Word: saigon
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...nearly one million troops on the Chinese border, was unable to prevent China's openly announced punitive expedition into Viet Nam. The U.S. lost its own direct influence in Indochina in 1975 when the remnants of the once mighty American presence there abandoned the crumbling citadel of Saigon...
...since the disintegration of South Viet Nam and the fall of Saigon four years ago had Southeast Asia witnessed such a swift and stunning shift in political power. Faced with the invasion of Cambodia by twelve Vietnamese divisions totaling 100,000 men, the Democratic Kampuchean government of Premier Pol Pot hunkered down in Phnom-Penh and pledged itself to annihilate the oncoming "Vietnamese clique." Within hours after that brave statement, Phnom-Penh had fallen, the Pol Pot government and many of its soldiers were in flight, and foreign diplomats together with nearly 700 Chinese and North Korean advisers were beating...
...Green Vietnamese soldiers were replaced with seasoned troops. Dissident Khmer were welded into a fighting force that would take part in "spontaneous people's uprisings." Most-important, the operation was assigned to Army Chief of Staff General Van Tien Dung, the tactician who directed the lightning conquest of Saigon...
Writing about the Saigon battle in his memoirs, Dung revealed that the opening attack on the highlands town of Ban Me Thuot was originally intended as no more than a probing operation. But the South Vietnamese army proved so weak that the test turned into a full-scale assault, which finally resulted in Saigon's fall...
Abandonment is a word that echoes through the Rand study, and the Vietnamese argue that U.S. withdrawal left them not only short of supplies but psychologically helpless. As Barry Zorthian, former minister-counselor for information of the American embassy in Saigon, said after reading the Rand study: "It pulls together the inherent contradictions in our relationship, that love-hate. There was a Vietnamese way of doing things and an American way of doing things. And we did neither." One of the Vietnamese officials concluded more tersely: "To sum up, the war was lost from its inception...