Word: nam
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Among themselves, the officials are not always even cautious. "We are winning going away," one field-grade officer in Viet Nam wrote to a Pentagon colleague last week. Not long ago a presidential aide mused: "The reports from the field are so incredibly good that we don't talk about them. We don't dare." Thus the optimistic talk is muffled. "Nobody around here is going into a dream world," an Administration expert insists. "Washington has been through this many times before." The American generals in Viet Nam, from U.S. Commander Creighton Abrams on down, sedulously forgo...
Rather, explains TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Marsh Clark, "the enemy is increasingly unable to achieve his own aims, which are military victory and overthrow of the Thieu government. The chance of success for the often repeated U.S. object in Viet Nam-to guarantee the South Vietnamese the right of self-determination, free from outside aggression-has vastly improved during the past year, because gradually an environment has been created in which the South Vietnamese can fend for themselves...
High-ranking U.S. officers in Saigon point out that main-force enemy units have been driven away from population centers. No major city in South Viet Nam has undergone an important attack this year. The strongest enemy divisions are now clustered along the Laotian and Cambodian borders. Local guerrillas and sappers still manage daily forays inland, but American officials argue that at the moment the enemy capacity for full-scale offensives appears drastically reduced...
...Trend. More roads are opened monthly; highway drives that would have been considered suicidal two years ago can now be made as a matter of course. Sir Robert Thompson, who led the victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya and is now a Rand Corp. consultant, recently returned to Viet Nam to sound out the situation for President Nixon. He told the President last week, says a White House official, "that things felt much better and smelled much better over there...
PACIFICATION. As of the end of October, this year, 92% of South Viet Nam's 17,424,900 people live in "relatively secure" areas v. 42% in January 1968; at the same time, the proportion of hamlets under Viet Cong control has dropped from 30% to 3.2% . The 92% figure includes "A" hamlets, where the V.C. apparatus has been eliminated; "B" hamlets, where the V.C. threat has been largely neutralized; and "C" hamlets, which are subject only to infrequent V.C. harassment. Some students of the war have long questioned the accuracy and significance of pacification statistics...