Word: saigon
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What the NLF and PRG will do after they take Saigon is as hard to judge as the current state of Da Nang and Hue--any judgment has to be based on NLF statement and past actions. The NLF has said repeatedly that it favors the ouster of Thieu and an immediate tripartite government in South Vietnam and continued North Vietnam control of be the North. That system, however seems likely to be only a temporary one what Vietnamese needs is a unified socialist strong based in cooperative rural communists where still liberties are preserved. There is nothing...
...most important thing for the Thieu government and the United States to accept is the idea that the NLF and the People's Revolutionary Government will be controlling South Vietnam and will need and deserve reconstructive aid. Thieu's government should stop trying to hold on to Saigon: surrender will avoid needless bloodshed. And the United States should focus it efforts on massive humanity aid to be administered by the PRG in its attempt to rebuild the shattered nation. If people want to leave Vietnam the should be allowed to but the primary American responsive now is to help...
...these, and simple war-weariness, were plausible explanations for people leaving their homes, but reporters rarely provided the specific details needed to illuminate or test them. What sorts of people took to the roads? All sorts? Rich peasants? Saigon soldiers families? Did the Saigon army encourage refugees to leave, or order them to leave? Did they expect to return to their homes, and under what circumstances? Whom did they blame for their homelessness...
...apparent Montagnard defection another sign of the end of Thieu, a portent of a new national Vietnamese unity that will embrace racial minorities or just a matter of different groups of tribesmen? The Guardian, a Maoist news weekly, claimed that a French reporter killed last week by Saigon police was silenced for attempting to discuss Montagnard defection to the NLF. Maybe that isn't so; in any case, other reporter haven't discussed the Montagnards much. In general, what the American papers have been best on is not political news of any sort by weird vignettes end horrifying statistics--gruesome...
...Times did get around to explaining Saigon's collapse, attributing it to a "paralysis of command" and a "leadership vacuum." With the point settled in this manner, the Times next day invoked Clio, the goddess of history, and pleaded with every else to just forget about Vietnam. The dead wouldn't mind, the theory seemed to be, and the living could trust in the benevolence of God or the Times's well placed friends to see that the "scenes of blood and horror" that "stun the emotions and make imagination a beggar" didn't recur somewhere else. In the meantime...