Word: saigon
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ALMOST TWO YEARS to the day after the last Americans left Saigon, the State Department announced last week that it would drop its opposition to Vietnam's application to join the United Nations, and promised to lift a trade embargo as soon as diplomatic ties are formally established...
...briefing sessions, to the point of using Nixon mannerisms and hand gestures. There was only one Nixon answer for which the briefing staff had not prepared Frost, says Zelnick. It came when Nixon blamed Congress for having failed to resupply the South Vietnamese, and thus causing the fall of Saigon. Says Zelnick: "I didn't think he'd have the balls to say that...
...Today it serves as a jail for common criminals. Another visitor noticed on sale in a shop a stack of pocket-size packages of Kleenex, obviously liberated from a U.S. Army PX in the South. His escort explained, "That is merely a souvenir from Ho Chi Minh City [as Saigon has been renamed]." Our guides unabashedly confessed to listening to the Voice of America. They prefer country-and-western music and Hollywood show tunes to The Ballad of Norman Morrison, a Vietnamese song commemorating the war protester who burned himself to death on the steps of the Pentagon in November...
...among her recollections of the American presence in Vietnam, when Emerson describes a meeting with a North Vietnamese diplomat in Paris, or a Vietnamese soldier, that form the most moving parts of the book. These people, and others like Don Luce, the American reporter who revealed the existence of Saigon's tiger cages, or an American deserter on his way to Sweden, struggled to bring an end to the war. They are the heroes in a book dominated by sadder characters, American veterans and their families whose lives have been destroyed by death or mutilation, and by Emerson herself--people...
WINNEPS AND LOSERS is a book for those Americans, like the CIA agent, who have tried to forget. When Emerson first visited Saigon in 1956, when Vietnam was still a French colony, the streets were quiet, lined with trees and women in silk and parasols. When she returned there in 1970, Saigon had become a city of refugees and prostitutes catering to the American army. Vietnam needs no reminders of the American experience in Indochina. But America, apparently, does, and the detailed portraits of individuals Emerson gives us are far more moving than statistics could be. It is the small...