Word: viet
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...BRIGHT SHINING LIE by Neil Sheehan (Random House; $24.95). In a riveting portrait, John Paul Vann, a major architect of U.S. policy in Viet Nam, emerges as a man who embodied the contradictions of his ill-fated mission: a courageous do-gooder with a dark streak of amorality...
...first time debated on television, and politics began an almost metaphysical transformation: the external world was miraculously reconvened as powdered images upon America's internal screen. Electrons fetched out of the air poured the circus directly into the living room, into the bloodstream -- just as they would inject Viet Nam into the center of American consciousness...
...Americans, or of remembered innocence. The candidates, youngish veterans, connected them to the days of their last good war. The election of 1960 was the end of America's postwar political order and the beginning (starting 1,110 days later) of a long, tumbling historical free fall (assassinations, riots, Viet Nam, Watergate, oil embargoes, hostages in Iran, the economic rise of the Pacific Rim nations, on and on -- glasnost, China) that has created an utterly new world and left America searching for its place therein...
...Thailand afflicted with many of the tensions that have brought down paradisal Asian escapes like Sri Lanka and the Philippines. On the map, the kingdom is ringed by countries that sound ominous: the People's Republic of Kampuchea, the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, the Lao People's Democratic Republic and the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma. Yet the land itself, for all its cyclone-cycle coups, is a pocket of relative calm and one of Washington's surest friends: the more the government changes, the more the monarchy stays the same...
Those who shun such metropolitan diversions tend to escape to Chiangmai, the cool northern town in the hills with something of the impenetrable allure of old China. Here one imagines the ghosts of opium warlords in the nearby Golden Triangle, or catches the sense of Viet Nam as one floats along the Mekong. Other, less adventurous souls simply sink into one of Thailand's seaside dreams: Pattaya, the "sea, sand and sin" city just 90 minutes from Bangkok; or Phuket, a Tahitian strip of bungalows along the emerald-green Andaman Sea that is home to Club Med and a host...