Word: delta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Angry Hornets. Beulah's freshest fury was expended on the dun-colored delta of the Rio Grande and the tiny ports that dot the Gulf Coast. Port Isabel (pop. 4,000), a shrimp-fishing village, was smashed by 150 m.p.h. winds; only a lighthouse and a newly built brick bank were left undamaged, along with Captain G. D. Kennedy, who with his wife and his handmade 60-ft. shrimp boat rode out the storm with diesel engines and good seamanship...
...Chicken Vendor. The French were just then opening up their first officer class for the newly created Vietnamese army. Thieu enlisted and graduated at 26 with a second lieutenant's commission and orders to take command of an infantry platoon in the Delta. It was Viet Minh country, and the platoon got a hostile reception. For two weeks, the peasants would not even sell it any food. Then one day the Viet Minh mortared Thieu's little camp. After the bombardment, an old man suddenly appeared with eggs and chickens to sell. "I knew why he had come...
...private life was distinguished by something still rare in Asia: a marriage not of convenience but of love. As a young officer he had been attracted by a snapshot carried by a colleague of a pretty Delta girl; he sought her out, fell in love, and in 1951 married her. Nguyen Thi Mai Anh was a Catholic, Thieu a Confucian Buddhist, but for her he promised to convert to Catholicism. He finally did in 1958-just in time, his detractors say, to help his army career under the Catholic Diems...
...Marines contracted their lines into a tight perimeter, then called in artillery and air strikes to shield them. Helicopters dumped nausea gas directly onto the enemy. Though its lines were breached at several points, Delta Company held its ground, and by next morning, two Marine companies were helilifted to the rescue. They caught the North Vietnamese as they attempted to retreat and killed 130 of them...
...Delta Company of the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, the two-month-long election lull ended last week in a hail of mortar shells that thudded down just after the company had dug in for the night near the town of Que Son, 30 miles south of Danang. The company commander radioed battalion headquarters that he had been jumped by a company of North Vietnamese regulars. It was nothing that he could not handle, he said. But he was dangerously mistaken. Facing his 100 leathernecks were some 1,000 North Vietnamese regulars, and they were primed for a fight. "Those people...