Word: lam
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...WHEN Lam Son 719, the invasion of Laos, began early last month, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird predicted that there would be "some tough days ahead." Last week the Communists made good on that prediction-with a vengeance...
...morning, he summoned Lieut. General Do Cao Tri, 41, his nation's most decorated and best-known soldier, to the presidential palace in Saigon. Then he told Tri that the job was his. The two men briefly discussed precisely how and when Tri would take over command of Lam Son 719 from I Corps commander Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam. After the talk, Tri boarded his helicopter to see how his troops were faring in their other outcountry incursion, a drive through Communist sanctuaries in southeastern Cambodia. Barely 2½ hours later, the body...
...fighting raged, the smoking hulks of broken Communist tanks and shattered U.S. helicopters littered the battlefield; B-52 strikes thundered so close, said a downed chopper crewman, that the dust "made our eyes water." Though the outcome of the battle remained in doubt at week's end, the Lam Son toll was already substantial: in three weeks, no less than five ARVN battalions had, for all practical purposes, been knocked out of action...
Mounting Skepticism. In Saigon, the popular mood was sullen, even acrimonious. Vietnamese complained that Lam Son was a U.S. concoction designed to accomplish U.S. goals and the ARVN was paying a dear price. Every hour, truckloads of fresh corpses rolled into the Bien Hoa military cemetery, where gravediggers had been ordered to double their normal 100-graves-a-week pace...
...designed to frighten Hanoi into keeping its reserve troops in place. But Hanoi's warning that such a thrust would bring China into the war seems to have ended threats of an invasion of North Viet Nam-a contingency that the U.S. would endorse only if the Lam Son forces were near annihilation...