Word: ngai
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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American press accounts showed the countryside filled with peasants fleeing to the cities. They said they were running from the ensuing communist bloodbath. But in fact, forced evacuation of the people by the South Vietnamese army was taking place. In the countryside around the town of Quang-ngai, many families were herded into helicopters by the South Vietnamese who set their houses on fire, shot their animals, and destroyed their crops. Then they were left stranded outside Quang-ngai, perhaps intended to block the advance of the communist troops. Other areas received similar treatment by the South Vietnamese army...
...received reports soon after from a missionary in the Quang-ngai province that much of the city of Ban Me Thuot, the capital of Darlac province, had been destroyed by South Vietnamese bombing. The Provisional Revolutionary Government news agency reported that about 200 people were killed or wounded in this attack, some of them former Saigon soldiers and officers. The Saigon regime defended itself by saying they were only bombing to destroy military equipment and installations their troops left behind. The soldiers used scoreched-earth tactics as well to destroy the area before the communists reached it and to drive...
...lieutenant general and the job of Defense Minister in the P.R.G. (the Viet Cong is the fighting arm of the P.R.G.). Apparently he is of peasant origin and has no formal education; in his younger years he worked as a coolie on the railroad in his native Quang Ngai province, which is in central Viet Nam. Recruited by Ho Chi Minn, Tra was a Communist Party agitator against the French colonial government in the 1930s and 1940s...
...loss of territory continued to be heavy; five provinces fell to Communist control last week alone, raising the total number of lost provinces to thirteen (out of 44). First to go were Quang Tin and Quang Ngai in the north. They were followed by Thua Thien; its capital, the old imperial city of Hue, easily fell to the Communists early one morning at midweek. That left only the city of Danang, swollen grotesquely with panicky refugees, as a final enclave in the entire five-province northern area that is referred to as Military Region I (see box, page 33). Some...
Most disastrous from Saigon's point of view was the unexpected weakness of its army's defense. In Tarn Ky and Quang Ngai City, government forces simply evaporated before the Communist advance, often dropping their arms and supplies in the process. In Ban Me Thuot, the provincial capital 160 miles northwest of Saigon, panicky troops fled a Communist offensive three weeks ago, abandoning 1 million gallons of gas, 3,200 tons of ammunition and 10,000 tons of rice. Three days before the city's collapse, 100 trucks arrived with supplies that were soon captured...