Word: mekong
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...world's greatest rivers is the Mekong, which rises in Tibet and flows* 2,800 miles to the sea at the southeastern corner of Indo-China. The Mekong delta is a 100-mile-long wedge of swampland, rice fields, palm trees and mangroves, called the Cis Bassac. "The Devil does not want for water here," say the French who use the Cis Bassac as a base for operations against Communist guerrillas infesting the thick Foret Inondee to the west and the marshes of the Plaine des Jones to the east. Fifteen times in the last year the French have...
...slender central region (An-nam), the mountains ripple almost down to the coast. Ho Chi Minh's Communist forces terrorize the coastal plains. In the south, terrorists make life unpleasant in the crowded Saigon region, and the Communist Vietminh haunts the marshes between the numberless arms of the Mekong River. In the northwest and southwest, as in the relatively unimportant kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia, the country is calm...
French Commander in Chief Marcel Carpentier aims to sweep Ho Chi Minh's men from the lower, heavily populated Mekong and Red River valleys. These are the best rice-producing areas and consequently the best source of rebel supply. By airlift and truck convoy, the French maintain a line of forts at the Chinese border, where aid could flow...
...bull-necked French captain stood at the rail of his U.S. made LCI moored up the Mekong river 70 miles from Saigon. Along the marshy jungle bank moved a column of tough, tired fighters-Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese, Algerians, a few French-back from a day's action by naval-ground-&-air forces against the elusive Viet Minh (Communist-led) guerrillas. Two of the legionnaires had been wounded by a booby trap. Behind them, over banyan and bamboo groves, rose the smoke of a straw-hut village they had put to the torch. With them the legionnaires brought a small...
...traffic-jammed klong (canals) that made Siam's capital an eastern Venice. Strawhatted boatmen on the wider canals that crisscross the rice-rich central plains to the north had told it to farmers' wives in houses perched on stilts. Up the great rivers, the Chao Phraya, the Mekong, the Tha Chin, the Ping, the Si and the Mun, it had gone with wandering merchants thumbing barge rides. On the lips of mendicants with shaven heads and shaven eyebrows it had traveled through cobra-ridden jungles where tigers lurked and elephants lurched, and on into the cool, airy teakwood...