Word: fled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...many areas, civil servants and technicians had fled, leaving communities without electricity or water. Merchants had closed their shops. The first task of the arriving soldiers was to get communities operating again. Communist cadres set men to burning or burying dead bodies; women were put to work cleaning streets and whitewashing Saigon slogans off public walls. Hanoi also broadcast pleas for shipments of medicines, vitamins and powdered milk...
According to one Swiss journalist who managed to accompany Viet Cong forces into Hué, one-fifth of the city's population of nearly 200,000 had fled before the Communists seized the old imperial capital. Dozens of planes and helicopters had been abandoned at Hué's airport. Aging Queen Mother Doan Huy, 86, was treated with respect by the arriving soldiers, the reporter said, but part of her palace was converted into a hospital. Soup kitchens were set up in public squares and even bicycles were commandeered to bring in food...
...Revered Flag and Battlefield in Quang Due. North and South Vietnamese currencies were both in circulation, but the black-market value of Hanoi's dong increased daily against Saigon's piaster. Looters sold rice from government storehouses and motorbikes and boats left behind by those who had fled. Such enterprise stopped abruptly when Communist soldiers shot ten looters and led others away with hands bound...
There were, to be sure, some ominous notes. When the Khmer Rouge seized the government radio station, a rebel spokesman said menacingly in a broadcast: "We did not come here to talk. The Lon Nol clique [a reference to the President, who fled about a month ago] and some of its officers should all be hanged." Fearing reprisals from the Communists, a number of government officials and military officers, plus an estimated 2,000 other Cambodians, took refuge in the Hotel Le Phnom, which the International Red Cross had declared a neutral zone...
Saukham Khoy fled Cambodia along with the U.S. diplomats, Long Boret announced a three-month suspension of the National Assembly and the creation of a seven-man "Revolutionary Committee," headed by Armed Forces Chief of Staff Sak Suthsakham, to rule the country. The committee offered the rebels a cease-fire if they would permit national elections to determine the future government of the country. The insurgents ignored the proposal...