Word: quoc
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hoang Quoc Bao, 28, was the leader of an 82-mm mortar squad in the North Vietnamese army that marched with Hanoi's victorious troops from Kontum all the way to Saigon. Last year Vietnamese security police burst into his home in the middle of the night, seized him and his two brothers and beat them, warning that they had to leave Viet Nam or be killed. Now he is a refugee, working sugar-cane fields in China and owning nothing but the clothes he wears...
...last spring, many Americans were deeply troubled. Would the refugees aggravate the bloated unemployment rate? Did they carry exotic diseases? How could they possibly fit in? Last week the 100,000th Indochinese refugee was quietly relocated-and the nation hardly noticed. Officially, at least, he was Pham Phu Quoc, 38, a former South Vietnamese army officer who was settled near Racine, Wis., last week with his wife and their eight children...
...that kill their children. Outsiders affect their lives too, now--Buc, the barber who joined the NLF when he learned that the Saigon government was encouraging men to grow their hair long; Sergeant Culpepper, the medic who solemnly affirms that American medicine is as good as scorpion urine; Colonel Quoc, ambitious and rising fast in the Saigon command but terrified of his astrology chart and unwilling to endanger his career by resisting an NLF attack. It becomes apparent, slowly (but quicker than it should, since Rubin at his subtlest is pretty elephantine), that these and other people's interaction...
...catastrophe doesn't rule out heroism--in fact, even Colonel Quoc has his moments of humanity. "I'm not really so terrible," he tells an American colleague. "Sometimes when I pass a beggar I don't spit, and maybe even give him a coin." Fighter Kim, tortured by Americans determined to find out who blew up their friends the week before, strangles a companion whose capacity for resistance he doubts, slits his own wrists and lies down quietly to die. And Grandmother Pan survives the catastrophe to rummage among the rubble for her husband's legs. Maybe in certain circumstances...
...returned to Viet Nam in February 1941, had been away from his native land for 30 years, and the name Ho Chi Minh was only the last in a bewildering list of pseudonyms. Born Nguyen That Thanh (which means He Who Will Be Victorious), he became Nguyen Ai Quoc (He Who Loves His Country) during his poverty-ridden years in Paris. Later, during his travels between China and Moscow, where he studied at the revolutionary University of the Toilers of the East, he was known for a while as Nguyen O Phap (He Who Hates the French...