Word: arvn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ARVN casualties were certain to increase still more with the opening of a third front in the Central Highlands. There, the Communists had waited until Saigon pulled a seasoned airborne brigade out of the Kontum area and dispatched it to the hard-pressed provinces near the capital. That left a U-shaped string of firebases on the ridges overlooking the eerily quiet approaches to Kontum and along the Poko River Valley largely in the hands of one of ARVN'S weaker divisions, the 22nd...
...Poko Valley's peace was shattered by a 30,000-man North Vietnamese force that included the 320th Division, a veteran outfit that had fought at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. One by one, the ARVN bases fell to the North Vietnamese; the losses included a string of seven artillery positions on aptly named Rocket Ridge, which looks down on Kontum 25 miles away. None of the terror-stricken ARVN units put up much of a struggle, but few faded as ignobly as the 1,200-man garrison at Tan Canh, the forward headquarters of the troubled 22nd...
...Canh's ordeal began with a two-day artillery barrage. At one point, the Communist fire was coming from 16 different locations, many of them abandoned firebases where the North Vietnamese had captured ARVN'S 105-mm howitzers intact. By night, Tan Canh's terrified defenders gaped at an extraordinary sight across the valley, as Communist tanks advanced, along with supply trucks that boldly kept their lights turned on. "For a while," said one adviser, Lieut. Charles Vasquez, "it looked like a Los Angeles freeway. All across the ridge line I could see a glow from...
...advisers; the overloaded chopper staggered to nearby Dak To, where it was forced to set down. (Six of the advisers and four crewmen died when another chopper that had come to pick them up at Dak To was shot down shortly after taking off.) In all, some 600 ARVN troops were dead or missing after the collapse. Said Captain Richard Cassidy, one of five advisers who survived the disaster: "Tan Canh fell because ARVN never got off its ass and fought." The word out of Saigon was that the regional commander, flamboyant Lieut. General Ngo Dzu, had suffered a "heart...
...Communists obviously meant to rebuild the broken Viet Cong, shat ter Saigon's pacification program and destroy confidence in ARVN-in short, to end the relative peace that the regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu has enjoyed ever since U.S. and ARVN troops broke up the Cambodian sanctuaries in 1970. Thus, in Saigon the offensive is not considered to be the "final battle" that Richard Nixon called it last week. Rather, it is beginning to be called the start of the Third Indochina War, succeeding the first war waged against the French in the 1940s...