Word: kontum
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Flares Like Fireworks. The North Vietnamese obviously saw Dak To as not much of an obstacle to their plan to sweep down through the valley to overrun the town of Kontum, then turn eastward for a damaging drive into the Highlands' heart (see map). Four regiments of North Vietnamese, some 10,000 men strong, began positioning themselves in the hills around...
...time of year when the rainy season comes to an end around Dak To-and the Communists dry off and come out fighting. Their plan had been to drive eastward from the border to seize the town of Dak To, then try to sweep southeastward for a strike against Kontum, the provincial capital. They never made it to their first objective. The U.S. forces caught them while they were still moving some 5,000 men into position in the hills above...
...long before USAID-supported programs for civilian pacification got under way, some Americans were hard at work in South Viet Nam helping strife-ridden citizens. Few have worked harder against greater odds than Seattle-born Dr. Patricia Marie Smith, 40, who has been in the central highland province of Kontum since 1959, first helping in a leprosarium, then running her own makeshift clinic, now operating a 40-bed hospital...
...quick recovery so astonished the Montagnards that they began to pass the word that the white woman's magic might be even better than that of their own women sorcerers. The trickle of patients to Dr. Smith's five-bed dispensary in the provincial capital of Kontum grew to a steady flow and then an overflow. Dr. Smith thereupon began a long struggle to build a hospital outside Kontum, which many Montagnards regarded as a hostile city...
...hospital was caught in crossfire between Viet Cong and Americans. Dr. Smith herded all her patients into the wards and got all but one, a boy in traction, onto the floor to reduce the risk of casualties from machine-gun bullets. When Americans urged her by phone from Kontum to take refuge in the city, she snapped: "Don't be ridiculous! I can't leave my patients." Then a stray bullet hit a woman in the thigh, and Dr. Smith was on the phone again, this time barking at an American commander: "Stop firing on my patients...