Word: mortars
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...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...
...covered some of the grimmest fighting a year ago, returned recently to Hué. He recalls crouching in a house near the Citadel's east wall while waiting for an air strike. With him was a grimy U.S. Marine sergeant. Amid the noise of small arms and mortar rounds, the Marine muttered, "We sure are shooting the living hell out of them." Outside, a Marine tank grinding through the rubble took a B40 rocket in the turret and pulled back. The crew climbed out, wounded, and were immediately replaced by others; the new men did not even bother...
White Against Black. Through the centuries, Cochin's Jews have adopted many Indian religious traditions. Mortar for the walls of their synagogue was mixed with coconut water, which Hindus use for sacred occasions. The ceremonial dress of a Cochin Jewish woman is a heavy gold brocade sarong and blouse, worn by Malabar Indian women at weddings. But the Cochin Jews have stoutly preserved their religious Orthodoxy, even though the community so far as it is known has never had a rabbi. (Many isolated Jewish colonies in India get along without rabbis...