Word: mekong
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...short of amazing," says Bao Ninh, a prominent writer and war veteran from the North. "Fifteen years ago, we were very dogmatic. Now it is almost impossible as a writer to describe what is happening." From the border with China in the north to the rice mills of the Mekong Delta in the south, the California-size country is humming with activity. Hong Kong investors have been allowed to open a casino near Haiphong, and Westerners are bidding to develop tourist sites along the scenic coast between Danang and Nha Trang. Hanoi, long a city of bicycles and moldy...
...March 29, the 13-man CIA reconnaissance team crossed the Mekong River into Laos and almost immediately ran into trouble. According to CIA officials monitoring the team at the time, Laotian army patrols pinned it down for more than a week. One member accidentally shot himself. Another fell ill and had to be evacuated. Though Nhommarath was just 40 miles from the Thai border the team took more than a month to reach the suspect camp and finally returned safely to Thailand on May 13. A week later, say CIA documents, the agency reported to the Pentagon that the team...
...remarkable account, reworked and eased of learner's stiffness, is now published as South Wind Changing (Graywolf Press; 320 pages; $20). The author's childhood was pastoral and amazingly peaceful. Although an older brother was a military pilot, the war at first did not touch the island in the Mekong Delta where his large, prosperous family grew rice. But fighting swept through with the Tet offensive of 1968, when Jade was 12, and afterward "the war continued on and off like a chronic disease." He had passed his university exams when the North won its victory and the Americans flew...
Among his experience in Vietnam was an encounter with a patrol of Viet Cong soldiers at a pagoda on the Mekong River...
Americans may have left the remnants of their Wilsonian idealism years ago, somewhere north of the Mekong Delta. They are certainly no longer driven by a desire to "pay any price, bear any burden," as John Kennedy said, to ensure the liberties of others around the world. In a way, the crisis in the gulf brings together a fortuitously crass coincidence of American idealism and materialism; Americans look to punish the aggressor and protect their energy supplies at the same time...