Word: mekong
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...feel that the job will eventually take about 600,000 men. They argue that one more division is needed to work with the Marines in the northern provinces, where the Communist pressure has been heaviest in recent months, and that at least one division is needed in the populous Mekong Delta (there are now only two U.S. brigades there), where the war is more or less stalemated. Another divi sion would come in handy in the central provinces above Saigon. Westmoreland's goal is, as he puts it, "to maintain more pressure on more places...
This time of the year, when the monsoons flood the Mekong Delta, water is everywhere. The canals, which are the roads of the region, run long and straight from swollen rivers. All war plans inevitably involve boats. Under cover of night, the Communists cart their troops and supplies in flotillas of long, narrow, shallow-draft sampans; the same boats that carry the enemy to battle take him away when he retreats...
Cold, wet feet have long rendered soldiers hors de combat as surely as enemy bullets. The rain-soaked coastal lowlands of Viet Nam and the paddy-fields of the Mekong Delta have presented U.S. troops with a less-understood disorder: warm-water-immersion foot...
Bell Aerosystems, British Hovercraft's licensee in the U.S., has manufactured hovercraft that have been used success fully in an experimental ferry run across San Francisco Bay and as high-speed gunboats to hunt down Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta. It has just sold its first two commercial craft to an Alaska firm that will use them to supply offshore drilling operations. Using the hover principle on land, a French hover train, suspended above a monorail by a thin cushion of air, has already reached speeds of 190 m.p.h...
...fighting men are fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance. In the unpredictable search-and-destroy missions through the Central Highlands, in the savage set-piece battles along the DMZ, in the boot-swallowing, sniper-infested mangrove swamps of the Mekong Delta, on the carrier decks and in the gun mounts of the Seventh Fleet offshore, in the cockpits of helicopters and fighter-bombers in the skies above both Viet Nams, the American Negro is winning-indeed has won-a black badge of courage that his nation must forever honor...