Word: saigon
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...Rubin knew them as a sergeant in the U.S. Special Forces from 1962 to 1964. There are about 30 longhouses in the village, with wooden piles underneath them to keep out floods and give the pigs, chickens and children a place to play. (When Americans and Saigon troops resettled Rhade tribesmen in small houses after taking their land for military purposes or for refugees from the North, they found that the Rhade slipped away, back to longhouses where there were neighbors to talk to.) Y Blo, the sorcerer, tries to keep the spirits friendly. Grandmother Pan, who divides up village...
...lives of Rubin's Rhade are no longer determined just by their own actions, even combined with the weather and the poverty and lack of sanitation that kill their children. Outsiders affect their lives too, now--Buc, the barber who joined the NLF when he learned that the Saigon government was encouraging men to grow their hair long; Sergeant Culpepper, the medic who solemnly affirms that American medicine is as good as scorpion urine; Colonel Quoc, ambitious and rising fast in the Saigon command but terrified of his astrology chart and unwilling to endanger his career by resisting...
...MOST RECENT Vietnamese refusal to submit to overweening power appeared last week, shrouded in the six points of the Provisional Revolutionary Government's latest peace proposal. Like the cease-fire, like the proposals of the Saigon government, the PRG's proposal called for the establishment of a Council of National Reconciliation to supervise national elections. The sticking point is the PRG's insistence that the elections be free--its refusal to hold them until Saigon's censorship ends and its permitted press coverage, until it can campaign openly for its candidates, and until communists and non-communist believers in democracy...
Like the American officials, the Saigon government was right. The PRG's proposal refused to acknowledge the realities of the situation--the grip the Saigon government continues to maintain on some areas of South Vietnam, and the American aid that lets this grip continue--just as Vietnamese resistance refused to acknowledge all the apparent realities of the last 27 years...
DESCRIBING HIMSELF as "an old-fashioned, liberal humanitarian," who has battled for world-wide prison reform both as a public servant in the New Deal and in the Foreign Service, Martin insists that the allegations against the Saigon government are not true. He said he ordered his embassy staff to conduct a through study of all accusations against Thieu shortly after he took over last year. According to Martin the investigation showed that South Vietnam's civilian prison population is about 35,000--roughly the same per capita population as found in U.S. prisons...