Vietnam [antikvár]

I confess that when I went to Vietnam early last February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official. Finding it is no job; the Americans do not dissemble what they are up to. They do not seem to feel the need, except through verbiage; e.g., napalm has become 'Incinderjell', which makes it sound like Jello. And defoliants are referred to as weed-killers - something you use in your driveway. The resort to euphemism denotes, no doubt, a guilty conscience or - the same thing nowadays - a twinge in the public-relations nerve. Yet what is most surprising to a new arrival in Saigon is the general unawareness, almost innocence, of how what * we' are doing could look to an outsider. At the airport in Bangkok, the war greeted the Air France passengers in the form of a strong smell of gasoline, which made us sniff as we breakfasted at a long table, like a delegation, with the Air France flag - our banner -planted in the middle. Outside, huge Esso tanks were visible behind lattice screens, where U.S. bombers, factory-new, were aligned as if in a salesroom. On the field itself, a few yards from our Boeing 707, U.S. cargo planes were warming up for take-ofF; U.S. helicopters flitted about among the swallows, while U.S. military trucks made deliveries. The openness of the thing was amazing (the fact that the U.S. was using Thailand as a base for II