Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...French concurrence, he has done everything he could do to subvert and destroy the struggling government of Premier Diem. In April, when the Binh Xuyen bandit army tried to grab Saigon, Bao Dai tried to fire Diem. Instead, Diem fought the Binh Xuyen back to the marshes of the Mekong River. Last summer Bao Dai directed an anti-Diem offensive by troops of the Hoa Hao sect, but Diem's troops scattered them. Said Bao Dai a fortnight ago: "I've been accused of betraying my country. But it is not I who have betrayed my country...
Behind a brisk barrage from 105-mm field guns, Diem's nationalists, led by a 27-year-old colonel, stormed three Hoa Hao headquarters, forcing the chocolate-colored Mekong River, skittering black pigs and yellow dogs along with the scurrying Hoa Hao. The nationalists lost 40 killed and wounded, but the show was soon over. Only a few hours after the Diem barrage began, one-third of the Hoa Hao laid down their arms and Commander Ba Cut fled for the hills...
...abject surrender to the Communists. The country cannot be divided, like Korea, for the Viet Minh forces cannot be shut off by a tourniquet: they are in the blood stream. Moreover, the French hold the two important rice deltas, but the Hanoi delta is in the north and the Mekong delta is in the south, and the French could not give up Hanoi, as they must in any north-south division...
...groping guerrilla war, looked suddenly as bright and hopeful as the generals. The French moved slowly north from Seno in the blistering jungle sun; they recaptured Thakhek (pop. 10,000) and knocked out the Communist corridor across southern Laos; they probed north for some 20 miles, and reported the Mekong Valley more or less clear. Then the French put commandos, paratroops and foreign legionnaires ashore at Tuyhoa (see map), thereby breaking into a rich, rice-bearing region that the Communists had occupied, unchallenged, since...
...months ago Viet Nam authorities, strongly backed by public opinion, decided the time had come to revive the sport on its grand old scale. Under the sponsorship of a leading Saigon newspaper and local businessmen, a seven-day race from Saigon through the Mekong Delta and back was planned. Communist leaders in the south damned the race as a capitalist attempt "to induce the youth of the nation to debauchery," and ordered their followers to sabotage it. The sponsors forehandedly asked the protection of the Vietnamese army along the route...