Word: conge
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PACIFICATION. As of the end of October, this year, 92% of South Viet Nam's 17,424,900 people live in "relatively secure" areas v. 42% in January 1968; at the same time, the proportion of hamlets under Viet Cong control has dropped from 30% to 3.2% . The 92% figure includes "A" hamlets, where the V.C. apparatus has been eliminated; "B" hamlets, where the V.C. threat has been largely neutralized; and "C" hamlets, which are subject only to infrequent V.C. harassment. Some students of the war have long questioned the accuracy and significance of pacification statistics...
...Medina told newsmen, his company had expected to be outnumbered "2 to 1" by the Viet Cong soldiers in the village, and he had been told by intelligence sources that by the time of the attack all the civilians would have left the village to go to nearby markets. He said that the village was shelled by artillery for ten minutes before his company began its airmobile assault. When advance helicopters approached the village, he got a report from a pilot: "The landing zone is hot. We are receiving fire. There are V.C. wifh weapons running from the village...
...voiced by Helicopter Pilot Thompson. Within a few days, the brigade commander, Colonel Henderson, quizzed Medina and some of his troops. He reported orally to the division commander. Major General Samuel Koster, that about 20 noncombatants had been killed by advance shelling and in crossfire between U.S. and Viet Cong forces. He was asked to put that in writing on April 24, 1968. Henderson, at Roster's request, then asked Barker to investigate formally, and Barker's report, equally limited, was accepted by Koster; the report apparently did not even reach the top Army command in Saigon...
Commanders in the field have other complaints. They say that the U.S. should have moved much sooner to strengthen the South Vietnamese forces, which are now belatedly expected to take over the fighting. Field officers would have liked greater freedom to clean the Viet Cong out of populated villages without having to obtain cooperation from province and district chiefs -although the massacre at My Lai raises questions about whether the restrictions are, in fact, tight enough. Officers contend that too many of the most prominent critics of the war simply do not understand Viet Nam or the nature...
...considered the U.S. presence too big for comfort. It had grown to more than 200 people and an aid budget of $30 million a year. Nowadays, Sihanouk's chief fear is that a Communist victory in Viet Nam might encourage the 40,000 uninvited North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops who now use Cambodia as a sanctuary to stay on indefinitely. To counterbalance that threat, Sihanouk began warming to Washington a year...