Word: saigon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...MISS SAIGON...
...abandoned to a nightmare retribution. That harrowing image from the newsreel of the mind not only inspired London's biggest new musical but is actually re-created onstage. While special effects generally promote escapism rather than emotion, the scenes of the hasty and haphazardly callous U.S. retreat from Saigon reduced many in last week's opening-night audience to tears...
They were weeping because literature had done what it does best: define a catastrophe in human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help...
...sound track with '60s pop songs, as if Viet Nam were just another trip down nostalgia lane, like high school mixers and afternoons at the malt shop. Both have taken a predominantly male experience and leavened it with female characters and soap-opera story lines closer to Dallas than Saigon...
...Vietnamese forces attacked Da Nang, South Viet Nam's second-largest city, and seven other major towns, breaking the Tet truce. Within 24 hours they hit 36 of 44 provincial capitals and overran almost all of the former colonial capital of Hue. Communist shock troops penetrated the heart of Saigon to attack the U.S. embassy and presidential palace. They drove General William Westmoreland into a windowless command bunker. "What the hell is going on?" Walter Cronkite wondered aloud as he prepared the evening's newscast. "I thought we were winning this...