Word: delta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Saigon's citizens got an eerily quiet three-day Tet holiday last week, rather than the long-awaited Communist attacks. At week's end, a North Vietnamese force overran a government outpost in the Mekong Delta, killing 27 defenders. Still, the only big Tet offensive last week was an American one: hundreds of air strikes were flown against Communist targets, including long-range artillery emplacements just above the Demilitarized Zone. South Vietnamese intelligence officers believe that an early February Communist flare-up had been planned but was put aside so that Communist negotiators in Paris could make...
...mixed pattern of political control in rural areas suggests that the process of political accommodation should start at the bottom and work up rather than the reverse. Some forms of local accommodation have, of course, existed for some time in parts of the country, particularly in the Delta. Most frequently they have involved "live-and-let-live" arrangements among local military commanders. To some extent they have also involved mutual tolerance of each other's revenue-raising activities. On the Government side, the weakness of its forces and the natural desire to remain in the towns and avoid the efforts...
...economic deprivation but on political deprivation, that is, on the absence of an effective structure of authority. lives in "hard-core" Viet Cong areas, some of which have been almost continuously under Viet Minh and Viet Cong control since the 1940s. They include the Camau peninsula, much of the Delta coast, the Plain of Reeds, War Zones "C" and "D" north and west of Saigon, and portions of Binh Dinh and Quang Ngai in the central part of the country. In some villages an entire generation has grown up under communist rule. In some of these areas...
...Giang, in which there have been no major U.S. or Government combat units. The security of An Giang results from the political control of the Hoa Hao. The Hoa Hao in the surrounding provinces have achieved similar areas of security, as have the Cambodians elsewhere in the Delta. Catholic and Cao Dai villages tend to be more scattered to relatively secure in otherwise highly insecure areas, simply because the Viet Cong know that they will be tough nuts to crack...
...Thirdly, the Viet Cong cut many of the transportation and communication routes into the cities in an apparent effort to isolate urban areas from each other and from the surrounding countryside. The most notable action here concerned road and water communication routes between the relatives secure areas of the Delta and Saigon. The weeks following the offensive saw a sharp drop in the previous level of supplies moving over these routes. This caused some economic dislocation in both the farmlands and the cities, but not of either a prolonged or highly threatening character...