Word: mekong
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Every night furtive little bands of Communist guerrillas, dressed in black peasant pajamas or faded khakis, splash through the marshes of the Mekong Delta or dart silently along jungle paths of South Viet Nam, pursuing their intent, murderous missions. On the road from Banmethuot last week, one band melted into the shadows as two members of the National Assembly approached in their Jeep. Then, at a signal from their leader, they raised their ancient rifles, clubs and swords and pounced with bloodcurdling cries. Seconds later, the two assemblymen lay dead, and the grim struggle to keep the Communists from winning...
...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...
Splitting up, one Communist group fled north while another tried to escape south toward the Mekong River. Some guerrillas made it to the Cambodian border, and others simply disappeared in the South Vietnamese villages. But 167 Communists were dead, and dozens more lay wounded when the sun set over the Plaine des Jones...
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...