Word: saigon
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...When am I going home?" asked twelve-year-old Ya Hinh, just eight weeks after arriving in the suburban New York home of Janet and Louis Marchese. Hinh, called Keith by the Marcheses, was one of some 2,000 Vietnamese children airlifted to the U.S. in Operation Babylift as Saigon fell to the Communists in the spring of 1975. He had learned to say "mother," "father" and a few other English words quite quickly. But Mrs. Marchese, wife of a New York City policeman, was torn between her desire to adopt the boy officially and her awareness that his real...
...rush to get the children out of Viet Nam, there was often no great concern about technicalities like proper identification or release forms from parents. Recalls Bobby Nofflet, who worked with the U.S. AID agency in Saigon in those hectic days: "Three, six, nine babies would be left in front of the agency, mothers begging us to take them. There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?" Children also were dying of malnutrition in the orphanages at the time. "When you see that, you don't care what goes...
...long tradition of foreign policy megalomania--the idea that the nation was embarking on a crusade for world-wide "democracy" and that we should somehow want or be entitled to "raise Manila, up, up, up, until it is just like Kansas City." The U.S. ambassador to Saigon departed Viet Nam the way he would have entered 20 years before, in a helicopter from the embassy roof between rounds of NLF artillery fire. The image of a fleeing Graham Martin should have taught us a hard truth: that no matter how much we talked about indigenous liberal "democratic" elements in underdeveloped...
...Hanoi recognized the reduction of U.S. aid to the Saigon government as a key factor in the war's outcome. Says Dung: "Nguyen Van Thieu was forced to fight a poor man's war." He adds that Saigon's "firepower had declined by nearly 60% because of bomb and ammunition shortages. Its mobility was reduced by half, owing to the lack of aircraft, vehicles and fuel...
...expected the first attack of the offensive to be either in Tay Ninh province, near the Cambodian border, or farther north in Pleiku. Hence the Communists' decision to launch the initial thrust against the Central Highlands city of Ban Me Thuot. That came as a complete surprise to Saigon and led President Thieu to his hasty decision to withdraw his forces from the Central Highlands. Dung calls Thieu's decision a "grave strategic mistake." Thereafter, he says, Hanoi's main problem was moving fast enough to maintain the military initiative. For example, the Communists sent a commander...