Word: nguyen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Thieu had another caller on April 20: Nguyen Van Toan, commander of the ARVN third corps. Says Tran Can Van, Thieu's Minister of Housing who was at the Presidential Palace that day: "Toan normally swaggered around, but that day he was like a robot, in a trance. I said, 'Hello, General,' but he didn't answer. He kept walking toward Thieu. Thieu was really tough, one of those guys who, if you looked right into his eyes and tried to shoot him, you wouldn't be able to pull the trigger. But that day when Toan came in, Thieu...
Huong's moment in the sun was brief and illusory. The communists had announced in advance that they would not deal with him. Throughout the seven days of his presidency, South Vietnamese politicians and their American and French advisers intrigued furiously to arrange another transfer of power. Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, a former head of government and advocate of dead-end resistance, alternately got the impression from American visitors that he was being urged to stage a coup and fight to the last, or that the U.S. wanted him to smooth the way for Big Minh to take over...
...timing, says General Vo Nguyen Giap, the top North Vietnamese commander, "the key was April 21, when Thieu resigned. Then I knew, we all agreed, we had to attack immediately, seize the initiative." That night at the NVA's forward headquarters in Loc Ninh, 75 miles from Saigon, General Van Tien Dung, commanding the armies moving on the capital, gave the go-ahead to start the climactic offensive...
...General Tran Van Tra, operations commander for the final push, ordered his columns to move into the city from five different directions.They had waited, says Tra, because "our main purpose was to seize Saigon, not to kill people. We didn't want to stop the evacuation." In fact, Nguyen Huu Hanh, who had come out of retirement as an ARVN brigadier general to join Big Minh's government, says "it was our troops" that fired at least some of the tracer bullets so prominent in accounts of the helicopter flights the previous night. "They were angry...
...party leader Le Duan promised a television and a refrigerator in every home within 10 years. Instead, there followed what Vietnamese call "the 10 bad years," during which orthodox communist policies and a costly occupation of Cambodia made Vietnam one of the world's poorest countries. In 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, a southerner, took over with a call for gradual reform. In 1989, as communism seemed to be collapsing elsewhere in the world, Vietnam flung open its doors to foreign investment. The economy has been growing at an annual rate of 7% to 8% over the past three years...