Word: boiloi
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Dates: during 1965-1965
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Operation Backfire. Almost simultaneously, South Vietnamese and U.S. forces launched another key offensive in the Boiloi Forest, 48 square miles of Communist stronghold 25 miles northeast of Saigon. Leaflets were dropped on the cave-infested region, warning all noncombatants to get out fast. More than 2,000 did. Then planes saturated the woods with chemical defoliants. After a few weeks of sunny, wind-scoured weather, the Boiloi Forest was tinder-dry. Last week U.S. bombers swept in with loads of Incendijel (an incendiary compound derived from napalm), while behind them flew C-123s dropping drums of fuel...
...forest went up in flames-precisely as U.S. planners had figured. Then came the sort of absurd disaster for which the Viet Nam war has become famous. The intense heat of the Boiloi boil caused the wet, tropical air overhead to condense into giant thunderclouds. The "thermal convective condition," as U.S. Air Force meteorologists later defined it, triggered a drenching downpour that doused the forest fire and left Boiloi's Viet Cong safe and unsinged in their caves...
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