Word: saigon
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WHEN THE LAST Americans left Saigon last spring, Vietnam quickly faded from the public view. Newspapers moved on to other questions, radicals found other causes to fight for. Even the Vietnamese refugees who came here have dropped out of sight. Though movies like Hearts and Minds kept some sense of guilt alive and reinforced a determination to avoid repetitions of the war in Southeast Asia, very little attention has been paid to the task of reconstructing a country whose entire social and economic structure was destroyed by 30 years of war. On the whole, Americans seem to have written...
...South Vietnamese lived in rural areas. By 1970, more than 65 per cent of the population was concentrated in the cities as a result of the American government's forced draft urbanization program--a program which left the Vietnamese countryside defoliated and riddled with 30-foot-wide bomb craters. Saigon's population skyrocketed from 450,000 to nearly four million by the time we left. Three million South Vietnamese were left unemployed. Many had worked for Thieu's army or civil bureaucracy, or in American-financed factories processing American raw materials. Two hundred thousand Vietnamese women had become prostitutes, while...
...holedup in Boulder Creek, listening to tapes of Jimmy Carter speeches and reading about himself in Doonesbury. Thompson was best in writing about thugs and goons, from San Bernadino's Hell's Angels and the burnt-out geeks of Las Vegas, to the inhabitants of the Oval Office. Covering Saigon at the time of NLF victory, when Nixon was gone, Thompson seemed trivial, almost offensive. At the same time the presidential tapes were revealing that H.E. and P. even talked like Thompson ("Take Pat Gray out and shoot him (laughter)"; "Fuck the lira, there's no votes in that...
...view of recent foreign visitors, life in Saigon is remarkably unchanged. The big question is how long that situation will last. The leaders of the P.R.G. have left no doubt that they intend to build a new socialist society in the South modeled on that of North Viet Nam. At least 25,000 North Vietnamese cadres have been imported to run everything from government bureaucracies to the telephone and bus companies...
...there are an estimated 1 million unemployed. Thanks to a bumper crop in the Mekong Delta (plus some imports from the North) the government has been able to supply ample rice at low prices. But most canned goods are now beyond the reach of ordinary people. Gasoline for Saigon's swarms of Hondas is officially rationed, but it can be obtained easily on the open market for about twice the rationed price, which...