Word: mekong
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...best troops. Instead, they have been fanning out over the countryside and expanding their area of operation. The North Vietnamese have been relying primarily on the use of small units, though their soldiers are frequently supported by tanks and long-range 130-mm. guns. In many sections of the Mekong Delta, as a result of steadily mounting pressure from the small units of Communist troops, security for civilians loyal to the government has all but vanished. In consequence, B-52s have been pounding the Delta, long the showcase of the government's pacification program...
...most part, they appear uniformly clean-cut and middleclass. 'It seemed a good place to learn my job and advance my career,' said Captain Claude Hamilton, 28, of Waco, Texas." Asked about the dangers to civilians in the use of B-52s to bomb the heavily populated Mekong Delta (see box, next page), the crewmen insisted that if mistakes are made, it is the responsibility of faulty intelligence, not of the planes and the equipment aboard them...
...region of South Viet Nam where North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units have been faced off against South Vietnamese soldiers and U.S. air power. Some 500,000 people have been displaced from the northern region occupied by the Communists, and the tide of refugees is still rising in the Mekong Delta provinces in the south. Since the North Vietnamese offensive began in late March, an estimated 1,500,000 civilians have been driven and burned from their homes and condemned to live in camps or in the putrid shantytowns that surround every city in South Viet...
...presence in Indochina. A romantic and a perfectionist, he retired from the army in 1963 after a dispute with senior U.S. officials over American policy in South Viet Nam. After returning two years later as a civilian adviser, he conducted the notably successful pacification program in the Mekong Delta with his usual impatience and abrasiveness. Thirteen months ago he became the senior American adviser in the Central Highlands. By the time he died last week in a helicopter crash, while flying by night from his headquarters at Pleiku to the embattled city of Kontum, he had spent nearly...
South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu now regards the Mekong Delta as the "main front" of the current war-even though the Delta does not have, in the strictest sense, a battle front. Long considered the country's most secure region, the Delta is crucial to both sides; more than a third of South Viet Nam's population lives there, and it grows 80% of the country's rice. As the conventional war to the north remained stalemated last week, attention shifted to the south, where Communist guerrillas are still waging what TIME Correspondent...