Word: saigon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unhappy battlefield of Viet Nam, of course, will prove the chief test of the present Administration. Nixon, the onetime hawk, is determined to disengage. He has begun to lessen the U.S. involvement here and has put pressure on the Saigon government to seek peace. It can be argued that he might have done more-some dramatic move after the inauguration, a cutback in American-initiated ground actions. On balance, however, Nixon has done about as much as could be reasonably expected, considering the political, diplomatic and military perils of the situation. At any rate, he has completely changed the official...
Plastic Leis. Just before leaving Viet Nam, the 3rd Battalion stood through an elaborate three-hour send-off ceremony on the baking tarmac at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airbase. A gaggle of aodai-clad Vietnamese girls pranced out to drape them with plastic leis and give each of the departing troops the country's yellow and red flag with a two-foot pedestal. Defense Minister Nguyen Van Vy spoke his gratitude at length-in Vietnamese, later translated. The U.S. commander, General Creighton Abrams, offered his congratulations: "You have fought well under some of the most arduous...
Those anguished words were written by Nguyen Lau, a softspoken, London-educated Vietnamese journalist who until three months ago published Saigon's English-language Daily News. After the authorities discovered that he had discussed his views on peace with a Viet Cong agent, Lau was arrested. Last week, in a dimly lit Saigon courtroom, a military tribunal sentenced him to five years imprisonment for "actions detrimental to the national security...
...predicament is not unique. He is a member of South Viet Nam's educated elite, which has long opposed any and all regimes in Saigon. These days, the country's intellectuals are on particularly bad terms with the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu over the issue of peace and how to achieve it. Thieu regards men like Publisher Lau with unconcealed loathing. Not long ago, he told a group of hamlet officials: "You are more patriotic than these intellectuals who drink four glasses of whisky a day. Although they are well educated, they are slaves...
...hardly novel: Pham Van Nhon, the publisher of Le Vietnam Nouveau, is serving a five-year sentence for associating with Communists. Truong Dinh Dzu, who recommended negotiations with the Communists when he ran for the presidency in 1967, has been in jail for a year. Considering that the Saigon regime has been at war for years, abridgment of some democratic freedoms is entirely natural, up to a point. Still, the situation makes it difficult to create a liberal opposition to Thieu's government, says Tran Van Tuyen, one of Lau's three defense laywers, and "into this vacuum...