Word: convoying
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Like some ponderous snake, the long convoy labored up the steep switchbacks on Route 19. Guards nervously rode rifle atop every truck. Three hours out of coastal Qui Nhon, the vehicles pulled into Mang Yang pass-favorite ambush point for the Viet Cong on the 100-mile highway to Pleiku. Along the edge of the narrow road were massive craters. To clear the V.C. from the pass, high-flying B-52s from Guam had blasted Mang Yang with bombs the night before. Once past the pass, the guards relaxed, and the convoy-the first since the end of May-rolled...
...Okamura describes his experiences in the current issue of LIFE, the next few weeks were like passages from an Oriental Kafka. The villages he visited changed hands with maniacal rapidity. Once he saw a convoy sweep by, heavily guarded by U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers who protected themselves from ambush by spraying the jungle on each side with machine-gun fire. No sooner had the convoy passed than 500 Viet Cong on bicycles emerged from the jungle and pedaled madly in pursuit until it was out of sight. On his devious journey to guerrilla headquarters, Okamura was escorted...
Short Cut. Suddenly, however, the partnership threatens to fall apart-largely over a convoy of eleven heavy trucks. The trucks, operated by the Uganda army, ran into a police ambush on a lonely bush road in southwestern Kenya. Their cargo was hardly of the common-market variety: 75 tons of Chinese weapons, which they were convoying from Tanzania to Uganda. What were they doing in Kenya? Taking a short cut, said the convoy commander, and besides, the direct road between Tanzania and Uganda was too muddy...
...Nairobi, Kenya's President Jomo Kenyatta found the whole affair too muddy-especially in view of police reports that an even larger convoy had probably traveled earlier over the same road. Kenyatta, who recently refused a shipload of Russian arms for his own army, ordered the convoy confiscated, arrested its 47-man escort on charges of arms smuggling...
...Games. That brought an urgent telephone call from Uganda Internal Affairs Minister Felix Onama, who said it had all been an unfortunate mistake, demanded his convoy back. Kenyatta was in no mood to play games. After an emergency Cabinet meeting, he delivered a thinly veiled denunciation of both Uganda and Tanzania for "an act of criminal folly and a serious violation of Kenya's territorial integrity." When Uganda Premier Milton Obote telephoned to try to smooth things over, Kenyatta refused to speak to him. When a Tanzania spokesman announced airily that "this has nothing to do with us," Kenyatta...