Word: saigon
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After the fall of Saigon the victorious General Vo Nguyen Giap's advice to his men was to "uphold the spirit of socialist labor, and together with the rest of the people zealously take part in economic reconstruction." The soldiers never got the chance. The promised demobilization of Hanoi's forces has yet to take place. As a result of Viet Nam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, more than 200,000 troops are tied down in that country. Another 50,000 have become an apparently permanent occupying force in Laos. Those expeditionary forces are merely the most...
...some deceptive ways Saigon seems not to have changed. The nostalgic visitor can still order a Grand Marnier Souffle in a good French restaurant or go to the Rex Hotel on Saturday night and dance with a lissome girl in a pastel ao dai. But such moments are illusory. The Marxist regime of the North makes its presence felt down to the naming of streets and buildings. The elegant Caravelle Hotel is now the Independence. The city's raffish main street, Tu Do (Freedom) has been renamed Dong Khoi (General Uprising), commemorating the Communist takeover...
Gone is the excess of the war years, when American G.I.s crammed Saigon's bars for instant companionship with girls who sipped "Saigon Tea" as packs of Vietnamese motorcycle cowboys roared through the streets. Now the signs of hard times are everywhere. Once well-to-do matrons slip into Tu Do's antique shops to sell family porcelains and ivory for cash. Beggars haunt the streets by day. At night, scores of vagrants sleep on the steps of the old National Assembly...
Outside the former capital, evidence of the ten-year war remains starkly apparent across the Vietnamese landscape. Sixty miles north of Saigon in An Loc, now called Binh Long, the twisted debris of Jeeps and armored cars lies rusting in the sun. Bunkers have collapsed. Abandoned shell casings and brittle gas masks litter the barren ground. No other town in the South suffered so severely during the war. In the spring of 1972, when it was encircled by the Viet Cong, at least 1,000 artillery and rocket rounds fell on An Loc every day. Today only a handful...
Apart from such physical damage, some of the saddest human legacies of the war are the re-education camps, where Saigon's military men, bureaucrats, suspect lawyers and doctors have been incarcerated to be "rehabilitated" into right-thinking citizens. Officials admit to having 20,000 in the camps, but one informed foreigner in Saigon insists that more than 200,000 are still confined...