Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...republic was baptized in blood. Initially, Ho and French civilian leaders in Hanoi sought to work out a compromise. Their efforts were undermined by colonialists in Paris, and for the next nine years the revolution ground on. In the spring of 1954, after a series of disasters on the battlefield and war exhaustion back home, the French were forced to leave Viet Nam. But Ho failed to secure at the conference table what his troops had won in combat. Under severe pressure from the Soviet Union, he was forced to accept control of only half of Viet...
...Viet Nam?whether guerrillas or regulars from the North?has been their spirit. The young men sent to the South, as U.S. fighting men have painfully discovered, made excellent soldiers. Tough and well-disciplined, they stood their ground under massive American firepower, then rose to charge. And the battlefield was only one test: the struggle southward along the tangle of jungle paths called the Ho Chi Minh Trail often lasted four to six months, during which many perished of disease, malnutrition and exhaustion. If a trooper survived that trek, he had proved himself strong indeed?and there seems little question...
...testimony from the battlefield was that the Communists still preferred shooting to talking. During the last weekly reporting period in late August, U.S. battle deaths totaled 190-somewhat fewer than the 244 killed during the week of the last "high point" earlier in the month. Enemy losses were put at 2,757. Last week U.S. Marines and infantrymen engaged in a number of sharp fire fights, most notably in the rolling hills near Danang and north of Saigon...
...first appeared in newspapers around the world, that anguished exchange by field telephone between a battle-weary young infantry lieutenant on a Vietnamese hill and his battalion commander was disturbingly reminiscent of classic episodes of battlefield rebellion. Ground down to two-thirds of its original strength after five days of sharp combat, a U.S. Army unit-Company A of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade's 3rd Battalion-had balked at orders to advance once again on well-bunkered North Vietnamese positions...
...that "he tried to reason with the men when the situation called for a boot in the tail." At the present stage of the war, the Song Chang incident seemed symptomatic of U.S. fatigue with the continuing bloodshed. It hardly presaged, however, any general collapse of battlefield will, as some early reactions to the report seemed to suggest. In the field, in fact, Alpha Company's travail was soon shrugged off as a curious but isolated incident born of unusual circumstances...