Word: pleiku
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...well have persuaded Hanoi and Peking that he was a pushover for peace at any price. Not even his quick retaliation for Red attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 could erase that impression. Only when Viet Cong guerrillas raided U.S. barracks at Pleiku and Qui Nhon last February did the President, with the election safely behind him, begin in earnest to intensify the U.S. role in the war. And even after he did, a chorus of protest from U.S. campuses led the Communists to believe, wrongly, that the U.S. was not united...
...within 300 yards of the outpost, which was manned by only twelve American Special Forces troops and some 400 Bahnar mountain tribesmen. Reports indicated that a Viet Cong regiment was in the area. Saigon's generals decided that Due Co could not be allowed to fall. Out of Pleiku, 40 miles to the northeast, rolled a three-mile-long column of South Vietnamese Rangers, marines, elite infantry and engineers, led by tanks and armored personnel carriers. They represented half of the country's strategic reserve. To old hands, the convoy seemed ominously reminiscent of the days before Dienbienphu...
Johnson cares what the Times or almost anyone else says. And he has come in for more than his share of criticism. After he sent bombers into North Viet Nam in retaliation for a Viet Cong attack on Pleiku in which eight Americans died and 100 were wounded, the Times shook its editorial finger: "A solution will not be found by exchanging harder and harder blows." When Johnson ordered regular air strikes against the North, the Times wrote: "The greatest weakness of this reprisal policy against North Viet Nam is that while it is true the Viet Cong gets orders...
...Vietnamese troops deployed in the largest military operation mounted by Saigon since the war began, requiring an airlift that tied up virtually every transport plane in South Viet Nam for days. Though the effort succeeded, and by week's end supplies were rolling daily from Qui Nhon to Pleiku, the magnitude of the effort underscored how thoroughly the Viet Cong have chopped South Viet Nam into isolated shards. Only a fraction of the nation's 4,000 paved miles of road are freely passable; of more than 600 miles of railroad trackage, a mere 100 remain usable...
...Though Pleiku was open for the moment, the peril in the highlands was hardly diminished. The next likely pressure point in the Viet Cong's plateau push is Kontum, once a pleasant mountain village of open-air cafés with circus awnings and a population of 14,000. Though only 30 miles from Pleiku, Kontum is surrounded by some 6,000 guerrillas backed up by an estimated 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars, and is still accessible only by airlift, as is nearby Ban Me Thuot. If the Viet Cong attack, as seems almost certain, Kontum's fate...