Word: cons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Vietnamese, the name means approximately "place of angels." To the 1,200 U.S. Marines guarding it and to Americans watching their ordeal, Con Thien has come to mean something more akin to hell. Since Sept. 1, the outpost, less than two miles from the southern edge of the six-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Viet Nams, has been under relentless bombardment from Communist guns. In one barrage last week, the Communists sent 903 artillery, mortar, rocket and recoilless-rifle shells whistling into the perimeter around Con Thien's three barren, red clay hills-probably the greatest...
Dangerous Detonations. In the U.S., 10,000 miles away, Con Thien dramatized all the cumulative frustrations of the painful war. A long-rising surge of doubt about Viet Nam was intensified for Americans as the bloody, muddy ordeal of Con Thien flickered across the TV screen. With total U.S. casualties nearing 100,000 since 1961, with the war's cost running at $24 billion a year and with rumors circulating on Capitol Hill that Lyndon Johnson may need $4 billion more before the end of 1967, there was a measurable increase in American unease and impatience...
Cork in the Bottle. By no coincidence, it was fatigue in France in the wake of Dienbienphu that finally propelled French arms out of Indo-China 13 years ago. Would Con Thien induce the same mood in the American public? "The enemy is fighting for American public opinion," says U.S. Commander General William C. Westmoreland, "and he is willing to pay a dear price to influence it. This is the way he expects to win the war-it is the only conceivable way he could...
...Con Thien, plainly, is not Dienbienphu. The French garrison was 76 min. by air from its supply sources, isolated in a narrow valley over 200 miles from the French stronghold at Hanoi. The French were hemmed in and, after the 56-day Viet Minh siege began, had to be resupplied by parachute drops through dense antiaircraft fire. Con Thien can be resupplied within six minutes by helicopter from Dong Ha, ten miles to the southeast, or by land from Cam Lo, seven miles to the south, when the road is not washed out. The French conceived of Dienbienphu...
...Con Thien, by contrast, rising nearly 500 feet above sea level, is the most commanding point all the way to the DMZ. It is supported not only by Marine and Army artillery but also by B-52 Stratofortresses, each packing 60,000 lbs. of bombs, U.S. warships bristling with 5-and 8-in. guns, and clouds of fighter planes. Westmoreland described the bombardment of suspected Red gun positions as the heaviest concentration of firepower "on any single piece of real estate in the history of warfare...