Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years ago this month, the North Vietnamese swept down the map like the blade of a guillotine. They came in full divisions, with artillery and tanks. They banged across the countryside like Patton. It was no longer the endless, hallucinatory Viet Nam at all, but blitzkrieg, Western war, all of those years of inconclusive struggle finished off briskly in a short, surreal spring...
...South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu appealed for the American help to which he was entitled by the Paris treaty--and to which South Viet Nam had grown addicted. But the U.S. Congress, long since weary of Viet Nam, refused it. On April 21, Thieu resigned and a few days later flew to Taipei, reportedly shipping out a retirement fund of 3 1/2 tons of gold...
...toward the end, the Americans tried to evacuate some 240 orphans, and their plane crashed in a paddyfield outside Saigon; only 100 or so survived. That seemed to be the fate of even the best American intentions in Viet Nam. As an early French colonialist reported home from Viet Nam in the 19th century: "Everything here tends toward ruin...
Questions persist that once seemed, at least to the Left, to have simple answers. Did the people of South Viet Nam really want Communism? The 1 million people who have risked their lives to escape the regime have stated their opinion. Did the American bombing of Cambodia, as some contend, really cause Pol Pot's unthinkable holocaust? A Khmer Rouge leader and theoretician named Khieu Samphan actually formulated the ideological foundation for the genocide long before the Americans started bombing. Pol Pot, once in power, set in motion the "Year Zero" program that led to the extermination of one-fourth...
...Viet Nam, small and remote and poor, translated into an enormous presence in the American imagination. A backward agricultural country became the theater of one of the great psychodramas in American history. America absorbed Viet Nam into itself. The war brought into brutal view the discrepancies of social class that Americans have always preferred to maintain as a kind of dirty half-secret. Viet Nam was, for America, essentially a class war. The children of the poor and the lower middle class tended to do the fighting. The children of the privileged tended to get draft deferments...