Word: lam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu emphatically insisted. The Laotian invasion, Lam Son 719, had not ended in "defeat, disorder, disaster." Sitting on some ammunition boxes among the pine trees of the cemetery at Dong Ha, an ARVN base seven miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, Thieu told newsmen and South Vietnamese troops that Laos was, in fact, "the biggest victory ever...
...hours on the ground, the Panthers killed just one North Vietnamese and found little in the way of enemy supplies. Their main mission seemed to be to let Hanoi know that its Laotian supply lines would never again be safe and to support Thieu's claim that Lam Son was "still going...
Numbing Losses. Only three days before the final pullout from Laos began, Secretary of State William Rogers told reporters that Lam Son would continue well into April, and perhaps until the start of the rainy season around May 1. After the assault on Tchepone, it was expected that Lam Son's troops would exercise an "option" to drive to a key junction ten miles to the southeast. There they were to have sliced up Route 914, an important and still intact trail route; disrupted Base Area 611, a key enemy supply depot; and swept home via the A Shau...
...real weaknesses Lam Son revealed were at the top. The Saigon strategists figured that air power would give the small but mobile ARVN invasion force an edge, even when outnumbered 3 to 1; too often it did not. Moreover, though the Laotian panhandle was known to be execrable country for armor, South Vietnamese planners sent in a column of 150 tanks. It stopped dead, only 17 miles in, during the first week...
...reason why the operation stalled was that it took six days for General Hoang Xuan Lam, the ARVN commander, to get around to establishing a forward command post inside Laos, where the troops, the B-52s and the other elements could be coordinated. What is more, Lam's staff was riven by jealousies. Major General Le Nguyen Khang, who bosses South Viet Nam's elite Marines and holds a slight seniority edge over Lam, was so miffed when Lam was named to run the Laos operation that he retired to Saigon and turned his responsibilities over...