Word: arvn
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...widely discussed case last spring, Army Lieut. James Duffy was tried for ordering his sergeant to kill an ARVN deserter and record him as a Viet Cong suspect. Justifying his action, Duffy explained: "I know in my case, platoon leaders never got any guidance on treatment of prisoners. The only thing we ever heard was to get more body count, kill more V.C. If you didn't have a lot of body counts, they would think you were a poor unit." The military jurors convicted Duffy of premeditated murder ?then were dismayed to find that he faced a mandatory...
...South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu emphatically insisted. The Laotian invasion, Lam Son 719, had not ended in "defeat, disorder, disaster." Sitting on some ammunition boxes among the pine trees of the cemetery at Dong Ha, an ARVN base seven miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, Thieu told newsmen and South Vietnamese troops that Laos was, in fact, "the biggest victory ever...
Even as Thieu spoke, 45 American helicopters were flapping into Laos for what he called a "new-type operation": a quick raid by ARVN Hac Bao (Black Panther) commandos about five miles across the border into the Communist depot known as Base Area 611. During their 24 hours on the ground, the Panthers killed just one North Vietnamese and found little in the way of enemy supplies. Their main mission seemed to be to let Hanoi know that its Laotian supply lines would never again be safe and to support Thieu's claim that Lam Son was "still going...
Despite Thieu's optimism, it was increasingly clear that the allies had suffered serious losses during the 45-day operation. U.S. intelligence men in Saigon privately confirmed recent reports that the 22,000 ARVN troops committed to Lam Son had suffered close to 50% casualties. Hanoi's forces had been hit hard, too, in terms of supplies that never made it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as casualties. The official, and probably inflated, Saigon estimate stands at 13,863 dead. White House officials maintain that the North Vietnamese are "at the edge of an abyss...
...reason why the operation stalled was that it took six days for General Hoang Xuan Lam, the ARVN commander, to get around to establishing a forward command post inside Laos, where the troops, the B-52s and the other elements could be coordinated. What is more, Lam's staff was riven by jealousies. Major General Le Nguyen Khang, who bosses South Viet Nam's elite Marines and holds a slight seniority edge over Lam, was so miffed when Lam was named to run the Laos operation that he retired to Saigon and turned his responsibilities over...