Word: giap
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...sanctity of my office, I leafed through the Giap cover story while eating lunch. On the first page of your color spread covering the embassy attack my eating came to an abrupt end. No one, certainly, would applaud your printing of such photos, but maybe such gruesome sights are what we need to be brought back to the grim reality that the news on TV is not just reruns of Combat, where the guy killed this week will return to co-star next...
...Naked. If the instructions and exhortations to his soldiers before the battles can be credited, Giap's ambitions in the general offensive were boundless. The attackers were led to be lieve that they were really going to take and hold the cities and towns and bring the war to a quick and victorious end. The South Vietnamese government was to be smashed. The Army of the Republic of Viet Nam (ARVN) was expected to desert to the Viet Cong in wholesale units. The Communists confidently anticipated that the population would welcome the attackers in a great popular uprising...
Nothing of the kind happened. And to further coat Giap's pill with bitterness, he took losses that most other states' armies would consider unacceptable. The allies estimated that more than 27,000 Communists died in the attacks and, even allowing for considerable inflation of the figure, the ratio of enemy dead to those of the allies was worse than 7 or 8 to 1. Of the 28 provincial capitals seized across the country, not one remained totally in enemy hands. An astonishing total of more than 5,000 Communist suspects were taken. By contrast, the allied dead...
Crucial in a Sense. But Giap had a surprise for Lang Vei: nine Soviet light tanks, equipped with thin armor but powerful guns, the first Communist use of tanks in the entire war. The tanks deployed in classic fashion east and west of the outpost, then rolled right through the camp's wire and up onto the bunker roofs, followed by North Vietnamese infantrymen. "We heard them," says a Green Beret, "but we never thought they were tanks. We thought they were our generator acting up." Soon the Communists started shoveling satchel charges, grenades, napalm and tear gas down...
During the attack on Lang Vei, Communist gunners poured nearly 1,500 rounds inside Khe Sanh's perimeters as a diversion-some six shells a minute in the heaviest NVA bombardment of the war. Giap also launched probing artillery and ground attacks on Marine outposts on surrounding Hills 861 and 558, both supporting positions of the Marines at Khe Sanh. His men were beaten back twice, suffering 106 dead the first time and 124 the second...