Sài Gòn Quotes in The Best We Could Do
“But the month I spent in the Communist North had a very different effect on me.”
“It was true that the Việt Minh had won independence by winning the WAR.”
“But the new society I dreamed of didn’t EXIST.”
“Here there was no freedom of thought, no allowance for individuality.”
“I was fourteen. Sài Gòn represented a whole new world of possibility to me.”
“Who would choose a world that had become so narrow, so poor and gray?”
I imagine that the awe and excitement I felt for New York when I moved there after college—
—must be something like what my father felt when he arrived in Sài Gòn in 1955.
The American version of this story is one of South Vietnamese cowardice, corruption, and ineptitude…
…South Vietnamese soldiers abandoning their uniforms in the street…
…Americans crying at their wasted efforts to save a country not worth saving.
But Communist forces entered Sài Gòn without a fight, and no blood was shed.
Sài Gòn Term Timeline in The Best We Could Do
