Word: mekong
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...automatic grenade launchers; above the "gunships" circle jet fighter-bombers armed with searing napalm, white phosphorous and bomblets that can unleash deadly patterns of tiny steel pellets. In no other war has American weaponry so quickly matched the demands of a difficult tactical terrain. From the swamps of the Mekong Delta, where 30-ft. patrol boats packed with unsinkable plastic foam whisk along on water jets, to the shell-pocked "Rockpile" below the Demilitarized Zone, where six-barreled Ontos tracked vehicles rumble, the arsenal last week was in awesome action...
...Slam" Marshall is right! With notable exceptions, the press and television are doing a miserable job of reporting meaningful facts in Viet Nam. As an operations officer in the Mekong Delta last year, I came in contact with numerous reporters and was amazed by the inexperience, prejudice and hostility of some who, it seemed, had already written their stories (at least mentally) before leaving the U.S. Their stories usually wound up as half-baked concoctions of half-truths completely unrelated to what was really going on. People know how bad reporting really is because those doing the fighting write home...
With the confusion nearly total, the Communist Pathet Lao seized the opportunity to strike. Last week some 200 of the Red troops thrust into the strategic Mekong River town of Ban Lat Hane only 20 miles north of the royal capital of Luangprabang, routing the government forces defending it. Whether it was the opening of a fresh Pathet Lao offensive or merely a hunger strike, no one could say, but hunger undoubtedly played a part. With the rice crops off 35% because of the floods, the Communists will be forced this fall to probe deeper than usual into government territory...
...been centuries in the making. Primitive aborigines who wear loincloths and worship ghosts, they are descended from natives who occupied the Indo-Chinese peninsula long before the Chinese-related Vietnamese moved south some 1,700 years ago. The Vietnamese took over the rice-rich coastal plains and the Mekong Valley, pushing the aborigines into the rugged, jungle-thick mountains to the northwest...
Newcomers or old hands, the women are frequent visitors to the front lines, where reaction to their presence is varied. When one of the women turned up at the headquarters of a Marine fighter squadron in the Mekong Delta, the C.O. gave her a curt order: "You'll wear fatigues all the time. We don't want women with legs down here." Out in the boondocks, another one of the girls was greeted by a battle-weary Army sergeant who asked quietly: "Will you please just say something? I haven't heard an American woman speak...