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...much of Thnai Toteong still stands. A few concrete-block walls, a post here and there, enormous 150-liter water jars remain curiously intact. Mostly, the little village 20 miles from Phnom-Penh is rubble and charcoal. Seven weeks before, I had driven through Thnai Toteong and stopped off to buy 4 Ibs. of a rich Chinese sausage so exquisitely prepared that travelers carry it back to Hong Kong as gifts for friends. It was a calm, bucolic village untouched by war. Now the sausage shop is gone, a few gun emplacements and foxholes testifying to its brief, final existence...
...current standards are none too good. Block-long lines form for a chance to buy even a pack of cigarettes or a liter of cooking oil. Beef is all but forgotten...
...purchased for about $165 in local currency (compared with $300 or so in New York for icons bought through Novexport, the state trading agency). The wholesale price is even lower. Police recently picked up a dealer who had bought seven icons from a church caretaker for one liter of vodka, and had acquired six others for a foreign-made gas lighter. When he was arrested, he had a stock of 400 icons and had bought two autos from the profits. Selling the icons also calls for ingenuity; one black marketeer recruited a plumber as a door-to-door salesman, since...
...where South Vietnamese forces waited for the long expected Communist assault, ARVN soldiers casually siphoned gasoline out of their trucks and Jeeps in broad daylight. They knew that they could sell the gas to civilians for 40 piasters (33?) a liter. In some areas of South Viet Nam, the word was out that the North Vietnamese, short of fuel for their thirsty trucks and Soviet-made tanks, were paying up to 80 piasters...
...sort of pollution filter. Thus all you need to knock out is the surface phytoplankton, and the entire marine life cycle is fatally disrupted." That disruption is accelerating logarithmically. At one Baltic measuring station, Environmentalist Barry Commoner points out, the oxygen content of water samples was 2.5 cc. per liter in 1900. The figure gently declined to 2.0 cc. by 1940, but in only 30 years since then it has plummeted...