Word: binh
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Freedom Palace, once the residence of French Commissioners, Premier Diem met the challenge with unexpected decisiveness, just as the U.S. was about to give him up as ineffectual. While Saigon reverberated to the bursting of 81-mm. mortar shells in the showdown fight against the Binh Xuyen, Premier Diem proclaimed: "I believe I am on the side of justice. I will not give...
Lowering the Mask. In two days of sputtering street fighting, only four nationalist battalions and 18 armored cars were needed to send the Binh Xuyen reeling from Saigon (see below), exposing their potency as a myth, exposing too the myth of French neutrality. The French repeatedly blocked nationalist army movements, helped Binh Xuyen terrorists to escape. In Paris, just as Diem seemed to be getting things under control, Premier Edgar Faure brushed off the Diem government as "not adapted to the mission it faces." And on the French Riviera, fresh from a hard day's work shooting down...
Twenty-five minutes later, more mortar shells dropped into the palace, and the private army of the Binh Xuyen, 2,000 terrorists in arsenic-green berets, opened concerted fire against three main Vietnamese Nationalist strongpoints. Ngo Dinh Diem, long criticized for pacifism and procrastination, first ordered counterfire against the Binh Xuyen defenses. One hour later he sharply raised the stakes, and told the army to clear the Binh Xuyen out of the city...
...Headquarters was milling with Nationalists in khaki shorts and shirts, carrying Tommy guns. Small-arms fire was rattling from the Binh Xuyen a couple of blocks down the road, and Nationalist Tommy-gun fire rattled back at them. Next came the sullen, unmistakable, paralyzing crump of mortars, three in the courtyard outside, filling headquarters with dust and falling plaster. A deep red flame spouted out of a weapons carrier parked next to our car. Black, oily smoke drifted upwards. We could hear a staccato cry ai ai ai from someone who had been...
...bombardment lasted for more than an hour, an enemy shell every two minutes or so-American shells as it happened, given to the Binh Xuyen by the French during the Indo-China War, when the terrorists were supposed to be helping fight the Communists. Our Nationalist garrison leaned forward impassively on their weapons, expecting an infantry attack. 'We are completely encircled.' a report came through to us. Outside I could see a number of grotesquely related things: fire leaping from densely packed wooden shacks; a rat scurrying down a gutter to escape; refugees huddled or fleeing, silhouetted against...