Word: moonless
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Emerging from a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Eugene McCarthy was besieged by reporters. What, they clamored, had Defense Secretary Robert McNamara said about the Gulf of Tonkin? "It was," deadpanned McCarthy, "a dark and moonless night." That climactic note, 3½ years after the encounter that overtly set the stage for the all-out U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, was one of the few certitudes about an incident that seems destined to rank in history with such hoary whodunits as the War of Jenkins...
...about five miles, star shells were fired from Maddox. It was, in McNamara's words, "a very dark, moonless, overcast night"-or, as Maddox Radarman James Stankevitz put it, "darker than the hubs of hell...
...Vietnamese year. All but a few Americans retired to their compounds to leave the feast of Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators filling the streets. Vietnamese soldiers made a special effort to rejoin their families. Relative visited relative, threading through thousands of firecrackers popping and fizzing in the moonless night. The Year of the Monkey had begun, and every Vietnamese knew that it was wise to make merry while there was yet time; in the twelve-year Buddhist lunar cycle, 1968 is a grimly inauspicious year...
...Crater with a View. The V.C. first opened up with mortars on the U.S. base, then sent snipers scurrying under cover of the moonless night into the camp's very midst to sow confusion. Then, from north and south, the Communists charged in force. The big U.S. 155-mm. guns were lowered to fire pointblank, and cooks and headquarters clerks joined the gun crews in manning the defense. U.S. planes, directed by Sergeant Mark Ridley of San Antonio, soon swept in to blast the attackers. When the attack began, Ridley and his squad found themselves out on patrol...
Blinking Lights. Long before dawn one moonless morning, an advance patrol of seven heavily armed commandos, their faces blackened with burnt cork, landed on a rocky beach north of Baraka. Soon their signal lights began blinking the all-clear, and a patrol boat churned in with the first assault wave of ten men. Before they had waded all the way ashore, however, a cross fire of tracers arced down at them from machine-gun nests in the bluff beyond, forcing the mercenaries to take cover behind their boat...