Word: mortaring
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Yelling & Screaming. As in most Vietnamese villages, the people of Dak Son were completely unarmed, and most of them were women and chil dren. The Viet Cong began their attack at midnight, pouring machine-gun, mortar and rocket fire into Dak Son as they had in the past. This attack, however, was to be very different from the others. The 600 Viet Cong who assembled outside Dak Son were armed with 60 flamethrowers. Yelling and screaming, they attacked the town, shooting countless streams of liquid fire that lit up the night and terrified by its very sight a people...
...there they were. First laying down a mortar barrage, the 272nd skillfully used bangalore torpedoes to blow big gaps in the six layers of barbed wire that surround Bo Due's two interconnected forts. Then, charging in mindless waves, the V.C. managed to reach one of the forts. Using homemade bamboo ladders that they had carried with them, they scaled the walls and captured the fort. Their victory was short-lived. While 250 South Vietnamese defenders fought back, U.S. advisers called in artillery strikes from two miles away, brought in planes to bombard the V.C. The Communists left behind...
Except for the dead, there was little sleep. Methodically, all day long, the Communists walked 82-mm. mortar shells, five and six at a time, back and forth across the paratroopers' perimeter. U.S. air and artillery blasted back. Waves of screaming jets swept over, searing and shearing the hilltop bunkers with fragmentation bombs, 750-lb. explosives and napalm canisters. The Communists were so securely shielded that they could be heard firing back even as the jets came in on them. When a group of troopers rushed a bunker and dropped eight grenades inside, a Communist appeared at its mouth...
After waiting three months, the Gens brothers decided to go it alone- but responsibly. First, they studied detailed exhibits of mining techniques displayed at Munich's German Museum. Back in Cologne, they bought mortar and scrounged bricks from construction sites, then placed a sand-covered ceiling over the old entrance of their excavation - to make it appear that they had filled it in. Entering the excavation through a secret door they built through the back of a cupboard, they dug farther, shoring up their excavations with brick columns and meticulously uncovering stone after stone-some of them weighing...
Mindful that after two years of mortar fire at martini time, the audience is perhaps suffering from battle fatigue, the networks have lately broadened their coverage to stories on the economic and political rehabilitation of Viet Nam. Yet there is little likelihood that the TV news shows will curb their compulsion to run those blood-flecked combat scenes. The labor and expense of filming and transportation are too great, and the competition between the networks too brutal to drop them. Walter Cronkite thinks they may bring about a "general revulsion" against war, which may be too much to expect, since...