Word: battalion
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Offered a rare opportunity to wipe out the Communist Viet Cong's crack 514th Battalion, some 2,000 U.S.-supported government troops last week trapped 500 of the enemy in a swamp ringed with coconut and banana groves, moved in for the kill. But a single Viet Cong platoon managed to hold off a timid government battalion for five hours. Other government troops failed to contact the enemy before dark. Instead of slipping away in the night as usual, the Viet Cong blasted right through the government lines and escaped, killing 22 government soldiers, wounding...
...Reds. While the political game went on, the Viet Cong-just as they did in the confusion after Diem's fall-lost no time stepping up the war. Unleashing their biggest offensive since November, the Reds increased small-scale harassments and terrorism, launched a rapid-fire series of battalion-size attacks. In Vinh Long province, the Viet Cong murdered the mother of the army's intelligence chief for the southern Mekong Delta. In Saigon, a Communist-planted bomb exploded in the Playboy Bar, killing five Vietnamese and wounding 40 other patrons, including six Americans...
Kenya's Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta took a harsher line. In the shade of a wild fig tree near Nakuru, where the 11th Battalion of his Kenya Rifles had mutinied, a military tribunal sorted out sheep from goats. Each of 500 suspects was trotted out at British bayonet point, briefly but intensely quizzed, then adjudged either "black" (an active, armed mutineer), "grey" (doubtful) or "white." (Worried about the color code's racial implications, the tribunal first tried a red-green-yellow system but found it too confusing.) All told, the tribunal tagged 100 black sheep. Kenyatta promised...
...which were besieged by guerrillas last week in the village of Idiofa. The soldiers' only help was a light plane that flew over, lobbing grenades at the rebels. With Congo Army Commander Joseph Mobutu away on vacation, the government seemed paralyzed. Finally, at week's end, a battalion of Congolese commandos was airlifted to the provincial capital of Kikwit...
...objective was to destroy a guerrilla training camp and supply depot on the island, which was defended by a battalion of Viet Cong troops. As orange tracer bullets streaked into the sky from Communist foxholes, a turbine-powered, UH-1A ("Huey") support helicopter, laden with rockets, fluttered down to "zap" the enemy. Suddenly the Huey was hit, and exploded in a ball of flame; the four Americans aboard, and their Vietnamese crewman, never had a chance. As the battle blazed, the desperate Viet Cong poured murderous fire into the other whirlybirds. Fourteen more were hit but limped back to Saigon...