Word: viets
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When all the cultural prisms were laid one upon another, the effects of distortion and mendacity and ignorance made a clear view of the war extremely difficult. For the Viet Cong, often serving the 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...
...field, the Americans were encouraged to lie about their "body counts" (measuring progress in the war by lives taken, not land taken). Viet Nam gave rise to an elaborate language of deceit. Officialese was done in the Latinate: incursion, attrition, pacification, termination with extreme prejudice. The linguistic underside of that was the flip, sinister slang that the American G.I.s contrived: dinky dau (crazy), numbah ten (the worst), Charlie (the Viet Cong), grease (kill). The antiwar movement built a massive vocabulary of rhetorical excess about "fascist Amerika." Officers lied in writing up citations for their men and themselves. The Viet...
...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 Viet Nam. Though they run one of the poorest nations in the world, the Vietnamese invest their best brains and creativity in the military: they have occupied Cambodia and Laos, resuming a campaign of expansionism that was interrupted more than a century ago when the French arrived to colonize Indochina...
...Viet Nam, the sacrifice and sadness seem always to come wholesale. During the ten years of war with the U.S., 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed. In the decade since the Communists took over, another million have fled the country, sneaking through the bush to Thailand via Laos and Kampuchea, or huddling in boats headed into the treacherous South China Sea. Viet Nam is now quiet and bucolic, the battlefields lush once again. But it is also an anxious, impoverished country, more than a little grim: the terrible random death of war has been replaced by the mean certainties...
...Viet Nam is one of the poorest countries in the world. As a Vietnamese economist explains, the decade of the 1960s was "a fabulous time for development in the Third World. Here, it was the worst time of the war." Energy is scarce. The country's infrastructure is decrepit. Ten years of inflexible Communist dogma have only hobbled the economy further. Four out of five workers farm, but the ancient techniques are pathetically underproductive. By 1979, famine was a possibility, as disastrous typhoons and war with China hit simultaneously. The country now depends on Moscow for $2 billion a year...