Vietnamese

There seems to be about a 50-50 chance that the Khmer Rouge will take over Cambodia again within the next year or so -- with help from President Bush and other Americans still fighting the Vietnam War. The last time it was in power it killed between one million and three million of its countrymen.The numbers are inexact because no one could count the skulls and skeletons littering the killing fields. The mass murder began on April 17, 1975, when the Khmer Rouge, crazed communist nationalists determined to return their country to an imagined 12th-century purity, came out of the jungles and took Phnom Penh.

''K [Kissinger] came in, and in the discussion covered some of the thinking about Vietnam and the P's [President Nixon's] big peace plan for next year, which K later told me he does not favor. He thinks that any pullout next year would be a serious mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the '72 elections. He favors a continued winding down and then a pullout right at the fall of '72 so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.

PIEDMONT, Calif. -- Dear Sen. John McCain: I am a gook, even though I was not one of your North Vietnamese captors, who tortured you and other American prisoners of war more than 30 years ago. I am a gook, even though I was not a Viet Cong sympathizer who helped the North Vietnamese army battle Americans and South Vietnamese soldiers. I am a gook, even though I was not allied with the South Vietnamese military who fought alongside American GIs in that unfortunate war in which you and other Navy pilots were shot down.

Franklin Bryan Gatch Jr., an accomplished land-use planner, foster parent and benefactor to a Vietnamese family he knew TC from his wartime Army intelligence service, died Saturday at Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin. He was 49.Mr. Gatch, who was named four months ago as executive director of the Wilmington Metropolitan Area Planning Coordinating Council in Delaware, suffered a heart attack while vacationing with his family in Bethany Beach.He had been a resident of Millington in Queen Anne's County, where he and his wife, Paula, were raising two foster children.

In the fall of 1969 in Bing Duong province of Vietnam, a North Vietnamese soldier sat at a table in a large underground tunnel, taking notes. "Do you know about the heavy artillery warning yet?" he scribbled in English as an American soldier's voice crackled over his radio. "Negative," another American responded. "The coordinates are 550 600, 3/5/31 until 1130 hours," the first soldier said. In the margin, the North Vietnamese soldier wrote "heavy artillery = B52 Strike, at [11:30 a.m.]"

Vietnamese pho is rapidly replacing chicken soup as the universal cure-all. Or maybe it's just me. In this Worst Winter Ever, where the colds all last three weeks and the threat of snow never ends, a large bowl of steaming broth filled with rice noodles and interesting cuts of beef - a soup that you individualize with garnishes served on the side like bean sprouts, fresh cilantro and basil leaves, hot peppers and wedges of lime, not to mention condiments such...

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - The Thanksgiving party at Pho 79, a Vietnamese noodle shop, crackled with the laughter of family and friends who sat drinking and sipping pho - Vietnam's signature minty, beef noodle soup. The reverie ended when an argument between two men in the parking lot led to gunfire and the death of a 26-year-old man. When Virginia Beach police officers arrived, they encountered the confusing din of an unfamiliar language inside the restaurant. Officers struggled to understand witnesses' accounts told in Vietnamese or broken English.

In many cultures, especially Asian, a humble facade hides a fancy home inside. In this case, though, the inside of Pho Dat Thanh (pronounced "Foe Daht Than") in Snowden Marketplace, Columbia, isn't all that fancy, either. A single room, with a small bar to one side near the entrance, features silvery green walls with a tangerine-hued chair rail in the middle and rather non-descript prints above. The tables are bare-topped, with a stainless basket of condiments providing a bit of color.

LOS ANGELES -- Topanga artist Chris Burden remembers being struck by "how one-sided" the Vietnam Memorial was when he happened to see a half-scale replica in Plexiglas in 1985.Not only were 57,939 war victims listed only on one side of the Washington monument, the names represented only American losses -- not Vietnamese ones."I thought there's an image here that we are grieving only for one side," he recently recalled. "I remember thinking it was disturbing."Thus was born the inspiration for "The Other Vietnam Memorial," which turned heads last fall when it was unveiled in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Saigon Palace, 609-B Taylor Ave., Annapolis, (410) 268-4463. Open Mondays to Saturdays for lunch and dinner, Sundays for dinner only. No-smoking area: yes. Wheelchair accessible: yes.Supposedly Saigon Palace was Harrison Ford's favorite place to eat when he was in Annapolis shooting "Patriot Games." Hard to believe when you consider all the good Maryland-style seafood he might have had, but there you are. I will say the first thing you'll notice when you enter this small Vietnamese restaurant is a snapshot of the movie star and the owner.