Word: mortar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Those vaunted "iron fists" were in action as the week ended, and blood once again stained the snows of Chen Pao Island, or Damansky, as the Russians call it. According to Moscow, Chinese troops moved onto the island by night, and next morning another large detachment attacked, supported by mortar and artillery fire. "There were killed and wounded as a result," the Russians reported, though no specific casualty figures were given. The Chinese, in their turn, accused Soviet troops of provoking the battle. Chinese frontier guards, a Peking radio broadcast said, were "compelled to shoot back in self-defense...
Just south of the Demilitarized Zone, assault troops hit a U.S. Marine fire base under cover of an intense mortar barrage. The attackers were led by sappers carrying explosives on their backs, the detonator cords wrapped around their chests. In vicious hand-to-hand fighting, in which more than two-thirds of the defenders became casualties, one Marine killed five attackers with his knife; another bludgeoned a Communist infantryman to death with a grenade. Some of the enemy sappers blew themselves up with the explosives they were carrying...
...happiest holiday. This three-day Tet had passed peacefully, unlike the nightmare of the year before, when more than 36,000 of the Communists' finest assault troops smashed into South Viet Nam's cities and towns. Then suddenly, in a whoosh of rockets and thud of mortars, the nightmare seemed about to begin again. Barely 19 hours after they had ended a self-imposed, week-long Tet truce, Communist gunners launched coordinated rocket and mortar attacks on more than 100 cities, towns and military installations throughout South Viet Nam, including the capital of Saigon...
Infantry on Guard. Danang, the country's second largest city and the coastal hub of northernmost I Corps, suffered greater damage. Rockets and mortar rounds poured into the city as well as into surrounding military installations. Chain explosions rocked an ammunition dump, setting huge fires raging and pumping black smoke high into the sky. A Marine hangar at the airfield was damaged. Incoming rounds hit a bare 200 yards from the headquarters of the Third Marine Amphibious Force, damaging the naval support headquarters just across the Danang River...
...flushing them out. In Saigon, a demolition squad slammed B40 rocket rounds into an isolated precinct station and killed four policemen before being driven off with their own loss of four dead. Long Binh, a U.S. headquarters and logistics base just north of Saigon, was hit by 80 mortar rounds and a number of rockets. Nearly a dozen Communist troopers penetrated Long Binh's defensive wire, but were soon repelled. A similar probe tested the defenses of nearby Bien Hoa airbase. Northwest of Saigon, two Communist battalions tangled with a unit of the 25th U.S. Division...