Word: dong
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...Dong Dang. Lang Son. Blunt yet musical Vietnamese place names, redolent of history, blood and death. At the railhead city of Dong Dang, a 30-ft. yellow gate marks Japan's invasion of Indochina in 1940, which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt's perhaps apocryphal vow that "we will not go to war over any damn Ding Dong." At Lang Son, a crowded market town nine miles to the southeast, a nipple-crested mountain that colonial troops named the "baroness's breast" overlooks the ruins of a fort demolished even before the Viet Minh's war against the French...
Last week Dong Dang and Lang Son had been turned into tormented battlegrounds again. In an escalating war between angry Communist neighbors and cultures that have been antagonistic for 2,000 years, three divisions of invading Chinese troops descended on Dong Dang and on the Vietnamese coastal plain to the east in giant pincers aimed at Lang Son. Battalions of the Vietnamese regular army hauling heavy weapons rushed north to meet them head-on and force a confrontation that could be the first major battle of the week-long war. In preparation, China threw three fresh divisions against forward Vietnamese...
...supported by T-59 tanks, spurted through the passes of the rugged, hilly terrain, bowled over Vietnamese outposts and fanned out in a broad, coordinated advance about six miles deep. By Hanoi's own admission, the Chinese after two days had occupied eleven towns and villages and had surrounded Dong Dang with tanks and self-propelled guns...
...read his statement. The tough race had humbled a normally proud man." After Philadelphians defeated a proposal that would have allowed Mayor Frank Rizzo to seek a third term, New York Correspondent Robert Parker visited the headquarters of the victors and watched "snake dances with revelers flashing signs, DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD." At Governor Jerry Brown's re-election party in Los Angeles, Correspondent Joe Kane observed while celebrants, dressed in costumes ranging from knickers to gold lamè, absorbed mariachi music. "To top it all off," says Kane, "an Arab sheik arrived in full native costume...
...those concerns go a long way toward explaining the tractability of the Vietnamese government toward its former foe. As Premier Dong expressed it in an hour-long interview with the Congressmen: "The wind is behind us" in promoting closer Hanoi-Washington ties. Earlier, Dong had told an interviewer: "We have no interest whatsoever in creating problems detrimental to our country's reconstruction...