Word: viets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...along the route, looking like a seedy version of a TV SWAT team. Most carry 12-gauge pump guns or rifles (some with bayonets), and several big old boys are bulging out of blue bulletproof vests. They look mad. "I walked point for 31 days in a row in Viet Nam," says a young black marcher. "I was tense, but not scared. That's how I feel today...
Solzhenitsyn is right in his denunciation of the double standard of morality that prevails in the academy. Contrast the silence about the genocide in Cambodia and about repression in Cuba and Viet Nam with the stormy agitation about South Korea or South Africa. Solzhenitsyn is right in decrying our failure of nerve. He is saying that any society that makes mere survival the be-all and end-all of life will sacrifice everything that makes life worth living. He is warning us that whoever values comfort, property or security above freedom when it is threatened will lose not only their...
...dotted with spikes holding the sun-bleached skulls of would-be refugees who were shot down by Khmer Rouge frontier guards. With considerably greater ease, others manage to evade the purgatory of Pathet Lao rule by crossing the Mekong River, the poorly guarded frontier between Laos and Thailand. From Viet Nam, thousands of refugees -the so-called boat people-have sailed to Thailand or Malaysia in overcrowded junks. An equal number have died in the attempt...
...still they come. Last month 4,752 Vietnamese succeeded in joining the 450,000 refugees who have successfully escaped from Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos since the Communist takeovers in 1975. The most recent escapees have been the Vietnamese and Chinese who were fleeing Hanoi's harsh new crackdown on private property and trade, which has resulted in large-scale unemployment and serious food shortages. On the average, 1,400 Laotians swim or sail across the Mekong every month, while only 60 Cambodians make it across their booby-trapped frontier in a desperate run from the mass executions...
Many of the Vietnamese refugees have been subjected to extortion several times. First, illegal ship brokers in Viet Nam demand 20 to 35 taels of gold ($6,000 to $10,500 on the Saigon market) to put a family of six on a fishing junk with 150 other people. When the ships near the Thai coast, Thai naval patrols sometimes climb aboard and rob the refugees of their remaining money and belongings. At least 1,000 boat people from Viet Nam are currently living in abject squalor on a stretch of beach in Songkhla, near the Malaysian border. These refugees...