Word: laotians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When the allies invaded Cambodia last spring, exuberant South Vietnamese units thrust 24 miles into the Parrot's Beak area in the very first day. Last week, 14 days after the first ARVN troops pushed across the Laotian border to strike at the Ho Chi Minh Trail network, they had covered only some 15 miles and were coming under increasingly intense enemy pressure. U.S. commanders insisted that Operation Lam Son 719, despite its slow pace, was scoring military gains. But Defense Secretary Melvin Laird warned President Nixon that the 17,000 ARVN troops and the 9,000 Americans...
...advance was kept to a cautious crawl for several reasons. Southeastern Cambodia is flat farmland; the Laotian panhandle is a tangle of dense, triple-canopy jungle. ARVN troops practically had to rebuild the old French Route 9 as they went, and they stopped frequently to set up protective fire bases and send out patrols for as much as six miles to the north and south to guard their flanks. Their vital link to South Viet Nam's Quang Tri province-a force of some 600 U.S. helicopters-was repeatedly socked in by bad weather...
Backing Up. Increasingly, however, it was enemy resistance that blocked faster movement. North Viet Nam moved two divisions out of areas south of the DMZ and into the Laotian panhandle, bringing total Communist troop strength along the trail to 30,000. Company-size units engaged the South Vietnamese in more than a dozen battles, usually night-time rocket and mortar attacks on lonely ARVN fire bases. In the heaviest fighting of the campaign, the Communists reportedly overran one base and cut off at least two others. South Vietnamese casualties officially rose to 147 dead and were probably much higher; Communist...
Pentagon spokesmen reported that the North Vietnamese moved several thousand fresh troops into the Laotian panhandle during the past week. Large numbers of North Vietnamese troops and tanks were reported yesterday moving toward the main South Vietnamese force in the Laotian panhandle...
...tactics of the Laotian invasion has grown a political position based on military superiority," he said. "Johnson was trying to win a military victory and so is Nixon. Only the method is different...