Word: saigon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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McWhirter, who joined TIME after graduating from Princeton University in 1963, is a seasoned observer of social upheavals. He was stationed in Saigon during the last days of the American involvement in Viet Nam and reported on Iran from the overthrow of the Shah until the arrival of Ayatullah Khomeini. Before moving to Miami to take charge of TIME's new Caribbean bureau last fall, he served for 3½ years as bureau chief in Johannesburg, a base from which he covered the painful birth of Zimbabwe as a nation. While he traced the subtle web of oppression...
...moral emptiness in the eddies of Viet Nam recalls the funk and disillusion that followed World War I. Someone has suggested that the U.S. after Saigon fell was something like Germany after 1918. The analogy, farfetched and literally false, contains a touch of truth. World War I was hard to beat as an example of dunderheaded, pointless slaughter. The men who fought it hated it just as much?and even in the same vocabularies?as the men who fought in Viet Nam. They went into it with the same illusions: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, Horace told...
Well, everyone is getting older now. A child who was born during the Tet offensive of early 1968 is already a teenager. The last helicopter went whumping ignominiously off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon more than six years ago. And the Viet Nam veterans are not kids any more. They are losing hair and getting fat and sighting down the road toward middle age. Why is it that so many of them, so many of those Americans who fought the war, still return to it with sharp, deep, sometimes obsessive memories?tonguing the bad tooth, re-enacting the most...
...Corson was reassigned to a desk job at the Pentagon, and proceeded to write The Betrayal, a blistering attack on U.S. military strategy in Viet Nam and the corruption of the Saigon government. Corson was scheduled to retire the day before the book was published, but a task force was convened to comb its pages for security violations; suddenly he was threatened with a court-martial. That threat passed, though Corson got a "nonjudicial reprimand." Since his retirement he has kept his sense of outrage over how the grunt was treated both in Viet Nam and at home. "We barely...
Your story about possible P.O.W.s in Laos [June 1] describes retired Lieut. Colonel James ("Bo") Gritz as "a former Army public affairs officer who served in Viet Nam." The implication is that his service consisted of briefing the press in Saigon, and that he has no business now leading commandos into Laos...