Word: mekong
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COLONEL DEAN MACHO, veteran Marine flyer and crew-cut C.O. of Air Group 12 greeted the final day of the war with a farewell bombing sortie over the Mekong Delta. Whistling off into the hot pink dawn with three other A-4 Skyhawks, Macho made radio contact with a Vietnamese forward air controller (F.A.C.); he was promptly directed in pidgin English to an enemy target. Except for the language problem, it was business as usual. "At one point I asked the F.A.C. whether the target was east, west, north or south of some smoke rising from the ground," Macho recounted...
...people. But they have not been able to dislodge Communist forces from much of the territory they seized in the Easter offensive. All told, the Communists dominate South Viet Nam's sparsely populated eight northern provinces, including the Central Highlands and several districts in the populous, once secure Mekong Delta south of Saigon...
...Cambodia since the start of the Easter offensive. They have expanded their area of control (see map, preceding page) from the sparsely populated north and northeast into the more populous south. They have also taken over virtual command of the segment of Route One that runs from the Mekong River to the Viet Nam border-in all, they control more than half the country...
Meantime Communist troops, according to U.S. intelligence sources, have been ordered to prepare for a cease-fire by extending their control in every way possible. They already dominate South Viet Nam's eight northern provinces, including the Central Highlands and several districts in the once secure Mekong Delta (see map). Nearly all of that control is a direct result of the Easter offensive. So far, they have no significant hold on population centers, which may explain their recent thrusts into Quang Ngai province south of Danang, South Viet Nam's second largest city...
...bombing adds an entirely new dimension to the fighting in the Mekong Delta. A high-ranking U.S. military official, who refused to be named, said that he knew of "no B-52 civilian casualties"-though he later admitted that there might be a few. His office is right across the street from the hospital. The officer insisted that intelligence for the plotting of B-52 raids was good, then added, incredibly, that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had recently broken contact in the province, and that no one really knew where they were. In the American effort to eliminate...