Word: bia
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...dearly won in American lives the week before, Ap Bia Mountain was abandoned last week by troopers of the 101st Airborne Division. Their aim, as always in the long war, had been not to seize ground but to disperse or destroy their enemies. Mission accomplished, they moved on to resume their sweep through jungled A Shau Valley, searching for Communist troops and stores. But the battle for Hamburger Hill, as G.I.s had christened Ap Bia while taking casualties of 84 dead and 480 wounded, continued to be refought far from A Shau...
...away from the border and eastward toward Hill 937, Honeycutt's troops surprised a North Vietnamese trail-watching squad and wiped it out. Estimating that a company of North Vietnamese occupied the hill (it turned out to be part of two regiments), Honeycutt sent his men up Ap Bia on May 12. The troopers quickly ran, as Specialist Four Jimmy Speers recalled, "into garbage": rocket grenades, fire from automatic weapons, lethal Claymore mines dangling from bushes and trees. The American attackers were forced to pull back. An assault by two companies on May 13 was also repulsed...
After so many costly failures to gain Ap Bia's summit, some U.S. soldiers were dispirited. "There were lots of people in Bravo company [which had borne the brunt of the casualties] who were going to refuse to go up again," one soldier said. "There'd been low morale, but never before so low-because we felt it was all so senseless." Two other battalions from the 101st and a battalion from the Vietnamese 1st Division were brought up as reinforcements. On May 18, two battalions-all of their men loaded down with 40 magazines of rifle ammunition...
...version of "fight and talk." Nixon, like Lyndon Johnson before him, probably feels that lack of such pressure could erode the allied negotiating position in Paris. But the war and domestic reaction to it have gone far beyond purely military considerations now, and the battle of Ap Bia raises the question of whether or not the U.S. should try to scale down the fighting by rescinding the maximum-pressure order. The Communists might follow suit and U.S. casualties might be reduced...
...Which, for the week preceding the final Ap Bia battle, reached the second highest toll of 1969, with 430 Americans killed...