Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...goading the department's sluggish bureaucracy into action, leaving Boss Dean Rusk free to follow the global swirl of high policy. But Bowles, used to being top man, never stopped spinning off grand ideas, reshaping the world to his taste. (He kept pushing for his pet Mekong River project in Southeast Asia so hard that even his aides insist he really has only two speeches: the Mekong River speech and the non-Mekong River speech...
...military advisers, rushed to South Viet Nam after the debacle in Laos, used the lull to train government troops in special new mobile tactics. Dozens of U.S. "Special Forces" operatives joined army units to demonstrate night operations, sneak attacks, better use of landing craft in the canals of the Mekong delta. Fortnight ago, reports filtered in that big Communist groups were moving south from Cambodia toward the marshes of the Plaine des Jones (Plain of the Reeds), 60 miles west of Saigon. The government forces were ready to try their new tactics...
Hardly had the U.S. sat down again at the peace talks in Geneva last week, on the hopeful assumption that a cease-fire was at last in effect in Laos, when the news arrived from Ban Hat Bo, a village near the Mekong River in central Laos. After a heavy mortar barrage that lasted two hours, 1,000 Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese soldiers had attacked to a frenzied blowing of bugles. The Ban Hat Bo garrison fled, along with their five U.S. military advisers. One of them noted bitterly that the Communist assault, with its tooting bugles...
Election Toll. Diem responded by handing Colonel Thao command of vital, rice-growing Kienhoa province in the Mekong River delta, where previous commanders had failed. There Thao has cut the guerrillas down to size with skill and daring at their own nighttime jungle tactics. "When there is too much light, you can see nothing," says Thao. "The truth is in the night...
...down the coast from Hanoi, at night sneak into remote beaches to deliver arms. In a year, the Viet Cong strength has almost doubled to 9,000 men. Though they have captured no major towns, they now have effective control of almost half the fertile southern delta of the Mekong, where half of South Viet Nam's 14 million people live. If hard pressed, they simply retire across the border to Cambodia, where they maintain a hospital and supply dumps. Though the Geneva International Control Commission has protested the attacks, North Viet Nam replied bluntly last month that "this...