Word: mortared
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Freedom Palace, once the residence of French Commissioners, Premier Diem met the challenge with unexpected decisiveness, just as the U.S. was about to give him up as ineffectual. While Saigon reverberated to the bursting of 81-mm. mortar shells in the showdown fight against the Binh Xuyen, Premier Diem proclaimed: "I believe I am on the side of justice. I will not give...
...showdown began at siesta time on a warm, summery day. Premier Ngo Dinh Diem was sitting down to a late lunch at Freedom Palace when nine 81-mm. mortar shells thumped down around the grounds, killing a civilian and wounding a couple of soldiers. The Premier rushed to the phone. "The palace is being shelled," he told French Commissioner-General Paul Ely, his voice disrupted on the line by adjacent explosions...
...Saigon. The windows of Freedom Palace were open, and Premier Ngo Dinh Diem, in grey striped pajamas, was pacing his third-floor bedroom. Suddenly, through the sultry night, Diem heard the clatter of machine-gun fire, the cries of wounded men. In the next instant, half a dozen mortar shells exploded beneath Ngo Dinh Diem's open window. "We never believed they would dare attack us!" said one of Diem's aides, aghast. But on Diem's shabby desk in Freedom Palace lay the confirmation: "All South Viet Nam will be put to blood and fire...
Battle on the Boulevard. The mortar shells and the ultimatum were fired at the struggling new state of South Viet Nam (pop. 10.5 million) by a war lord named General Le Van Vien-a man who used to be a river pirate and now runs the Binh Xuyen (pronounced bin soo yen), one of South Viet Nam's exotic alliances of political and religious sects, with its own private army of 8,000 uniformed men. The general often seems like an inclusive version of Murder Inc. and the police force, for his Binh Xuyen controls Saigon's prostitutes...
When the general launched his surprise attack on the palace last week, Diem rushed outside to check the mortar damage and comfort the wounded. Brushing aside the general's ultimatum, Diem called up Vietnamese army reinforcements to relieve a couple of hardpressed Vietnamese garrisons near by. Thundering to the scene in trucks, the reinforcements were ambushed along the Boulevard Gallieni by well-placed Binh Xuyen machine gunners, but the Vietnamese government troops piled out, unlimbered a 37-mm. fieldpiece, battered point-blank at the Binh Xuyen, and then charged...