Word: pegasuses
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...battlefields, the allies have once more moved out to the offensive. Operation Pegasus, in the northernmost I Corps area, opened vital Route 9 for the first time since last August, relieved Khe Sanh, and last week recaptured the outpost of Lang Vei, which was overrun by the North Vietnamese in February. Last week, too, in the eleven provinces around Saigon, the allies mounted the largest campaign of the war, which consisted of some 100,000 men in an operation ambitiously called Complete Victory...
First Blood. When the lead units of Pegasus were within a mile of Khe Sanh's perimeter, they halted to let the Air Cav's rocket-firing helicopters pound away at North Vietnamese gunners still dug into surrounding hills. Once the guns were silenced, Air Cavalrymen were lifted in to seize the high ground around the base. But the Marines inside Khe Sanh drew first blood in that mission. Breaking out of their own perimeter for the first time since the siege began, they stormed and took Hill 471, two miles from their base...
...trenches built and stocked by the enemy during the eleven-week siege. A battalion of South Vietnamese rangers that had been landed inside Khe Sanh moved out to do the same, found enemy trench and bunker complexes extending right into their wire. After seizing the hills around the base, Pegasus and the men of Khe Sanh intended to try to roll the Communist forces back all the way to the Laotian border on the west and the Demilitarized Zone to the north, destroying as many as possible in the pursuit...
Communist sources in London tried to make propaganda out of the lack of resistance to Pegasus by claiming that Hanoi had voluntarily lifted the siege of Khe Sanh as a gesture of good will toward peace talks. U.S. intelligence had indeed noted that most of the enemy's 325C Division had withdrawn into Laos-but more than a week be fore President Johnson's offer to de-escalate. Parts of the 304th Division were also pulling away from Khe Sanh, leaving perhaps only 7,000 of the estimated 30,000 Communist troops that once encircled the base...
...base just before his trip to Washington, Westmoreland declared: "We took 220 killed at Khe Sanh and about 800 wounded and evacuated. The enemy by my count has suffered at least 15,000 dead in the area." General Giap may well have been glad to see the men of Pegasus approaching Khe Sanh. Pegasus not only relieved the Marines of Khe Sanh; it also relieved the Communists of a siege that they could no longer profitably maintain...