Word: arvn
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...main thrust?and the one shrouded in mystery?developed in rugged, sparsely populated and Communist-infested Military Region I (formerly known as I Corps). There the U.S. command massed a total of 20,000 ARVN and 9,000 U.S. troops, plus at least 600 choppers. The juggernaut advanced westward on, above and around Route 9, an all-weather dirt road running 40 miles across South Viet Nam into Laos. At Khe Sanh, road graders rolled across the red clay plateau as troops patched one shell-torn runway and built a second to handle up to 40 big C-130 transports...
...PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT. The caveat reflected congressional prohibition of the use of American ground troops outside South Viet Nam. One shirtless G.I., bathing in a tributary of the Pone River, which, forms the border with Laos, said with a smile: "Don't worry, this is Vietnamese water." ARVN troops, too, pulled up short of the border...
...cross-border thrusts aimed at immobilizing the Ho Chi Minh Trail seemed imminent. One obvious target lay right down Route 9?Tchepone, a Communist staging area and a key control point for the Ho Chi Minh Trail 25 miles inside the Laotian panhandle. A second possibility was that ARVN troops would be helicoptered to the mountainous Bolovens Plateau, which forms the western flank of the trail. Their likely objective: Attopeu and Saravane, two Laotian river towns captured last spring by North Vietnamese troops, apparently in an effort to secure the trail's flanks and provide a starting point...
...presaged trouble in the coastal cities of Hue and Danang. But MACV asserted that it also posed a "serious threat" to U.S. troop withdrawals and that a "preemptive offensive" was planned with "limited objectives." Few reporters in Saigon doubted that the jargon was a verbal screen for a direct ARVN assault on the Ho Chi Minh Trail...
...Cambodia closer to war than it had been," says TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Jon Larsen, "we inevitably moved it from a secondary concern to one almost as intertwined with our interests in Indochina as South Viet Nam. The same will be true of Laos." Another problem is that if ARVN is to be called upon regularly for cavalry duty in Cambodia, and possibly Laos as well, it might be spread perilously thin. U.S. air, artillery and logistic support will be needed to bolster ARVN's actions beyond its borders, even if no U.S. ground troops are sent in. Finally, Abrams...