Word: saigon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After four years of being urged to stay out of Viet Nam's larger cities, there they were: the last U.S. servicemen, buzzing about Saigon on driver-pedaled cycles, flirting with bar girls, buying souvenirs and generally staging the biggest shopping, sex and sightseeing spree ever seen in the city...
...last minute, about 400 other G.I.s were frantically trying to arrange to get their fiancees and wives back to the States. The waiting room at the U.S. Consulate in Saigon was packed with nervous Vietnamese women and mixed-blood children, all lined up to receive U.S. visas...
...Vietnamese entrepreneur, known to G.I.s as "Miss Lee," talked about the future of her business-Saigon's Magic Fingers Steam Massage and Barber Shop. At one time, Miss Lee had 60 girls at work; now she has only seven. "Everything fini," she lamented. No one seemed more downcast than "Momma Bich," who played hostess during the 1960s to some of the wildest parties ever seen in Saigon's back rooms. U.S. Special Forces troops used to lavish $1,000 apiece on parties that lasted a whole weekend. Now fat and aging (she is 32), Momma is left with...
...Pentagon East," the sprawling U.S. military headquarters in Saigon, the only thing working was the air conditioning. The eerie silence, broken only by the clacking heels of an occasional soldier, resembled a scene from the last reel of On the Beach. Desks, chairs, maps and bookcases remained in place, but many of the offices were empty. Most of the 1,200 civilian bureaucrats and technicians who will eventually occupy the building were already on the job, but they slept, played chess or just looked out the windows at the crumbling concrete bunkers, now covered with bougainvillea...
Once a charming French city of 500,000, Saigon reeks of the war that has officially ended. On Vo Tanh Street, west of Tan Son Nhut, paraplegic war veterans sell stolen army uniforms. Their wives and daughters are for sale on Cach Mang Street. Now that Saigon is jammed with more than 2,000,000 refugees, for whom there are no jobs, crime is becoming epidemic. Murders have increased by 50% since 1970, and robberies have jumped...