Word: mekong
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...most forceful complaints about the CDC have been leveled by former Chief of Naval Operations Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr. As the Navy's top commander in Vietnam, he ordered that Agent Orange be sprayed in the Mekong Delta region to destroy vegetation from which the Vietcong regularly launched ambushes against U.S. patrol boats. In 1988 Zumwalt's son Elmo III, a former lieutenant who had served in the "brown-water Navy," died from a rare lymphoma. Zumwalt believes his son's exposure to Agent Orange was responsible...
...there has been a lively debate in some of the state-controlled press and among academicians and trade unions. In part this may be because Hanoi has ruled with a lighter touch than Beijing. Says Tran Phuoc Duong, the American- educated rector of Can Tho University, deep in the Mekong Delta: "Something has happened. There has been a lot of internal relaxation. The pace of change has taken people by surprise...
...farther one gets from the capital, the more the picture darkens. A lack of proper irrigation machinery severely limits rice production. On Route 1, in the arid border area between Vietnam and the Mekong river, there is virtually no fighting, but poverty is so acute that beggars line the road and try to flag down the occasional passing car. The area just to the north is more prosperous, but government troops at checkpoints along Route 7 often demand money or cigarettes from travelers for permission to continue on a road that is in such disrepair...
They have known almost nothing but war. For a generation men have fought over the fabled ruins of Angkor Wat, the colonial palaces of Phnom Penh, and the rich rice paddies along the Mekong River, leaving more than a million Cambodians dead and their land in ruins. But at long last the shell-shocked country had something to cheer. Cambodians crowded the streets last week to hail the withdrawal of the last of the 200,000 Vietnamese troops who had occupied their country for nearly eleven years. Across the eastern border in Viet Nam, there was also celebration. Senior officials...
...such metropolitan diversions tend to escape to Chiangmai, the cool northern town in the hills with something of the impenetrable allure of old China. Here one imagines the ghosts of opium warlords in the nearby Golden Triangle, or catches the sense of Viet Nam as one floats along the Mekong. Other, less adventurous souls simply sink into one of Thailand's seaside dreams: Pattaya, the "sea, sand and sin" city just 90 minutes from Bangkok; or Phuket, a Tahitian strip of bungalows along the emerald-green Andaman Sea that is home to Club Med and a host of other beach...