Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...North Vietnamese responded to the attacks over a wide area. Some 80 miles south of Tchepone, Communist forces overran a Royal Laotian garrison at the edge of the Bolovens Plateau, overlooking the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The base, known as Site 22, commanded the SeKong River, a key artery in the trail complex. Near Tchepone itself, North Vietnamese troops managed to call in American artillery on South Vietnamese positions by using the same radio frequencies as the ARVN troops'. At other times they lured American helicopters into antiaircraft fire. Total helicopter losses since the Laos operation began five weeks...
...dead and 2,763 wounded. Even if the figures are accurate, the operation has so far yielded far fewer enemy supplies than did the invasion of Cambodia last year. More impressive in the eyes of U.S. officers is the estimate that one-third of the Communist battalions in the Laotian panhandle have been put out of commission...
...Drowsy pilots walked out to their UH-1 Hueys and malevolent-looking OH-6 Cobra gunships, checked out the oil levels, the instruments and the control linkages, and then strolled back to their tactical operations centers. The call to combat came as it has almost every day since the Laotian operation began, well before midmorning. At the heavily sandbagged T.O.C. of the 4th Battalion, 77th Field Artillery, 101st Airborne Division, blond, mustachioed Warrant Officer Fred Hayden, 27, set down his cup of tea and sprinted out onto the oil-soaked pad. Zipped into his brown flame-resistant flight suit...
Walters dipped the Cobra's nose and rolled out to the northwest. A set of scrambled alphabet letters came in over the T.O.C. radio, and Hayden pulled out his "Whiz Wheel" decoder to decipher the grid coordinates of his mission. As their chopper raced over the bomb-pocked Laotian countryside, a second Cobra pulled up alongside. Twenty minutes later, the Cobras arrived over a scene of total chaos. As Hayden and Walters carved circles in the sky several thousand feet above the fire-scarred hilltop, they watched errant rockets from choppers already on the scene blazing into friendly...
...Nghi, forward command post of the South Vietnamese 1st Corps and 1st Infantry Division near the Laotian border, Brig. Gen. Pham Van Phu, division commander, said the entire 1st Regiment of his outfit had been pulled out of operation and returned to Vietnam...