Word: saigon
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...after day, as artillery fire thundered a somber greeting from a nearby range, the buses disgorged their weary passengers. Vietnamese refugees were arriving at their first destination in America: Camp Pendleton in Southern California. Small-businessmen and Saigon bureaucrats, their faces etched with fatigue and suffering, their tight-lipped wives stifling tears, their children staring blankly in the bright sunlight, filed into the camp. There they were issued mattresses, bedclothes and kits containing toilet articles, sandals and one candy bar each. Inside the tents and Quonset huts hastily erected for the emergency, the refugees finally gave way to emotions stored...
Despite the screening in Guam, some obviously unqualified refugees reached the U.S. Parts of Pendleton resembled Saturday night in Saigon, as bar girls clad in tight-fitting slacks flirted with Marines. An Air Force officer admitted that the eight women accompanying him were not, strictly speaking, dependents. "I'm not married to any of them, and I'm not related to any of them either," he said. "I met them when I was stationed in Nam, and I felt I had to get them out. The authorities must have known I was lying, but they realized...
...long-run judgment that he would bet on. He lived in an age when rhetoric had not yet been debased. "Peace with honor" was invoked to justify the Christmas bombing of North Viet Nam; "commitment" has become a disputed phrase about what Richard Nixon did or did not promise Saigon. But surely peace with honor includes a refuge for those who, with or without a proper, binding legal commitment, trusted the U.S. for so many years...
...this represents something of an overreaction to the events in Indochina. The surrender in Saigon "is not the beginning of the end in Asia," said one ranking State Department official. "The U.S. is still a Pacific power, and we must demonstrate this with our knowledge and feeling...
...their overwhelming victory. Among the placards carried by 100,000 Russian workers on their May 1 march, only one referred -obliquely-to the event: "Fraternal greetings to the heroic Vietnamese people," it read. The Communist Party daily Pravda was a nonchalant 36 hours late in reporting the news of Saigon's surrender. North Vietnamese diplomats assigned to Hanoi's embassy in Moscow had to seek out Western correspondents for details of their nation's triumph...