Word: saigon
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...mass exodus from Saigon really began three weeks ago, a huge Air Force C-5A transport took off for the U.S. with a load of orphans andaccompanying adults. Less than an hour later, the plane crashed in a paddy, killing 206 of the more than 300 passengers aboard. Last week TIME learned that Government investigators have agreed on the probable cause of the disaster: a defective latch on the door of the rear loading platform...
...explosive ejection severed the elevator-control cables leading to the plane's tall, T-shaped tail. To keep the plane from nosing into a dive, the pilots had to maintain a speed of 325 m.p.h. while turning back for Saigon. But on its landing approach, the giant jet pitched down and crashed...
With the enemy literally at the gates, Saigon last week seemed to be in a state of schizophrenia-and in both phases seemed equally mad. With their inbred fatalism and stoicism, the 3 million residents of the old French colonial capital fought, often in vain, against a rising sense of terror. The result, as TIME Correspondents Roy Rowan and William McWhirter cabled from Saigon, was a strange blend of serenity and fear in the aloof and careless city that had so largely been spared the shock...
With the soldiers and the refugees came rumors and gossip, which sometimes were printed by the Saigon press as though the editors wished they could be true. In this surreal atmosphere, the entire city seemed to have heard that China had invaded North Viet Nam, precipitating a coup in Hanoi and necessitating the withdrawal of seven Communist divisions from the South; that U.S. Marines had landed at Vung Tau, Danang and Cam Ranh. "It is like a dream," admitted a Saigon journalist...
...province of Long Khanh ("a big cemetery of the North Vietnamese aggressors"), although the region was lost. At the fashionable Cercle Sportif Francais, center of the social life of the wealthy Saigonese, champagne was served as usual beside the greenlined swimming pool. At the Club Nautique de Saigon, racing shells got another coat of varnish, as though the joys of summer would never end. The front gate of the My Canh restaurant, where two Viet Cong Claymore mines killed 48 diners in 1965, was being painted a sparkling aquamarine...