Word: saigon
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Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death--and on launching the Year of the Monkey on its malign way before it was many hours old. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out on the ground, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than...
...passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968, at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a company of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one morning and destroyed houses, livestock and all the inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that...
...Marines with rifle butts pounding the fingers of Vietnamese who tried to claw their way into the embassy compound to escape from their homeland. An apocalyptic carnival air--some looters wildly driving abandoned embassy cars around the city until they ran out of gas; others ransacking Saigon's Newport PX, that transplanted dream of American suburbia, with one woman bearing off two cases of maraschino cherries, another a case of Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Out in the South China Sea, millions of dollars worth of helicopters tossed overboard from U.S. rescue ships to make room for later-arriving choppers...
...quintessential image of World War II was the flag raising at Iwo Jima. For Vietnam, it was a helicopter scrambling off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon. Apocalypse Then: the chaotic endgame of the Vietnam War fatally charged the atmosphere of the 1970s, a decade in which America discovered limits to its power and wealth. For a nation long accustomed to expansion--material, geographic and psychological--this was something new and unwelcome. Only the Great Depression--an apt name--had presented a comparable challenge to national optimism, and that was followed by the reassuring wartime victory and postwar boom...
Although Tai says she received a "good education" in Saigon's French schools, the realities of the brewing civil war did intrude, if indirectly...