Word: saigon
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...even whispering the word "evacuation" would set off a Danang-style panic. But the ambassador also believed more fervently, and longer than almost anyone else, in the possibility of an accommodation with the communists. As late as April 28 he was cabling Kissinger that he foresaw Americans staying in Saigon for "a year or more." By then, Gotterdammerung was well under...
Though any of several dates could be picked as the beginning of Saigon's final agony, April 20 stands out. For one thing, it marked the fall of Xuan Loc, a small town 38 miles northeast of the capital and the site of just about the last prolonged and bloody battle of the war. If ARVN, the South Vietnamese army, could not hold there, it was unlikely to hold anywhere...
...Saigon on April 20, Martin called at the Presidential Palace for a long interview with President Nguyen Van Thieu. The South Vietnamese leader bore no small share of the blame for the impending catastrophe: it was his order to the army to withdraw from the Central Highlands without much of a fight that touched off the final rout. In the last few weeks, he had shuttled from one villa to another, increasingly out of touch with his aides and allies, and with reality. He even speculated that bombing strikes by American B-52s might halt the NVA's onslaught. Hanoi...
...loaded with rockets and shells. Bui Tin, a colonel and journalist for an NVA newspaper, arrived in Danang on April 21, en route from Hanoi to join the final push. Two days later he flew south on a helicopter that, he says, "was filled with new military maps of Saigon that had been rushed into print and flown from Hanoi" to guide the invaders...
...timing, says General Vo Nguyen Giap, the top North Vietnamese commander, "the key was April 21, when Thieu resigned. Then I knew, we all agreed, we had to attack immediately, seize the initiative." That night at the NVA's forward headquarters in Loc Ninh, 75 miles from Saigon, General Van Tien Dung, commanding the armies moving on the capital, gave the go-ahead to start the climactic offensive...