Word: giap
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...year 1965 was billed by the Communists as the year of victory, and it very nearly was. By May of last year the black-pajama-clad Viet Cong were roving the South with impunity. Giap's forces owned the Central Highlands. South Viet Nam's army was bloody, reeling and exhausted, its strategic reserve destroyed, and eleven of its maneuver battalions in need of complete rebuilding before they could fight again. To Giap, it seemed only a matter of time until Saigon was forced to the conference table, where he could dictate the terms: reunification and the Communist...
...Giap, for his part, was unconvinced that U.S. intervention would be able to slow his momentum. In October, he launched an assault on the Special Forces border camp of Plei Me, 30 miles south of Pleiku, intended as the opening of a concerted drive to cut Viet Nam in half from the Cambodian border to the South China Sea. His technique was a carbon copy of past successes at the camps of Due Co near Pleiku and Dong Xoai, northeast of Saigon, earlier in the year: to attack an isolated camp and then ambush the South Vietnamese force charging...
...Plei Me, it was the newly arrived 1st Air Cavalry that came charging-and by rotors not roads. In the month-long battle that followed, Giap's soldiers at first stood their ground and fought ferociously, sending the U.S. death toll up to 240 in one week, the highest of the war. But Communist losses were far higher, owing in large part to the 1st Air Cav's helicoptered artillery, rocket-firing choppers and tactical air support. Giap's men finally broke and ran, and the 1st Air Cav relentlessly pursued them in a campaign culminating...
...during a single, intense 24-hour engagement. The 1st Air Cav's battalions were shifted 40 times by helicopter, and 13,257 tons of supplies were airlifted to its men before the remnants of the Communist forces scuttled to safety in Cambodia. It was a stunning defeat for Giap's forces. Thanks to the helicopter, the U.S. had found a way to overpower the guerrilla fighter with his own methods: speed and surprise...
Snow on the Volcano. Nothing in Giap's experience or theoretical manual of strategy had prepared him for the quality or magnitude of the U.S. intervention. Though Vo, his family name, means "force," and Giap, his given name, means "armor," the architect of North Viet Nam's army was born near the city of Vinh, the son of a bourgeois landowning family that had fallen into penury. By the time he was 14, he was a member of a clandestine, anti-French sect; four years later the French clapped him in jail for political agitation. It proved...