Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is little doubt that Hanoi would like to have all of Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia under its control. Saigon and the Mekong Delta, for instance, are prizes the North Vietnamese treasure, but they would prefer to absorb them with a minimum of dissension and violence. Thus Hanoi's tactics in South Viet Nam are shrewd and pragmatic: go slow, don't push, reeducate...
...Laos, military units proclaimed loyalty to the new commander. At the police academy, the units actually stripped then" rightist officers of power. Elsewhere, they deserted camps en masse rather than continue under rightists. In other places rightist officers simply disappeared, fleeing with their families in wooden ferries across the Mekong River into Thailand. Rightist politicians and many Chinese and Vietnamese businessmen also fled...
...Saigon didn't give a damn for us," a Foreign Service officer stationed at the U.S. consulate in the Mekong Delta city of Can Tho told TIME Correspondent William Stewart aboard the Blue Ridge. "We were promised Navy choppers, but the only thing we got was a phone call telling us there was an evacuation. Not just Vietnamese were abandoned but Americans too. The embassy was exercising no initiative, no control. We were told, 'We can't worry about Delta employees...
...failing. In Can Tho, for example, notice of the evacuation only came at the very last minute. Since helicopters had been flown to Saigon or commandeered by the CIA, the consulate's American employees and a small proportion of its Vietnamese staff went by boat down the Mekong River to the coast. After six hours of futile searching for the ship that was to have met them there, they luckily chanced upon another U.S. vessel, the Pioneer Contender, which brought them to safety...
...matter of time before Laos becomes the next Indochina state to fall to the Communists. Anticipating this, wealthy Laotians, Chinese and Vietnamese have already begun departing Laos in great numbers; planes are booked solidly, and scores of autos have lined up at the Vientiane ferry, waiting to cross the Mekong River into Thailand...