Word: nam
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Secord's outfit, Stanford Technologies Trading Group International, was only one of many such firms that have grown up around the Washington Beltway in the past decade, most of them staffed with veterans of the huge CIA covert operations of the Viet Nam era. Reacting both to the end of the war and to congressional investigations of covert activities, Jimmy Carter's CIA director Stansfield Turner purged nearly 800 people from the agency. Some of them turned up in the Beltway firms. "One result of the purge was that many of the former agents set up private companies that began...
South Viet Nam, 1969. Somewhere below the 17th parallel. About midnight. It was called Operation Hot Tamale. Quietly but firmly, Second Lieut. Oliver North roused his combat-weary men from their makeshift bunks. "We have to get ourselves a prisoner," he told them. Peace talks were going on in Paris, and the U.S. was claiming the North Vietnamese were operating unofficially inside the demilitarized zone. North's superiors wanted a prisoner for interrogation...
With blackened faces, North and his men crept through the dark, scarred landscape of the DMZ but could not find a single enemy soldier. North was determined to return home with the goods. Suddenly his team spied a North Vietnamese guard across the 17th parallel, inside North Viet Nam. North did not hesitate. He and a comrade stole across the border, wounded the guard and dragged him back into South Viet Nam. Mission accomplished. Keep mum about this, the lieutenant told his troops when they got back...
...Viet Nam shaped North in lasting ways, and the account of his nighttime assault on North Viet Nam reveals some of the same traits and patterns that have put this much decorated war hero at the heart of the Iran-contra affair. For North, the U.S. defeat abroad and the revulsion with the war at home were searing, bitter experiences. Never again would something like that happen -- if he could help it. He was a man of action, frustrated by red tape, timid bureaucrats and waffling politicians. If you needed to get something done, do it yourself...
...year ago this spring Cat Nguyen was 16, an honors student at West Jefferson High School, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, and an editor of a soon-to-be mimeographed school paper called Your Side. Five years before that she had reached this country from Viet Nam, with no command of English. Having come so far so quickly, she thought the world was at her ! feet -- until Principal Eldon Orgeron saw the paper and banned...