Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people in revolutionary South Viet Nam. Though they run one of the poorest nations in the world, the Vietnamese invest their best brains and creativity in the military: they have occupied Cambodia and Laos, resuming a campaign of expansionism that was interrupted more than a century ago when the French arrived to colonize Indochina. It is ironic that the Vietnamese, so often sentimentalized by the American Left as a simple and gentle peasant people, are the imperialists of the region, restlessly putting new Vietnamese settlements in neighboring countries, seeking Lebensraum...
...Minh City in 1985 is physically little different from Saigon in 1975, just as Hanoi is much as the French left it in 1954. Both cities are full of pastel stucco and the decaying architectural flourishes of colonial temps perdu. In Hanoi, which shows surprisingly few signs of the U.S. bombing, water buffalo pull carts down boulevards lined with tamarind trees. There are few automobiles; as elsewhere in Asia, the bicycle is ubiquitous...
...Minh City, the authorities have eliminated most of the druggy, decadent excesses, yet the city is still frenetically commercial. At the Cafe Givral, the Rick's Bar of wartime Saigon, a superb French-bread sandwich and cool citron presse are still available. Money changers, prostitutes and all kinds of small-time wheeler-dealers flourish, albeit rather more discreetly than ten years ago. North and South, Coca-Cola is for sale, but the black market stalls of Ho Chi Minh City are packed with foreign goods: Spam and Tang, Zest and Lux, A&W root beer and Del Monte prunes, Remy...
General Giap, 72, one of the most successful military tacticians of the past 40 years, orchestrated the victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Tet in 1968 and the conquest of the South. But he was replaced as Defense Minister in 1980 and dropped from the Politburo in 1982, possibly because he was too outspokenly pro-Soviet. That was heresy to Hanoi's xenophobic leaders, despite their alliance with Moscow. Giap remains on the party's Central Committee, however, and last May met with reporters at the 30th anniversary of Dien Bien...
...West got a rare inside look at the Kremlin's technological espionage last week when secret Soviet documents came to light in France. The material was obtained by French intelligence agents, who leaked it to Le Monde, the Paris newspaper, and TF1, a French government-owned television station. The documents, prepared in part by the Soviet Union's Military Industries Commission, reveal that in 1979 the country's aircraft manufacturers saved an estimated $65 million in research and development costs by using pilfered technology. Soviet aircraft engineers were able to draw upon 140 "samples" of Western hardware...