Word: deltas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Dressed in their best white shirts, the dozen Viet Cong leaders assembled at dusk in a mud-walled house in the little Delta village of An Lac Thon to mourn a fallen comrade. Only the afternoon before, their district propaganda chief had been killed by a raiding party of U.S. Navy commandos. Now, as they gathered in silence, a security guard of 40 men kept watch in the rain outside, and another 50 Viet Cong waited only 100 yards away. All the guns seemed hardly necessary. As they do with many a Delta village, the Viet Cong considered...
Reception Committee, The funeral assault was the first publicized exploit of a new kind of force operating in South Viet Nam's Delta: the Prews, or Provisional Reconnaissance Units. Informally advised by U.S. Navy officers and made up largely of former Viet Cong who have defected, the Prews are primarily night raiders who slip into territory in which the Viet Cong feel secure, turning the enemy's hit-and-run tactics back on him. "We operate where the Viet Cong haven't been bothered before," explains McMahon. "They don't dare sleep in their houses...
Prews are now operating in each province of the Delta IV Corps, and all are volunteers who know the terrain well. At first the Prews dressed as they pleased, but after a few instances of being mistaken for Viet Cong by U.S. helicopter gunners, they adopted tiger suits or the black pajamas of simple peasants as uniforms. Their exploits have not only crimped the morale of the Viet Cong, but beefed up that of the government's regular forces. And their effectiveness cannot always be measured by a single night's work. Two days after the Prews...
...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 as "the cork in the bottle," designed to stop Viet Minh movements into the fertile Red River delta and Laos. But the garrison was ringed by hills that General Vo Nguyen Giap's artillerymen, who outgunned the French 5 to 1, used to murderous advantage...
...search partners are not police but Vietnamese Rangers, working in completely integrated "supercompanies" made up of one U.S. and one Vietnamese com pany. The U.S. 9th Division is also involved in intermediate warfare, working closely with the ARVN's 25th Division in Long An province in the Delta. All told, some 50% of U.S. forces in Viet Nam are now engaged in "operations in support of the security structure"-digging the Viet Cong out of the countryside where most of the Vietnamese people live and where ultimately the war must be won or lost...