Word: mountain
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the fighting against the Congolese rebels tailed off six months ago, Premier Moise Tshombe knew the war was not fully won. His troops had never dared attack the Simbas' mountain redoubt of Fizi, located high above Lake Tanganyika and reachable only by roads so narrow and precipitous that they are impassable during rainstorms. Led by Castro Cuban advisers and supplied with Red Chinese arms ferried in from Tanzania to the lake port of Baraka, the 5,500-man ragtag rebel force was roaming at will through a 200-sq.-mi. patch of the eastern Congo, cutting roads, murdering...
...drive and change his battle plan. Last week, calling back the diversionary column in the south, he ordered it into boats for a water trip to join him in Baraka. Then Hoare and his officers sat down to try to figure out how to negotiate the 23-mile mountain road to the rebel stronghold itself...
They were kept for months in the total blackness of a dank cell in a Laotian mountain prison, their lacerated bare legs locked each night in crude wooden stocks, helpless to do anything more than curse when rats ran across their bodies, even more helpless to care for themselves when dysentery and bladder infections racked their bodies. Sanity hung by such threads as U.S. Special Forces Orville Roger Ballenger's calm recital each night of the 23rd Psalm, the creation of a deck of playing cards with tissue paper smuggled past the guards. Above all, they were sustained...
...mountain flowers are purple underfoot. Yellow lichens and red moss brighten in the morning sun, and the heavy granite block retaining wall of the caravan road to Natu Pass curves in gentle arcs up to the ridge line that forms a natural border between Sikkim and Tibet. Just over the top of this ridge wait some 3,000 Red Chinese troops, part of the 17,000-man Chinese 2nd Division headquartered at Yatung. Other Chinese battalions guard Jelep Pass and the smaller passes into Sikkim. The tough Chinese troops at Natu, whom we had come up to see, have...
...come over Indian morale and training since the grim days of 1962, when the Chinese walked all over them. These troops are tough and determined, well supplied with U.S. weapons and winter clothing. All have been acclimatized at 9,000 ft. and can jog up and down slopes like mountain goats...