Word: saigon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO WHEN SAIGON FELL, TEACHING high school. I picked up the paper after work and read it during the bus ride home. So. It was over, almost seven years to the day since I finished my own tour of duty in that already ancient war. When you've served in a war, gloriously or not-not, in my case-you are bound to take an interest in the news that your side has lost. I found nothing surprising in the reports of how effortlessly Saigon had been taken. But there was this picture: a helicopter perched...
...found nothing to be surprised at in the fall of Saigon, of Vietnam itself, it was because the war had already been lost by the time I got there in the spring of 1967. The suspicion that this was so came upon me not as a thought but as a deepening unease at the way we treated the Vietnamese and the way they treated one another. I hadn't been 10 minutes off the plane at Bienhoa before I saw one of our troops abusing the baggage handlers; the bus driver who ferried us to the transit barracks spent most...
...Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, but Vietnam is still with us. A politician's war record--or antiwar record--evokes scorn or approbation; the masterfully manipulative Forrest Gump makes adults weep; we fret over quagmires, and still we can hear the air torn by helicopter blades and see that canted, top-heavy map on the evening news and recall precisely our draft-lottery number or that of our brother or son. Some brothers and sons did not return; they are still with us as well...
...there is a peace that passeth all understanding, Vietnam may be the war that passeth all understanding. In the following pages, as we convey the panic and heroism of Saigon's last hours and describe Vietnam as it is today, as we explore the myths of the lessons of the war and offer a novelist's meditation on its end, we hope to shed some light on a place where memory burns, but darkness still prevails...
What we do understand is ultimately uninspiring. The play doesn't probe deeply into the ramifications of the loss of language, as its title suggests. Instead, Translations becomes a standard love story about two people from different worlds: an Irish "City Mouse and Country Mouse" meets Miss Saigon. This tired tale overwhelms the more engaging juxtapostion of the physical presence of the soldiers with the intangible but overpowering influence of the English language...