Despair in the Empire of Graveyards: Or Gilbert and Sullivan Come to Afghanistan, Depending on Your Perspective

 Via Reborn

Fred of Fred On Everything and his lovely wife in Ajijic. Expatriate’s galore here but I feel just fine walking the streets of Guadalajara and making do with the little Spanish I know and dealing with many who have little or no English.  There are many Spanish who have not married outside their class/race that it is difficult to tell they are not Caucasians and I think most of the time they think that I am from here also. (Though Spanish are considered Caucasian) Very friendly and they are extremely polite in receiving your money and counting carefully when they hand your change back. The weather is more pleasant down here, though only 1 1/2 hours away.  As Fred says it gets almost cold enough that you want heat and almost hot enough to want A/C of which he has none. It’s not cheap though, where new car dealers abound and is about 2 1/2 times more expensive than Vietnam.

My comments concerning the article and although both of us were there until the end, the two of us may have experienced different happenings.

1. My first contact with Fred: I asked him if he remembered the flagrant flowers along the Avenue in Phnom Penh which he did.

2. We knew it was lost April 1st (Personal experience) as the shredders were running 24/7.

3. Anyone could get our with an American. Evacuation.

4. The South Vietnamese were fiercely anti-Communist. (Search Memories Of The Republic Of South Vietnam)

5.  Can Tho fought until the end. THE SUICIDES ON APRIL 30, 1975 

At 8:30 PM, 30 April 1975, his troops still kept the city of Can Tho under control. A delegation of the city people came to see him and convinced him – as he was the deputy commander – that his ARVN forces should not fight to death as they certainly would, because the people were sure that the Communists would spare nobody in Can Tho in order to win. They would not hesitate to shell Can Tho into rubble. General Le Van Hung and the commander, General Nguyen Khoa Nam, dropped their intention to fight to the last bullet. Hung then said farewell to his men, his wife and children before he killed himself by a .45 pistol. It was 8:45 PM, 30 April 1975. 

 6. We destroyed DAO Headquarters at TSN. The structures were wired to make them unusable as we were leaving. Shredding machines had been going 24/7 since the first of April.

 7. Sally Vinyard, the Last American Lady to Leave Vietnam and My Friend for 51 Years

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Forty-six years ago in a previous comedy I was in Saigon, recently having been evacuated from Phnom Penh in an Air America—CIA—Caribou carrying, in addition to me, several ARVN junior officers and perhaps a dozen BUFEs (Big Ugly Fucking Elephants, the ceramic pachyderms much beloved of GIs). America had already embarked on its currently standard policy of forcing small countries into wars and then leaving them in the lurch. In Cambodia this led to the reign of Pol Pot, the ghastly torture operation at Toul Sleng, and a million or so dead. In the unending fight for democracy, casualties are inevitable.

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