Word: viets
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Every day for a decade, images of the faraway country came flooding into the U.S. on tape and film and photographic paper, pictures of Viet Nam by the hundred gross. Bit by visual bit, Americans accrued a vivid (if distorted) portrait of the country where their sons and husbands were dying, a terrifying multimedia montage of nervous teenage heroes behind sandbags, of Saigon's beleaguered charm, of a green, green countryside with helicopters hovering everywhere...
...Singapore, was sailing from that city to Hong Kong last July when his 80-ft. schooner was seized by armed Vietnamese. Mathers, 41, and his companions--two Frenchwomen, the two sons of one of them, and an Australian engineering student--were taken into custody for allegedly crossing into Viet Nam's territorial waters. While his friends were allowed to go free last fall, Mathers was charged with spying and held for almost nine months in solitary confinement...
Mathers estimates that he was interrogated more than 50 times during his captivity. The Vietnamese accused him of mapping their coast and of gathering intelligence for hostile powers. Two weeks ago he was given a choice of becoming a spy for Viet Nam or being sentenced to up to five years in prison. Mathers refused the spying assignment. "I assumed I was on my way to prison." But the next day the Vietnamese told him he would be set free, and last week he was finally released...
...years after the fall of Saigon, the debacle in Southeast Asia remains a subject many Americans would rather not discuss. So the nation has been spared a searing, divisive inquest--"Who lost Viet Nam?"--but at a heavy price. The old divisions have been buried rather than resolved. They seem ready to break open again whenever anyone asks what lessons the U.S. should draw from its longest war, and the only one to end in an undisguisable defeat...
Pondering these questions, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argues, citing Viet Nam, that "before the U.S. commits combat forces abroad, there must be some reasonable assurance that we will have the support of the American people and . . . Congress." Secretary of State George Shultz replies that "there is no such thing as guaranteed public support in advance." The lesson Shultz draws from Viet Nam is that "public support can be frittered away if we do not act wisely and effectively." And this open dispute between two senior members of the Reagan Cabinet is mild compared with the arguments among policy analysts...