Word: minh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...like beginning a burglary by deliberately knocking over the garbage cans. As a formidable force of South Vietnamese Rangers, armored, infantry and artillery units assembled at a base in Tay Ninh province northwest of Saigon, Lieut. General Nguyen Van Minh's command post issued almost daily bulletins about what targets the ARVN force would hit across the border in Cambodia. Communist staging areas near the town of Snuol were mentioned, as were the Mimot plantation near Krek, the vast Chup plantation, the town of Suong and the enemy-infested banks of the Chhlong River...
With Care. Minh claims that the idea behind all the pre-invasion publicity was "to keep the enemy guessing and on the defensive." Only cynics, of course, would suggest that it might also have been designed to give the enemy plenty of time to get away in case he wanted to avoid anything so unseemly as a battle...
Actually, as the new dry season begins, both sides have reason to handle themselves with care. Last summer Minh's troops took a mauling at the hands of the North Vietnamese at Snuol: they left behind ten tanks, 50 trucks and 14 armored personnel carriers. But the Communists have even more reason to be battle shy. In September and October, Minh's troops in Tay Ninh badly battered units of the 5th North Vietnamese Division, which had slipped across the border from Cambodia to try to disrupt the South Vietnamese presidential election...
...through a rough "transitional" period, and that South Viet Nam's 17.3 million people will soon be both willing and able to earn their own way. That is, of course, a tall order. Even at the peak of the fighting between the French and the Viet Minh during the "first Indochina war," South Viet Nam derived some income from exports of rice and rubber. But now many of the plantations are in ruins, rice is imported from the U.S., and the leading export is scrap metal left behind by the departing U.S. military. Exports bring in a bare...
Other fighter-bombers and B-52 Stratofortresses slammed hundreds of tons of bombs into the underground storage bunkers along the 300-mile Ho Chi Minh trail...