Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...Vann, retired from the Army, was back in Viet Nam as a civilian "pacification officer" for the Agency for International Development. He opposed Westmoreland's attrition strategy because he believed it resulted in needless U.S. and Vietnamese casualties. The U.S., he argued, should reform the corrupt Saigon regime and woo the peasantry. Despite his role as gadfly, Vann rose through the system, ultimately becoming the top U.S. adviser for central Viet Nam and the first civilian, according to Sheehan, ever to command U.S. troops in wartime...
...young Vietnamese mistresses (each of whom was kept ignorant of the other for years) "satisfied him so completely that he could no longer look at ((the war)) as something separate from himself." Sheehan's conclusion is as sobering as it is powerful: Vann, like the U.S. leaders in Viet Nam he had once criticized so adroitly, was finally consumed by his own illusions...
...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...