Word: panic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...taken out by a U.S. helicopter along with the American officials he had come to interview. William McWhirter, who provided much of the reporting on the refugee exodus for this week's cover narrative, has twice had to flee cities as they fell in confusion and panic: first Danang, last week Nha Trang...
...posed almost as great a danger to security as the Communist divisions inexorably sweeping toward the coast. In some places, groups of soldiers acted more like conquerors than the remnants of a routed army. Just before the Communists took Danang, there was looting, pillaging, murder and madness. In their panic to get away, soldiers elbowed past women and children to board the planes and boats that managed to evacuate 90,000 people from Danang in the hours before the city fell to the Communists. In some cases civilian refugees were killed by troops stampeding away from the enemy. "True enough...
...Small Viet Cong units have begun infiltrating the capital's suburbs. Moreover, because they are attacking fixed defensive positions, the Communists have the tactical advantage. They could attack Tay Ninh west of Saigon and then move southward into the Mekong Delta, thereby encircling the capital and breeding even more panic there. Or they could try to move troops down the major routes from the north directly into the capital. U.S. intelligence, in fact, reports that two full divisions began moving south from North Viet Nam in recent days, leaving no more than three divisions to defend all of North Viet...
...early last week 200,000 refugees, many of them defeated soldiers from farther north, had arrived in Nha Trang, doubling the city's usual population. Everyone had heard of the agony of Danang, not only of its loss to the Communists but of its civilian panic and, worse, the violent behavior of its soldiers. The city made an effort to seal itself off from the war. Newly arriving refugees were barred from entering the town...
...refugees, there are also thousands of South Vietnamese peasants who have been and will continue to be friendly to the NLF, the army of South Vietnam, which has been abandoning, looting and even killing and raping civilians seems to be creating much of the atmosphere of panic and frantic retreat in Vietnam...