Word: battalion
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...taxes, and no official attention that was more than passing. Then last November, after Diem's overthrow, the Communist Viet Cong arrived. They drove off the garrison, and when the new government made a feeble effort to recapture Hoaimy, the Viet Cong ambushed and whipped an army battalion...
...week's end, General Nguyen Khanh's South Vietnamese troops showed considerable fighting spirit of their own. Whooping and racing across paddy fields, 200 government troops attacked bunkers of the toughest Viet Cong battalion (the 514th) in the Mekong Delta, made the Reds yield their positions. "It was beautiful," said an American sergeant. "The South Vietnamese bounced across that grass like they were in a foot race...
...beginning to look more and more like a full-scale conventional war. Ominously, the Communist Viet Cong are often forsaking the shadowy, hit-run tactics they have heretofore used in favor of challenging the government in set-piece battles. In the past fortnight alone, the Reds have mounted battalion-strength attacks in Tayninh and Kienhoa provinces, as well as the Delta village of Goden. Last week, in Chuong Thien province, they unleashed their biggest assault...
...Civil Guard defenders, and publicly disemboweling the district chief, his wife, infant son and two other officials. When the government counterattacked with 2,000 air-supported troops, the guerrillas pulled out of the village. But instead of fading into the landscape, they were reinforced by a third 500-man battalion, making it the Viet Cong's first regimental-size operation. Then the Communists stood and fought half a dozen battles that blazed for five days, inflicting the heaviest government casualties of any engagement-some 200 dead and wounded. The Reds suffered a similar toll...
Abolish the Holidays. Heating up the war anew, the Viet Cong opened a barrage of almost daily attacks, concentrating on the rice-rich Mekong Delta south of Saigon. Boldly, an 800-man guerrilla force ambushed an infantry battalion near Mocay, shot down a T-28 fighter plane that swooped to the rescue -killing its American pilot-and simultaneously lobbed .81-mm. Red Chinese-made mortars into Mocay itself. But the government got in its own licks, several times counterattacked with refreshing aggressiveness. On a forested ridge near the Laotian border, troops overran a Viet Cong staging camp for infiltrators coming...