Word: saigon
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Popular history tells us that American troops were caught napping when North Vietnam launched the Tet offensive. Yet while Vietnam celebrated its new year, at least one top U.S. Army officer was practically lying in wait. General Fred Weyand couldn't stop American officials in Saigon from throwing a party on Tet's Eve, replete with Chinese firecrackers and a lawn band. Convinced of an imminent strike, however, Weyand kept his troops close to Saigon, and officers in his camp placed bets on the timing. All wagered that the strike would start between midnight...
PLAN TO CLOSE MISSION AT ABOUT 0430 30 APRIL LOCAL TIME. DUE TO NECESSITY TO DESTROY [COMMUNICATIONS] GEAR THIS IS THE LAST MESSAGE FROM EMBASSY SAIGON...
...years down the road, someone will make an honest film denouncing it. ("All Quiet on the Western Front" came a dozen years after WWI ended, "Patton" 25 years after WWII, "MASH" 17 years after Korea and "Platoon" more than a decade after the last U.S. helicopter escaped Saigon.) For another, war gives members of the industrial-entertainment complex - a business designed to offer diversion from the little murders of daily life - to take the world seriously. And that's a spectacle only slightly goofier than movie stars taking themselves seriously...
...even in Saigon you can go too far. In December 2001, the government sent police from Hanoi to arrest Cam at his mistress's house, and then widened the net, trumpeting the nation's biggest organized-crime bust. Since Cam's tentacles reached far into the government, the case simultaneously became Vietnam's biggest corruption crackdown. Two of the 18 government officials on trial with him this month were members of the ?lite Central Committee, the Communist Party's 150-member main decision-making body. One of the accused, Bui Quoc Huy, was Ho Chi Minh City's police chief...
...Cracking down on gangsters and corruption appeals to a population that has resigned itself to these twin evils, and following Cam's arrest, Saigon's newspapers went into a muckraking frenzy, openly asking how far the corruption went and who might be the next government figure to be arrested. After 6 months of that, the government decided that openness about official corruption might not be in the Party's best interest. On June 2002, Vietnam's ideology chairman, Nguyen Khoa Diem, ordered newspapers to tone it down. "They're afraid people are losing their faith in the government," explains...