Word: px
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Except for the fact that she is 55 years old and a woman, Novelist Mary McCarthy would be an Angry Young Man. Last year she reported from South Viet Nam, turning her fierce, polemic prose on everything she saw, particularly the Americanization of Saigon ("a gigantic PX") and the moral corruption that, in her view, followed. Now it is North Viet Nam's turn. Last week the New York Review of Books published the first installment of her account of a recent 18-day visit. She was a special guest of North Viet Nam, and it shows. Her report...
...isolated outposts, and by airdrops to ships on duty near Yankee and Dixie stations in the South China Sea. About 11,000 are packeted to troops by the Army's Library Field Distributing Center. Half of these copies are donated by TIME; servicemen who can get to a PX snap up their copies at a special 250 rate. Many say they rely on TIME to fit their own unit's action into the picture of overall strategy. About 5,000 copies each week are also given free to hospitals and rest-and-recuperation centers, and put aboard planes...
...spent a week in Saigon getting USAID identification cards, a px ration card, a Vietnamese driver's license, seeing Saigon and getting used to the look and feel of siege. At night I sampled the restaurants, favoring the old French Colonist haunts. The best of a good lot was a purely Vietnamese place, the My Canh, a floating restaurant tied up on the Saigon riverfront. It made news last year when a VC satchel charge ripped it and several patrons apart. As much as I enjoyed eating there, there was an indecent feeling about consuming sweet and sour pork, Carling...
Despite the necessary ugliness, there is a great deal worth seeing in Saigon. The markets (black and legitimate) are never dull. Of course there are the perpetually delicate, self-possessed Vietnamese women floating by in their silken ao dais. And for sagging American spirits there are always the px's which can meet almost any need...
Taipei, which has few cultural monuments apart from the great collection of Chinese art in the National Museum, has gained R & R status from the complaisance of its girls and the excellence of its food. Hong Kong is the shopper's paradise ("the world's biggest PX," as one R & R-er described it); it is thronged with purposeful G.I.s looking for camera and tape-recorder bargains offered by its freeport status, and perhaps an instant custom suit for $35 ordered and fitted within 48 hours. Hong Kong is also the most popular R & R center...