Word: delta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...troops. Instead, they have been fanning out over the countryside and expanding their area of operation. The North Vietnamese have been relying primarily on the use of small units, though their soldiers are frequently supported by tanks and long-range 130-mm. guns. In many sections of the Mekong Delta, as a result of steadily mounting pressure from the small units of Communist troops, security for civilians loyal to the government has all but vanished. In consequence, B-52s have been pounding the Delta, long the showcase of the government's pacification program...
...part, they appear uniformly clean-cut and middleclass. 'It seemed a good place to learn my job and advance my career,' said Captain Claude Hamilton, 28, of Waco, Texas." Asked about the dangers to civilians in the use of B-52s to bomb the heavily populated Mekong Delta (see box, next page), the crewmen insisted that if mistakes are made, it is the responsibility of faulty intelligence, not of the planes and the equipment aboard them...
...single month of July, American B-52 bombers flew 900 missions over South Viet Nam-111 missions more than were flown in all of 1971. For the first time the big B-52s flying out of Thailand's Utapao Air Base are striking the heavily populated Mekong Delta. With ARVN forces deployed elsewhere to counter the North Vietnamese offensive and unable to cope with the growing enemy threat in the Delta, the U.S. has apparently decided on a policy of massive and calculatedly destructive airpower as a substitute for manpower...
...maintains that civilians are not being bombed in the Delta. But last week Tom Fox of TIME's Saigon bureau paid a visit to Dinh Tuong province. He found that in fact the bombing has claimed numerous civilian casualties. When they heard Fox inquiring about the bombing, more than a dozen other patients came forward to offer the names of civilians and villages that have been struck. "The bombs are falling everywhere, and the civilians are getting killed," one woman said...
...bombing adds an entirely new dimension to the fighting in the Mekong Delta. A high-ranking U.S. military official, who refused to be named, said that he knew of "no B-52 civilian casualties"-though he later admitted that there might be a few. His office is right across the street from the hospital. The officer insisted that intelligence for the plotting of B-52 raids was good, then added, incredibly, that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had recently broken contact in the province, and that no one really knew where they were. In the American effort to eliminate...