Word: saigon
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During the Viet Nam War, the U.S. Special Forces relied on some loyal comrades: the Montagnards, mountain tribesmen who proved to be ferocious fighters. But after the fall of Saigon in 1975, the "Yards," as their Green Beret trainers fondly called them, were left to fend for themselves in their jungle homeland. Last week, following a dangerous eight-year odyssey across hostile territory in Laos, Kampuchea and Viet Nam, some 200 Montagnard men, women and children reached...
...intrepid pilot of the silk scarf and goggles school, the kind of man who could (and did) attempt to set a new speed record between Paris and Saigon, who could crash in the Sahara and survive, rescued by Bedouins. He was also the acclaimed author of such international best sellers as the novel Night Flight (1931) and the children's tale The Little Prince (1943). As if these achievements did not generate sufficient glamour, Antoine de Saint- Exupery also managed a death that was both heroic and mysterious. At 44, he had won permission to fly photoreconnaissance missions over...
...program director called a wartime comrade, Quan Le, who commanded the South Vietnamese explosive-ordnance forces during the war, escaped from Saigon in 1975 and settled in Dallas. Le, 54, rounded up 19 strong, young Vietnamese and Laotians from the area and piled them into three cars that arrived in Hawthorne in two days...
...Frontier withrenewed patriotism. "When Kennedy sounded thebugle, I was more than ready to follow." But theturmoil of the late '60s taught Larsen, who coveredthe tumultous 1968 Democratic convention inChicago for Time magazine, that the solution forchange "was to openly challenge the system." Asbureau chief for Time magazine in Saigon in theearly 1970s, Larsen grew disillusioned with "theanarchy" he saw in almost half of the AmericanGI's on drugs. "Kennedy would have beenpessimistic himself...
Most of the prose poems in this memoir of Viet Nam amount to Polaroids hastily snapped before the mind forgets what it has witnessed: children rioting over candy at a Saigon orphanage; a bar girl singing to a G.I. ("You give me baby./ I give you V.D."). But as the authors pass out their pictures, they also provide moving autobiographies. Wendy Wilder Larsen reconstructs the early '70s from the American point of view; Tran Thi Nga offers a far more unusual perspective. The daughter of a Vietnamese mandarin, she twice became the second wife in polygamous marriages, first...