Word: pleiku
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...celebrated the lunar New Year. As the Year of the Dragon went out and the Year of the Snake came in, the Viet Cong had unilaterally proclaimed a seven-day ceasefire. They spent that period busily caching explosives and setting up mortar positions near the central highlands town of Pleiku, 240 miles northeast of Saigon. As headquarters of South Viet Nam's II Army Corps and site of a U.S.-run airstrip at nearby Camp Holloway, Pleiku was a tempting target...
Then, at week's end, came massed Communist guerilla attacks on two large American compounds at Pleiku, a mountain town 240 miles north of Saigon, where about 1,000 American military men are stationed. When President Johnson received word of these raids, he conferred by phone with Defense, State Department and CIA officials, convened a Saturday night session of the National Security Council, made the decision to launch jet attacks on North Vietnamese staging areas. Next morning he met again with the NSC, reviewed the results of the air strikes...
...unsatisfactory, and rather frightening. Secretary McNamara has characterized the action as "a clear and necessary response to a test of American and South Vietnamese determination...by the aggressor, North Viet Nam." He was referring to Saturday's Viet Cong raid on a U.S. Army camp and airfield at Pleiku...
While the Pleiku attack was certainly a test of our determination, it was no more so than the hundreds of similar raids executed by the Viet Cong in the past several years. Saturday's raiders employed traditional guerilla tactics and, as has become usual, mounted their short, lethal offensive with stolen or captured American arms. In no way did the incident resemble last summer's Tonkin affair, where American bombing answered clearly defined aggression by the North Vietnamese government...
...because of the Pleiku raids, North Viet Nam deserves bombing, then such action should logically follow every large Viet Cong victory. By construing the air strikes as retaliation, Secretary McNamara is directly equating South Vietnamese civil war with North Vietnamese aggression, an equation unsupported by evidence and indicating that the United States does indeed "seek a wider...