Word: newports
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...Marines with rifle butts pounding the fingers of Vietnamese who tried to claw their way into the embassy compound to escape from their homeland. An apocalyptic carnival air?some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries on her head and another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters profligately tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships, discarded like...
...from the rest of South Viet Nam. Communist forces had brought enough artillery to the edge of the city to level it utterly if they chose to do so. On the northern edge of Saigon, flatbed trucks piled high with crated ammunition roared away from the supply depot at Newport, their air horns shrieking. The Newport tank farm burst into flame with a series of explosions that shook the ground and sent clouds of black smoke, easily visible from the center of Saigon, billowing into...
Word spread that the U.S. had abandoned the giant commissary at Newport, setting off a frenzy of looting by some 3,000 Vietnamese. As burglar alarms brayed, looters wheeled off shopping carts filled with sugar, medicines and frozen pork chops that began immediately to thaw and drip hi the blazing sun. Cops in the nearby parking lot watched with amusement, occasionally plucking a few items for themselves from passing shopping carts as a kind of exit toll. Finally a truckload of military police arrived, firing M-16 bursts into the air, and the looting stopped...
...thing, there is the logistic problem of how to get the Americans from downtown Saigon to either Tan Son Nhut Airbase (five miles distant) or another possible evacuation site, Newport, a cargo area near the port of Saigon. During the rush last week to get home before the special 24-hour curfew was imposed, traffic in Saigon was her-ringboned at every intersection. What then might happen in the midst of the real hysteria that will almost surely come in the capital's final hours...
There is the danger that the Communists will shell the airports. There is also the grim possibility that South Vietnamese forces will turn their guns on Tan Son Nhut, Newport, or even the American embassy's small rooftop heli copter pad if the Americans make a move to evacuate. Given the anti-Americanism that flared in Danang and Nha Trang before they fell, it is hard to say who might pose the greater threat-Communist enemy or South Vietnamese friend...