Word: mekong
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Always there are the innocent caught in the crossfire. On a Mekong Delta back road, a country cop flags down a row of buses packed with peasants, cabbages and poultry, to let a column of armored personnel-carriers rumble past to a fire fight just ahead. In a village hut in Kienhoa province, an old woman lies dying, broiled lobster-red from napalm, while a soldier spoons watery soup between her flayed lips. At another hamlet a teen-age girl, driven mad from the explosions of mortar shells, runs screaming from her house across the paddy-fields, stark nude...
...Khanh. who stands only 5 ft. 4½ in. and weighs 155 Ibs., has been deeply concerned with the cold war since he was a youth. Son of modestly well-to-do landed parents, Khanh was born in the hamlet of Caungan, 75 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta, on Nov. 8, 1927. During World War II, when Indochina was ruled by the Vichy French and Japanese, and the tides of nationalism was running high, Khanh as a teen-ager joined Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas, which at the time billed themselves as nationalists. Armed...
Saigon's most pressing concern is the area that includes the capital itself. In eight surrounding provinces, the Communists have tightened what American advisers call a "doughnut" around the capital. To the south, between Saigon and the Mekong Delta, the Viet Cong are so strong that more than 50% of the population there is estimated to be under varying degrees of Communist control. To the north, the Viet Cong are steadily increasing their pressure, last week hit four government battalions in three days. The guerrillas operate right...
That point was well illustrated last week when the Viet Cong guerrillas struck punishingly across the Mekong Delta. For the umpteenth time, an army battalion hurrying to relieve an outpost under attack-this time 120 miles south of Saigon-walked into an ambush in broad daylight...
Privately, U.S. advisers bitterly complained that the Vietnamese often just won't post sufficient flank guards to avert ambush. In the Mekong River village of Caibe, the Reds attacked a military dependents' compound, and 16 women and 24 children were killed in the crossfire-one of the worst tolls of civilians thus...