Word: mekong
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...majority of the more than 300,000 tourists per year come to cruise the scenic Mekong, visit World Heritage Site Luang Prabang or explore the mysterious Plain of Jars. But increasingly they are drawn because they have heard, from other kids on the Asian travel circuit, that drugs in Laos are plentiful and cheap, and as long as you don't do anything too stupid, the cops leave you alone to get loaded in peace. Towns such as Vang Viang and Muang Sing, in the north, have developed expat communities of late teens and twentysomethings who come intending to stay...
That night in the Mekong Delta, the women and children who died were, in the heartless phrase, "collateral damage." They were victims of the fog of battle, or of the atrocity of Oops! You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs...
...Kerrey's Raiders went into Thanh Phong in 1969, the men were dropped off by speedboat and crept in by cover of night. Today visitors to the remote coastal village come by daylight, by road and ferry, past lush coconut groves and over the countless fingers of the Mekong River as it branches across the delta. Of late, those traveling the one-lane clay road to Thanh Phong--now home to about 380 families who fish and grow rice--include foreign journalists trying to corroborate an atrocity and Vietnamese government officials accompanying them...
Against that dreary background of official hubris, myopia and duplicity, it seems odd that former Senator Bob Kerrey is hitting newspaper headlines and television screens because of the revelation that his team of Navy SEALs killed innocent women and children while on a mission in the Mekong Delta. I reckon that thousands of grunts went through the same experience. But if what they did was appalling, it was comprehensible. In a way, they were victims of the machine that vaulted them into a hot, humid, shadowy, alien environment in which friend and foe were a blur, and all a potential...
...term collateral damage implies something secondary and unimportant. But it's the collateral damage that most haunts us later on. It's because of My Lai, or incidents like Bob Kerrey's night in the Mekong Delta, that that war keeps coming back and back and back to the surface of the American conscience, all these years later--unquiet ghosts that you may still see flickering, from time to time, in Kerrey's troubled...