Word: saigon
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...temporary refuge for most of the Americans and Vietnamese evacuated from Saigon was the U.S.-administered island of Guam in the Western Pacific-"where America's day begins," as tourist brochures endlessly remind visitors. For thousands of Saigon evacuees, a curious mixture of delicate old Vietnamese ladies, Cholon Chinese, middle-aged American contractors and former Saigon bar girls, their days began last week at some extraordinary sites, among them: "Tin City," a neat compound of one-story barracks at Andersen Air Force Base, and Asan, a rusting, long-abandoned Seabee camp...
Food was no problem. Marketplaces were filled with green vegetables and raw meat, peanuts were piled high on the pavement on Le Loi, the busiest boulevard in Saigon, and exotic aromas bubbled up from the hot food stalls in front of Saigon's cathedral. Young women crowded the lobby of the Mini Rex Theater every matinee to see Brigitte Bardot in Boulevard du Rhum. Roving photographers armed with Polaroid cameras still tried to hustle a few piasters out of foreign correspondents they mistook for tourists. The piaster rate, perhaps the best war barometer in town, shot up from...
With the Communists closing in, Catholic priests and Buddhist monks gathered at the Basilica, Saigon's cathedral, for the first joint service in the history of South Viet Nam. Prayers were offered to Buddha, in the words of one monk, "to seek harmony and protect and help the Vietnamese people. It would be very good to help us sufferers...
...Marcos worried about offending these potential friends. Almost immediately, those who had begun to settle into Clark's "Tent City" were hustled aboard Air Force C-141s and a chartered American Airlines 747 for the 1,600-mile flight to Guam. Soon C-141s were arriving directly from Saigon almost every half-hour with as many as 190 passengers aboard...
Relieved to have escaped from Saigon and amused at the oddities of American barracks life, the Vietnamese stood patiently in line to receive rice, meat stew and bread served on paper plates, and milk. In the separate huts, men and women, the elderly and the very young, Americans and Vietnamese were thrown together with no privacy. Most preferred to be outside, chatting with friends, watching children play on the swings, or strolling among the huts. "I don't feel good about leaving Viet Nam," said Mrs. Gene Till, the pretty Vietnamese wife of an American computer programmer...