Word: baing
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...Smith's office is a meticulously detailed desk calendar. But one day remains strangely empty. The only notation for Saturday, June 17-when the crowd will be at its peak-is this: ba da boom! An old Shinnecock expression, no doubt...
...that final week, the Northern armies had encountered little ARVN resistance. A unit commanded by General Ly Tong Ba did put up a fierce fight at Cu Chi, about 12 miles from Saigon, through the night of April 28 and on into the afternoon of the 29th. But, finding his position untenable, Ba decided on a fighting retreat to Hoc Mon, a bit closer to Saigon. "I bring my staff with me, working, fighting," says Ba. "Oh, the bullets just...
...ambushed Ba's troops on the road to Hoc Mon. Ba remembers yelling "Shoot, shoot, shoot!" at his force, only to have a captain tell him, "Sir, we cannot shoot. I think it's all over now, sir." At NVA command, Ba's men meekly laid down their weapons, while the general and his bodyguard hid in a flooded rice paddy, lying face up with eyes half shut and only noses poking above the murky water. That bought Ba less than 24 hours of freedom. He tried to get through the NVA lines by passing himself off as a farmer...
...Ba's stand at Cu Chi was a model of lionheartedness compared with what the NVA columns entering Saigon proper found on April 30. The South Vietnamese soldiers confronting them did not just flee; they threw away everything that could identify them as soldiers and tried to melt into the general population. Bui Tin, an NVA colonel and journalist, says he spent that last morning "with one of our units taking a fortress that had been held by a South Vietnamese division. All the South Vietnamese soldiers who had fled had abandoned their uniforms. Everywhere you looked on the road...
...MUDDY TRACK 25 MILES OUTSIDE Hanoi lies the Ba Chua Khoa Pagoda. There, one recent afternoon, stood a taxi driver imploring the goddess of the treasury to ward off bribe-hungry police; a woman who had ridden 120 miles on her motorcycle to get the goddess's blessing for a new karaoke bar; and Hoang Ngoc Dung, a budding real estate magnate. "I came here at the beginning of the year so I'd make a lot of money," said Dung, a former schoolteacher. Afterward "I invested $40,000 in a piece of land outside Hanoi and sold...