Word: phuoc
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Region Three, which encompasses the eleven provinces surrounding Saigon, the South Vietnamese have suffered several serious setbacks, including the loss a month ago of the entire province of Phuoc Long on the Cambodian border. The same day the Communists captured Phuoc Long, they dislodged Saigon's forces from the strategic Nui Ba Den (Black Virgin Mountain), which overlooks the important provincial capital of Tay Ninh, where the South Vietnamese 25th Division is garrisoned. Communist forces have launched a random shelling of the city that has driven out some 30,000 of its 350,000 residents...
...since January 1973, when the Paris Accords supposedly brought peace, had the fighting in Indochina been so bloody. Following up their capture of Phuoc Long province earlier this month (TIME, Jan. 20), Communist forces last week kept relentless pressure on the Saigon government with small-unit action throughout the country. Saigon claimed that in the nine days following the fall of Phuoc Binh, capital of Phuoc Long, 3,066 Communist soldiers were killed while 484 government troops died and 1,661 were wounded...
...promise that he would ask Congress for $300 million in supplemental funds for new weaponry for Saigon, increasing the current $700 million already appropriated for 1975. Proponents of the request will surely argue that Saigon's shortage of ammunition and aviation fuel seriously hurt its cause in Phuoc Binh and will weaken its defense of other Communist targets. Administration spokesmen predicted that some emergency funds would be approved, but the heavily Democratic Congress, already preoccupied by recession, the oil crisis, and the confrontation in the Middle East, is bound to be reluctant to come once again...
...therefore the only real alternative to him, that only the PRG is likely to lead the Vietnamese people in rebuilding their shattered country into a land where it is at least conceivable that freedom and democracy will be more than just words. That is why the capture of Phuoc Binh last week--the first hint in three years that the continuing battle may have reached a turning point or be drawing toward an end--is such a welcome development...
...United States government did not find the fall of Phuoc Binh welcome. On the contrary, it provoked a flurry of threats of and preparations for stepped-up military involvement in Indochina such as have not been seen since Congress finally forced Richard Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia, two and a half years ago. North Vietnam charged last weekend that U.S. planes have directed Saigon bombers operating in South Vietnam and that U.S. reconnaissance planes have been flying over Hanoi. The long record of lies and cover-ups by the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the Defense Department made their responses...