Word: bunkered
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the Communist shellfire began hitting Saigon in the middle of the night, U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker was whisked from his villa to a secure haven for the second time in three weeks. So was President Nguyen Van Thieu, as fears spread of Viet Cong again rampaging through Saigon. Six 82-mm. mortar rounds exploded outside the U.S.'s "Pentagon East" headquarters, where General William C. Westmoreland was sleeping. The commander was not hurt, but shell fragments wounded four sentries...
...four miles southwest of Khe Sanh on Route 9. Basically a post for interdicting Communist movement into the South and for overseeing allied patrols into nearby Laos, Lang Vei was defended by some 400 South Vietnamese and Montagnard irregulars and 24 Green Berets, operating out of a deeply dug bunker made of three feet of rein forced concrete and two-inch steel plate, complete with its own ventilation system. As much as any place can be in Viet Nam, it seemed an ideal outpost, immune to artillery attack and so situated that ground troops would form a carpet of corpses...
...Lang Vei: nine Soviet light tanks, equipped with thin armor but powerful guns, the first Communist use of tanks in the entire war. The tanks deployed in classic fashion east and west of the outpost, then rolled right through the camp's wire and up onto the bunker roofs, followed by North Vietnamese infantrymen. "We heard them," says a Green Beret, "but we never thought they were tanks. We thought they were our generator acting up." Soon the Communists started shoveling satchel charges, grenades, napalm and tear gas down the air vents in an effort to dis lodge...
...Sanh grows steadily shabbier. More and more "hardbacks" (metal-roofed shacks) are tumbled by the incoming; day by day the protective sandbags and runway matting rise higher on bunkers. Even so, the bunkers cannot withstand direct hits. A rocket or mortar round will collapse a bunker and likely kill its occupants. The Seabees are finishing strong underground bunkers for the control-tower crew of Khe Sanh's airstrip and the evacuation hospital, rushing to complete the work before the threatened battle erupts. Meanwhile, the doctors must make do in cramped quarters: the operating room is an empty metal...
...Marine at Khe Sanh is Colonel David E. Lownds, 47, the mustachioed commander of the 26th Marine Regiment, who oversees the defense of the base from an underground bunker left over by its original French occupants. Sitting in a faded lawn chair, he seldom rests, night or day. He keeps constant watch over the nerve center, a labyrinth of whitewashed rooms lit by bare bulbs and bustling with staff officers and enlisted aides. Is he worried about the huge enemy concentration surrounding him? "Hell, no," says Lownds. "I've got Marines. My confidence isn't shaken...