Word: southeasterly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...freedom against Communist aggression? Or were they anti-Communist crusaders who committed atrocities against a land of peasants? Were the North Vietnamese under Ho Chi Minh austere and virtuous folk heroes, or murderous, Stalinist totalitarians who committed barbarities far worse than those of the Americans and South Vietnamese? Was Southeast Asia a line of dominoes waiting to fall, one after another, before the sinister push of Communism? Or was the region a complexity of nationalities, all different, with mutual historic antagonisms that predated the war and will endure when its 100th anniversary rolls around? Were the Americans a collection...
...this time were looting the embassy. A man's arm smashed through the window of the door leading to the rooftop helipad. A Marine jerked the arm down smartly onto the broken glass, and as the Marines waited for their deliverance, they alternated between studying the sky to the southeast and raking arms across the glass to keep the Vietnamese at bay. A Chinook-46 escorted by six Cobra gunships came fluttering in from the sea. The Marines dropped canisters of tear gas onto the crowd below, and then they boarded their Chinook. But they had also gassed themselves...
...technically, of course, the country was out of it by the time of the final collapse. But the loss itself was not as traumatic (for Americans, anyway) as the way that the war was fought, the way it was perceived, and peculiarly hated. The struggle was waged, savagely, in Southeast Asia. But it was also fought in America, in American institutions, in the American streets and, above all, in the American conscience...
...Americans by day and killing them by night, duplicity was the chief weapon of survival. Lyndon Johnson never leveled with the American people about his intentions in the war. He wanted his Great Society too much, he wanted to win both the War on Poverty and the war in Southeast Asia. And Johnson's problem remained America's problem for years: the nation somehow never quite squarely looked at Viet Nam and asked itself what it was doing there. A certain legerdemain was the official style of Viet Nam. Americans deliberately tried to fight without stirring up war passions...
...that history has played itself out in Southeast Asia has considerably complicated some of the old simplisms of the era, and therefore changed some old opinions. The North Vietnamese, whom Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos once called "the Prussians of Southeast Asia," have imposed a grim, repressive regime throughout the country, but most forcibly upon the South. Ambitious and militaristic and given to a Stalinist style of dogmatism, they have turned the South into a police state. They have even abolished the old National Liberation Front, which they had long billed as the voice of the people in revolutionary South...