Word: monsoon
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India's 1,300-mile Himalayan frontier with China is one of the world's most unlikely battlegrounds. Monsoon rains flood its approaches in summer, and snows blanket its jagged peaks and passes in winter. All year round, the thin air gnaws at the lungs and vitality of human trespassers in the fastness. Across the forbidding landscape, some 125,000 to 150,000 Chinese troops and more than 300,000 Indian jawans (infantrymen) are positioned in edgy, continuous confrontation...
...Monsoon rains have turned the roads to quagmires in the Northeast, but the Commandos press on, moving from village to village in Japanese-made Jeeps, or rented oxcarts if the going gets too heavy. A Thai official goes along to explain that "our government has asked these foreigners to help us." The medics give shots, dress wounds and treat minor diseases, including dysentery. Their long-term aim is to teach the Thais these skills and so to work them selves out of jobs...
...Marines and a 500-man South Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The Marines were not anxious to make a stand there: they sat at the end of a 27-mile supply line on Communist-interdicted Highway 9, the weather was turning bad with the onset of the Northeast monsoon, and they had done little in the way of fortifying the isolated defense complex...
...That same day the monsoon began to lift from Khe Sanh, and the better weather brought the fighter-bombers to join with the B-52s in earth-jarring raids. The heavy U.S. bombing only heightened the desire of the remaining North Vietnamese troops to get out. The testimony of captured NVA regulars indicates that the bombing so disrupted the Communist supply lines that Giap's men were nearly starving...
...Viet Nam was to be that its new inertial guidance and radar targeting system enables it to bomb in foul weather or fair, either by night or by day. Its arrival in force would thus mean that the U.S. could keep up its aerial bombardment of the North despite monsoon rains or heavy cloud cover...