Word: piasters
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...woman, caught between a bus and the building when a shell burst, was carried inside unconscious, but only from fright. A European walked down the line asking everybody to sign a 500-piaster note he wanted to keep as a souvenir. Sister Fidema of the Good Shepherd Convent in Saigon knelt over her suitcase and prayed. "I've been here four years," she said later. "These have been good years until this week. But this has been the saddest ever." The day before, 90 children from the convent had been taken out to Tan Son Nhut but had been...
...exotic aromas bubbled up from the hot food stalls in front of Saigon's cathedral. Young women crowded the lobby of the Mini Rex Theater every matinee to see Brigitte Bardot in Boulevard du Rhum. Roving photographers armed with Polaroid cameras still tried to hustle a few piasters out of foreign correspondents they mistook for tourists. The piaster rate, perhaps the best war barometer in town, shot up from 2,000 to 3,900 for one U.S. dollar in four days. For a time, a hooker could be hired for less than $1. But when hopes for a cease...
...returning to normalcy. Stores were open and cinemas were operating, featuring such Hanoi potboilers as The Revered Flag and Battlefield in Quang Due. North and South Vietnamese currencies were both in circulation, but the black-market value of Hanoi's dong increased daily against Saigon's piaster. Looters sold rice from government storehouses and motorbikes and boats left behind by those who had fled. Such enterprise stopped abruptly when Communist soldiers shot ten looters and led others away with hands bound...
...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 to 2,000 to $1; the rate was 800 to $1 only a few days earlier...
...that in the future it will continue to reduce his fund allocations. Yet, as the French scholar Philippe Devillers and an official on leave from the U.S. embassy in Saigon both impressed on me, the only laws that the United States respects in Vietnam are the gun and the piaster. Wars that cannot be won on the battlefield can be dragged on a minimal cost. Thieu may last for another eight years if he can stir up enough support from the right-wing chauvinists, Jean Lacouture, a French scholar and journalist, said...