Word: saigon
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...passed—Watergate came and went, Saigon was abandoned and Nixon resigned—college students became more and more willing to work within the institutions that their predecessors had fought and protested so vigorously...
...Broadway theater, the new millennium has started on a note of musical diminuendo. With the demise of "Cats," the soon-to-be-missing "Miss Saigon" and the lack of any new hits from Andrew Lloyd Webber or the "Les Miz" team in years, the era of the Brit-generated mega-musical seems all but over. Happily, straight plays seem to be filling the gap. Demanding dramas like Michael Frayn's "Copenhagen" have become unlikely Broadway hits, while the Manhattan Theatre Club, an off-Broadway stalwart, successfully transferred two strong works, "Proof" and "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife...
...many reasons Bogota is not Saigon is that Congress has strictly limited how many U.S. troops can be on the ground. The 300 U.S. trainers in Colombia are handcuffed into training and escort missions only. U.S. drug warriors in the region have had to reach elsewhere, into the shadowy world of State Department contractors, to fill many jobs. It's an expensive decision. Chopper and crop-spraying contract pilots can make $100,000 a year. And because the U.S. doesn't want to send active-duty soldiers, the narcowars have come to serve as a retirement plan...
...military historian John Keegan ended his classic study The Face of Battle (published a year after the last helicopters lifted ignominiously off the American embassy roof in Saigon) by saying that, what with Vietnam and nuclear weapons, "the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself." It is pretty to think so. What we have left, in any case, is chronic but localized messes--and terrorism of the McVeigh or bin Laden variety...
...Thanh Phong, Kerrey and his men were on a "behind-the-lines" mission, but they were also not very far from Saigon. In the Vietnam war there was no frontline; the enemy was everywhere. Not in uniform, not always armed, not always a male of fighting age. And if a whole South Vietnamese village supported the Vietcong, providing a base, logistics and intelligence to soldiers who were often their husbands and sons, then where exactly was the line drawn between civilians and enemy personnel? It was that reality that gave rise to oft-quoted statement by an American officer...