Word: lange
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Dong Dang. Lang Son. Blunt yet musical Vietnamese place names, redolent of history, blood and death. At the railhead city of Dong Dang, a 30-ft. yellow gate marks Japan's invasion of Indochina in 1940, which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt's perhaps apocryphal vow that "we will not go to war over any damn Ding Dong." At Lang Son, a crowded market town nine miles to the southeast, a nipple-crested mountain that colonial troops named the "baroness's breast" overlooks the ruins of a fort demolished even before the Viet Minh's war against the French...
Last week Dong Dang and Lang Son had been turned into tormented battlegrounds again. In an escalating war between angry Communist neighbors and cultures that have been antagonistic for 2,000 years, three divisions of invading Chinese troops descended on Dong Dang and on the Vietnamese coastal plain to the east in giant pincers aimed at Lang Son. Battalions of the Vietnamese regular army hauling heavy weapons rushed north to meet them head-on and force a confrontation that could be the first major battle of the week-long war. In preparation, China threw three fresh divisions against forward Vietnamese...
...embracing. At dawn on Saturday, Feb. 17, Chinese forces, massed more than 300,000 strong north of Viet Nam in Yunnan and Kwangsi provinces, loosed a massive artillery barrage on key border positions. Hardest hit were Vietnamese concentrations around the cities of Lao Cai, Muong Khuong, Cao Bang, Lang Son and Mong Cai. The People's Liberation Army, untested in major formation warfare since it crossed the Yalu River in October 1950 to surprise and rout the U.N. forces in Korea, stormed across the border at 26 different points...
...Saturday, mortar shells descended near Lang Son, according to an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene. To the north, heavy artillery shells could be heard every ten to 30 seconds. "Chinese troops have launched a general attack, all the frontier posts are being shelled by heavy artillery," a Vietnamese provincial official announced. "Bloody fighting is taking place, human casualties are certainly heavy." Said a wounded 18-year-old Vietnamese soldier named Trien Van Mien, who staggered into town and fell in the road: "The Chinese are close by, they are everywhere...
...jugular thoroughfare from Friendship Pass. Both thrusts appeared to aim directly at Viet Nam's capital. At the same time, an auxiliary Chinese force, spearhead units of an estimated three more divisions, probed toward the coast for a possible end run aimed at cutting off Highway 4 to Lang Son and later, perhaps, the main Vietnamese reinforcement and supply route of Highway 1, which years ago gained the dolorous nickname "street without...