Word: saigon
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...also writes books--prolifically. He has published at least 27, and is now working on a 28th. At the moment, he is on a national tour to publicize his latest, Grasshoppers and Elephants (Urizen Books, 256 page, $4.95), an account of the two months preceding the liberation of Saigon. It is not the first book he has written on the Vietnamese struggle. One of the others, Viet Nam Will Win(1968), was widely circulated by the anti-war movement in this country, and it will not be the last (he is currently working on a history of the Vietnamese people...
...tactics of the Vietnamese guerrillas during that final offensive. On the whole, Burchett says, the Western press failed miserably to cover the war--and this argument has been supported in a series of books by American correspondents, who agree that their inability to speak Vietnamese and their location in Saigon kept them from one whole side of the war. The Western press "never understood the nature of the war," Burchett says, and it is hard to take real issue with...
...area where Burchett was supposed to be with nerve gas. (Apparently, the U.S. authorities thought Burchett could disclose the whereabouts of American prisoners of war.) Burchett is aware of the risk he ran: he refers several times in Grasshoppers to Paul Leandre, a French journalist whom Burchett claims the Saigon police killed because he revealed the use of particularly hideous weapons against civilians. But he shrugs off any claims to heroism, saying simply, "Well, I didn't find out 'til long afterwards [about the attempts to capture...
...agents play by the old-boy-network rules. Last week Random House published Decent Interval, a 592-page book by Frank Snepp, 36, an eight-year CIA veteran who had been a senior analyst in Viet Nam and was one of the last Americans to leave Saigon as it was falling to the Communists in 1975. Snepp charges that the CIA and the State Department inexcusably botched the evacuation. He claims that the U.S. not only abandoned about 60,000 Vietnamese who had served American agencies, including, in some cases, the CIA, but also failed to destroy secret intelligence documents...
...freedom to travel wherever military transport would take him-and his timing was fortuitous. His year in the country coincided with some of the war's fiercest struggles-Tet and the battle for Hue, the siege at Khe Sanh and the Viet Cong's May 1968 Saigon offensive. Although he regularly cursed his own bravado, Herr made a point of being wherever the action was hottest, convinced that the war's "secret history" must exist there: "Somewhere on the periphery of that total Viet Nam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear...