Word: saigon
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Call up Eddie Adams' 1968 photo of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, the police chief of Saigon, firing his snub-nosed revolver into the temple of a Viet Cong officer. Bright sunlight, Saigon: the scrawny police chief's arm, outstretched, goes by extension through the trigger finger into the V.C.'s brain. That photograph, and another in 1972 showing a naked young Vietnamese girl running in arms-outstretched terror up a road away from American napalm, outmanned the force of three U.S. Presidents and the most powerful Army in the world. The photographs were considered, quite ridiculously, to be a portrait...
...been more than 14 years since the last Americans were lifted off the embassy roof in Saigon, a televised vignette of ignominy that is still replayed in the U.S.'s memory. Now Viet Nam has suffered its own setback: after more than a decade of trying to defeat a rural insurgency in Cambodia, a Vietnamese expeditionary force has given up and gone home...
...MISS SAIGON...
...abandoned to a nightmare retribution. That harrowing image from the newsreel of the mind not only inspired London's biggest new musical but is actually re-created onstage. While special effects generally promote escapism rather than emotion, the scenes of the hasty and haphazardly callous U.S. retreat from Saigon reduced many in last week's opening-night audience to tears...
They were weeping because literature had done what it does best: define a catastrophe in human terms, at the primal level of the G.I. helpless within the compound and the woman he pledged to marry trapped outside. Miss Saigon, from the creators of Les Miserables, is too long and wayward, unevenly acted and loaded with cliches. But the failings hardly matter because the show takes on a powerful subject, explores it without easy answers and ends in true tragedy -- disaster wrought by those who meant only to help...