Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Always there are the innocent caught in the crossfire. On a Mekong Delta back road, a country cop flags down a row of buses packed with peasants, cabbages and poultry, to let a column of armored personnel-carriers rumble past to a fire fight just ahead. In a village hut in Kienhoa province, an old woman lies dying, broiled lobster-red from napalm, while a soldier spoons watery soup between her flayed lips. At another hamlet a teen-age girl, driven mad from the explosions of mortar shells, runs screaming from her house across the paddy-fields, stark nude...
That point was well illustrated last week when the Viet Cong guerrillas struck punishingly across the Mekong Delta. For the umpteenth time, an army battalion hurrying to relieve an outpost under attack-this time 120 miles south of Saigon-walked into an ambush in broad daylight...
Privately, U.S. advisers bitterly complained that the Vietnamese often just won't post sufficient flank guards to avert ambush. In the Mekong River village of Caibe, the Reds attacked a military dependents' compound, and 16 women and 24 children were killed in the crossfire-one of the worst tolls of civilians thus...
...Army's 57th Medical Detachment, Kelly insisted on rotating his men on dangerous night rescue missions, but kept his own name at the top of every flight roster. Of the 1,600 casualties his five UH-1B choppers had lifted from the paddies of the Mekong Delta this year, more than 500 were carried by Kelly himself. "He worked day and night, seven days a week," said one of his lieutenants. "He wouldn't even take a beer in the evening for fear it might affect his flying. He had only one purpose: to get wounded men under...
...operations, it was the sixth consecutive week of only scattered and brief engagements, which the Viet Cong broke off with surprising readiness. One explanation: the guerrilla commanders, concerned by threats of stepped-up U.S. intervention, had ordered a temporary slowdown. Besides, it was the rice-planting season in the Mekong Delta, and many a part-time guerrilla was needed at home...