Word: interdicting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...form of many more smaller-scale actions. Abrams has found that forays by sub-battalion-size units -companies, platoons, even squads -can be mounted more quickly, more often and in more places. Such surprise sweeps also achieve better results. Thus the general's sting-ray tactics, designed to interdict the movement of North Vietnamese units and supplies, involve the same number of men but hundreds and sometimes thousands more of what Abrams prefers to call "initiatives" rather than "offensives." As Abrams explained it last week to TIME Correspondents Marsh Clark and Burton Pines in Saigon: "Since the beginning...
...planes usually attract "incoming." The Marines just sit and wait to be attacked, primarily because seeking out the enemy could cost more lives and casualty-consciousness has been drummed into every commander. The fact that they do not patrol means that Khe Sanh's original purpose-to interdict enemy infiltration-has been abandoned. As the tension builds, Marines manning the misty perimeter, their eyes wet with straining, sometimes begin to imagine phantom attackers coming through the gathering dusk...
...Viet Nam to keep the war going, and Laotian rice has helped keep Ho's warriors fed. The U.S. regularly bombs the Trail to slow the flow. But unlike Hanoi, Washington has been unwilling to violate the ban on foreign troops in Laos and strike directly overland to interdict the enemy traffic southward...
...unwary patrol, a lumbering convoy or one of the camps itself. The Marines mostly sit and wait, cramped in muddy bunkers and trenches. Day and night their 105-and 155-mm. howitzers shake the hilltops as they fire into the DMZ and into North Viet Nam beyond to interdict the Communist buildup and southward movement; day and night the dread cry of "Incoming!" rings through the camps as the Communists return the shells. It is a deadly duel of giant cannon more akin to World War I or Korea than to the rest of the war in Viet...
...move supplies, farm their paddyfields, build their bunkers, position their troops and launch many of their attacks. During the day, they generally disappear, sleeping and hiding beneath thick jungle canopies, taking refuge in hillside caves or melting back into the "peaceful" civilian population. The U.S. has long tried to interdict the Communists' nighttime movements by regularly shelling and bombing trails and camps where their presence was suspected. Now it has launched a new operation that is more precise and sophisticated in its nighttime harassment...