Word: panic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is no overt panic, but Saigon's 3 million residents, and the countless refugees streaming into the already overcrowded city, are shaken, afraid, even desperate. "We have nowhere to go!" cried a Saigon bar girl. "I am frightened, but what can I do? I have bought rice and dried fish. When the Viet Cong come, I will lock the door and wait...
...tickets abroad. The Chinese of Cholon, long the city's most sagacious businessmen, are shuttering their shops and slipping away to the coast, where they hope to find ships that will take them to Malaysia. The scenes at Saigon's banks are reminiscent of the financial panic that gripped Shanghai shortly before it fell to the Chinese Communists a quarter-century ago. Each morning hordes of Saigonese besiege the banks to withdraw their life savings. Almost to a man, Saigon's Indian haberdashers have switched to money changing. At one point the piaster fell...
...large measure the refugee tide could not be explained in such rational terms. "It was hard to say what started it," said a Catholic priest who had escaped from one of the suddenly lost provinces of South Viet Nam, "but panic set off panic." The flight seemed to overtake everything in its path, engulfing military commanders as well as shopkeepers, peasants and schoolteachers. It uprooted entire towns and villages overnight, causing even greater fear. It mercilessly tore families apart and destroyed the trust and friendship that had been built up between individual Americans and Vietnamese during the past decade...
Sheer contagious panic aside, for most people the immediate motive probably was to escape the fighting, to keep from getting caught in a murderous crossfire. For a variety of reasons, many South Vietnamese had cause to fear their own armed forces. After ARVN abandoned one town last month, the South Vietnamese air force promptly flattened the place with bombs. In city after city, marooned South Vietnamese troops were running wild. A British diplomat noted: "The civilian refugees have as much to fear from the vanquished soldiers as they do from the victors...
...children, many Vietnamese adults who have good reason to flee their country seem to have been lost in the shuffle. The South Vietnamese government is not issuing passports except in "special cases"-such as the orphans. Saigon officials are worried that a mass exodus would touch off panic among those left behind. Clearly, however, people who were connected with the Thieu regime or with American organizations could be the victims of reprisal if the red flag goes up over Saigon. The U.S. recognizes that as many as 1 million people might have to look to its shores for refuge...