Word: phantomed
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...North Vietnamese struck in I Corps-South Viet Nam's five northernmost provinces-in a coordinated set of attacks on more than a dozen allied positions. In one, the North's rocketeers fired 24 Russianmade 122-mm. projectiles at Danang Airbase, destroying one F-4 Phantom jet and two spotter planes and heavily damaging five other craft. But there were no allied deaths, and within hours the runways were repaired and the base fully operative again. In another attack, some 5,000 Communists tried to overrun two U.S. forward positions in the Que Son Valley south of Danang...
...Phantom Soldiers." As in any army, morale is largely the result of the quality of leadership. Good junior officers are lacking in the ARVN, which has been fighting for years and was virtually beaten in mid-1965 when the U.S. buildup began. Though a tough new law cut the desertion rate in half in 1967, it is still disappointingly high: more than one in ten ARVN soldiers go permanently AWOL, accounting for 70% of the ARVN's personnel losses. Draft dodging remains a national sport; even if caught, an affluent youth...
Some 20,000 "phantom soldiers" are still in the ranks-soldiers who have defected to civilian life but still remain on the active rolls in exchange for letting their officers pocket their pay. Graft runs right up the command line in many units. The going price for a province chief's chair can be $25,000, an investment quickly earned back via shakedowns of the local population and kickbacks on licenses and shipments of goods...
...another new hotel on Park Place for Howard Hughes, 61, the world's most indefatigable Monopoly player. Without emerging from his $250-a-day cave on the ninth floor of Las Vegas' Desert Inn, the phantom billionaire has concluded negotiations to take over the 650-room Frontier Hotel for a total of $9,000,000. Hughes's holdings in and around Las Vegas are now worth over $100 million, include the Desert Inn, Sands Hotel, Alamo Airways, 30,000 acres of land and the city airport...
...petals. What he calls the "bloody row and chaos" of contemporary life-jangling telephones, whirring machinery, blaring car horns-can make him physically ill. He has been known to get off elevators before arriving at his floor because he found the "treacly tripe" of Muzak so grating. Dubbed "the Phantom" by musician friends because of his penchant for withdrawing into secluded rooms to commune with his gentle-speaking instruments, he would be happy to spend most of his time in the placid surroundings of his country house in Wiltshire, about 75 miles from noisy London...