Word: lam
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JUST five weeks after they plunged confidently into the jungles of Laos, the best troops of South Viet Nam were engaged last week in a perilous and bloody battle to get out. Whether Operation Lam Son 719, as the Laotian invasion is officially called, could be judged a success or a setback was still a matter of considerable debate (see box next page). Beyond debate, however, was the fact that some units of the South Vietnamese army (ARVN) had been badly cut up in the fighting, and that North Viet Nam seemed ready and willing to sacrifice casualties...
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...
...educated Montagnard remarked bitterly that the relocation centers in Darlac surrounded by Vietnamese-occupied land "look like Indian reservations." He suspects that Vietnamese policy is aimed at making rural proletariat out of relocated Montagnards, noting that in Lam Dong Province as well, Vietnamese relocated Montagnards near a tea plantation. "They will have to sell their labor in order to survive," he said. "It will be a kind of slavery...
Teodoru asked the council to change its policy slightly and to sponsor a trip for students to which the council agreed, after Teodoru convinced Tran Van Lam, then head of the council and now south Vietnam's Foreign Minister...
Chopper pilots earn every penny they get. In one company at Khe Sanh called the Lancers, the pilots have organized a pool; the pot-$5 from each aircraft commander-goes to the ship with the greatest accumulation of bullet holes when Lam Son finally ends (choppers that crash are disqualified). Says soft-spoken Huey Pilot John Oldham. 22, of Peculiar, Mo.: "If you think about getting killed, it will screw you up. You just do the job you are trained for." Over Laos, where the elaborate Communist antiaircraft system is especially potent, the pilots fly high-but not on grass...