Word: saigon
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...established stars (among them: Don Henley and Jimmy Page), he is breaking in such new musical talent as Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians and the Australian ingenue Kylie Minogue. Geffen has three films under way, including Men Don't Leave, starring Jessica Lange. His next Broadway candidate is Miss Saigon, a musical by the composers of Les Miserables...
...middle of A Bright Shining Lie, it is difficult to disagree with this bold assertion. Perhaps Sheehan overstates his case when he credits Vann with saving the Saigon regime from collapse, not once but twice: after the 1968 Tet offensive and again in 1972. Nevertheless, in Sheehan's characterization Vann emerges as a personality to rival the most complex creations of fiction. He was a brave soldier, a brilliant analyst, a born maverick and a savvy political infighter. He was also, as Sheehan eventually learned, a shameless hypocrite with a "secret vice" he could not or would not control...
Vann first arrived in Viet Nam in 1962 as an Army lieutenant colonel. He quickly learned that the South Vietnamese forces he was advising suffered from "an institutionalized unwillingness to fight." When his superiors refused to heed his reports and force Saigon to engage the Communist guerrillas, he took his case to the small cadre of resident reporters, including Sheehan and David Halberstam of the New York Times. By the time Vann's one-year tour ended, the reporters were convinced that he had jeopardized his military career by speaking out. Halberstam, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Viet...
...Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian "pacification officer" for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland's attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime...
When Do Van Tron escaped from Saigon to San Jose in 1982, no bank would take a chance on his business prospects. Do lacked a credit history, had no money and spoke no English. Today, however, the 31-year-old refugee publishes a Vietnamese-language newspaper, tools around town in a silver Jaguar and has started plans to build a shopping center. The reasons for his rapid rise: long hours of work, plenty of thrift and $4,800 in start-up capital from an unconventional source. Like thousands of other immigrants, the budding entrepreneur tapped an ethnic loan club...