Word: battalion
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...statistics: the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies suffered only 456 dead in the previous week-the lowest toll since January 1965-and even when U.S. air cavalrymen surrounded three Red regiments near Bong Son last week, the bulk of the Communist force slipped furtively away. The enemy battalion that was finally trapped put up a good fight-but reluctantly (see following story). The Reds were saving their strength for the monsoon, waiting for the rain-rich thunderheads that hamper American air strikes. And they were doing a lot of their waiting in the sanctuary of neighboring, "neutral" Cambodia...
Elsewhere, other elements of Operation Abilene fared better. As the operation concluded at week's end, units of the Big Red One, the Royal Australian Regiment and New Zealand Artillery Battalion counted a total of 59 enemy killed, 22 captured, and a 900-sq.-mi. area cleared of Viet Cong-at least for the time being. That left two major sweeps still in progress: Operation Nevada, a search-and-destroy mission by several U.S. Marine battalions in the Cape Batagan Peninsula, which has so far killed 42 Viet Cong, and Operation Fillmore, a sweep through Phu Yen province...
...from the records and statistics. At 76, Survivor Chapman is one of a dwindling group of 150 old comrades who share his memories. He is a historian (at the Universities of Leeds and Pittsburgh), but his academic work contains nothing so grim and memorable as this memoir of his battalion of the Royal Fusiliers...
Chapman was briefly a staff officer, map-making in a safe chateau but, to his own mild surprise, he found that he was happier when he was back in the trenches. At the Armistice, he discovered that he had so completely identified himself with his battalion that he refused demobilization to spend a year with the Army of Occupation. The experience is so subtly conveyed that the reader is not surprised. Chapman's war is told without bitterness (though with an almighty disdain for the political bunglers and profiteers and civilian patriots who prolonged the agony), and this sets...
...book survives as more than a memoir of a battalion; it stands as a funeral service for a generation, the somber record of all men who not only bore themselves well in the face of a great calamity, but found their lives enhanced by it. There is no rhetoric; Chapman puts out no flags, but guards the human honor of his battalion like a mourner concealing his grief from strangers at the graveside...