Word: piranha
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Tropical Fish Hobbyist Herbert Axelrod [July 29], TIME says "he delights in swimming in piranha-infested rivers just to prove that piranhas are not man-eaters." This is not in accord with my childhood memories of placing my hand against the glass wall of the piranha tank in the hometown aquarium for the thrill of watching these aggressive Lilliputians try to attack the hand...
Axelrod undertakes yearly expeditions to the tropics. In the Amazon jungle, his favorite fish-finding territory, he delights in swimming in piranha-infested rivers just to prove that piranhas (which he sells for $50) are not man-eaters. In fact, about the only place he finds hazardous is the U.S., where he lives in an expensive, theoretically bombproof, glass-and-concrete house on the Jersey shore. There, with unlisted phone numbers and safe from advice-seeking laymen and other "bores," Axelrod can, and does, toss off as many as four T.F.H. booklets over a weekend...
...part of Operation Piranha, a joint U.S.-Vietnamese assault on the Batangan peninsula 20 miles south of coastal Chu Lai-and a suspected supply base for guerrillas operating in the area. At dawn of Piranha's first day, big naval guns pounded Batangan's beaches from offshore. Then an American amphibious force slipped ashore, while Vietnamese marines and army troops helicoptered inland to close the trap, and a U.S. Marine unit choppered down atop Batangan's commanding 660-ft.-high hill...
...landings by sea and air were virtually unopposed, but soon Piranha's pincers, aided by tactical air strikes from Navy bombers, were flushing out Viet Cong on all sides. In the first encounter, U.S. Marines killed four V.C. and captured six. The Vietnamese soon checked in with 28 dead Viet Cong, and the bombers picked off twelve more. Later, in one brief, fierce firefight, the marines killed 17 more Viet Cong and captured 21, suffering not a single U.S. casualty in the process. Marine Major General Lewis Walt flew into Batangan for a battlefield look, found himself "so proud...
...every right to be. At week's end Operation Piranha had yielded the marines 112 Viet Cong dead and 43 prisoners, not to mention an additional 66 V.C. kills scored by the South Vietnamese troops...