Word: lam
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That the ARVN withdrawal was not yet a rout was due very largely to U.S. airpower. Day after day, B-52s, F-4 Phantoms and F-100s, flying as many strike sorties for the Lam Son operation alone as they ordinarily stage in all of Indochina, kept the battlefield under incessant barrage. Giant B-52s, used like Phantom jets for close ground support, pursued North Vietnamese soldiers through jungle and elephant grass, dropping their 30,000-lb. bomb loads as close as 600 yards to allied positions. Everywhere ARVN soldiers went, they stumbled upon phalanxes of enemy bodies, or survivors...
...ARVN troops sent into Laos. Another important, though unstated task was to draw much larger North Vietnamese forces into massing along the trail so that they could then be hammered by U.S. airpower. For obvious reasons, neither Washington nor Saigon has greatly stressed that a key feature of Lam Son was to use ARVN as bait in order to kill North Vietnamese troops...
...immediate purpose of Lam Son 719 never was to "protect" withdrawing U.S. troops, even though that has been the longer-range justification advanced most often by the Administration. From the start, Richard Nixon's own top advisers described Lam Son-and the parallel thrust by 20,000 ARVN troops into Cambodia-mainly as an opportunity to reap some short-term gains. One important objective was to shore up the embattled regime in Cambodia by taking further pressure off the Cambodian army to the south. Another was to blunt Communist capability to wage offensives in South Viet Nam, particularly...
...However Lam Son comes out, the results-as with so much in Southeast Asia-are unlikely to be clear-cut and decisive. Some objectives and how they have fared in the battle...
...Abrams has said that he does not think that the North Vietnamese can now mount a major offensive in 1971, and possibly not until the spring of 1972. That, unfortunately, is the kind of expectation the Communists have explosively upset in the past, notably during Tet 1968. Even if Lam Son has slowed the Communist supply effort, it has done so only temporarily. If South Vietnamese forces do stay in Laos until mid-April, the Communists will still have several weeks to recoup before the monsoon completely closes the trail. To win this temporary advantage, the allies have paid dearly...