and boats that managed to evacuate 90,000 people from Danang in the hours before the city fell to the Communists. In some cases civilian refugees were killed by troops stampeding away from the enemy...
...according to some reports?were deeply pessimistic about South Viet Nam's ability to defend what remains of its territory. True, the government has the equivalent of seven divisions within a 50-mile radius of Saigon, including the 4,000 men of the airborne division that moved down from Danang two weeks ago; there are also some 175,000 popular-force and regional-force soldiers, but Saigon's combat-ready troops are outnumbered by the North Vietnamese forces that have been massing in the capital military region over the past several weeks. Small Viet Cong units have begun infiltrating...
...board the American ship Pioneer Commander, sent to Danang to take refugees to Cam Ranh, 300 miles to the south, passengers were shot or pushed overboard by soldiers trying to make room for themselves. Other evacuation vessels, including flat tug-drawn barges, took three days under the scorching sun with neither food nor water to make the Danang-Nha Trang trip. The vessels were so packed with people that most had to stand for the entire journey, except for those who died en route. Six children and two elderly men were taken dead from one barge after it landed...
...Ranh Bay, a once impregnable U.S. base visited by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, leaderless marines went on a rampage when their evacuation ships arrived from Danang. They took over cars and Jeeps at gunpoint, robbing fellow refugees at random. Soldiers even fired on American helicopters and chartered aircraft seeking to land in Cam Ranh. The situation was so bad that field commanders in the military region around Saigon were ordered to execute rioting troops on the spot; one commander in Binh Tuy province east of Saigon ordered some troops shot for indiscipline...