Word: saigon
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...when he had got "peace with honor." But the possibility of honor seemed to have vanished somewhere in the terrible course of things. War, once history's stirring, Homeric pageant, degenerated into futility and rout, and bodies dangling from the skids of the last helicopters out of Saigon...
Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to dozens of towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on celebrating only death. After the merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered out, they struck with a fierceness and bloody destructiveness that Viet Nam has not seen even in three decades of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of South Viet Nam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against airfields and military bases, government buildings, population...
...Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too big or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. South Viet Nam's capital, which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered by house-to-house fighting...
...actual assaults took the U.S. and South Vietnamese military by surprise. In that sense, and because they continued after five days of fighting to hang on to some of their targets, the Communists undeniably won a victory of sorts. In the raid on the poorly defended U.S. embassy in Saigon, they embarrassed and discomfited the U.S., still coping with the stinging humiliation of the Pueblo incident. They succeeded in demonstrating that, despite nearly three years of steady allied progress in the war, Communist commandos can still strike at will virtually anywhere in the country...
...Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker opened the white reinforced-concrete complex last September, few American missions ever settled into more seemingly impregnable quarters. Looming behind a 10-ft.-high wall, the six-story symbol of U.S. power and prestige is encased in a massive concrete sunscreen that overlaps shatterproof Plexiglas windows. Saigon wags soon dubbed it "Bunker's Bunker...