Word: quang
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...attrition, fought mostly on the ground between North and South Vietnamese troops struggling for favorable positions prior to a possible ceasefire. Recently, TIME Correspondents David Aikman and Donald Neff visited the sites of two of the longest and bloodiest battles that stemmed from the Communists' Easter offensive: Quang Tri, capital of South Viet Nam's northernmost province, and An Loc, another provincial capital 60 miles north of Saigon. Their reports...
...QUANG TRI province, according to a Vietnamese proverb, is a place where "dog eats stone and chicken eats salt." It is easy to appreciate this bit of folk wisdom, writes Aikman. The ugly garbage of war still sprawls obscenely on either side of Highway 1, Viet Nam's major coastal artery. Thousands of U.S.-made shell casings are piled in dull gray heaps. Now and then a refugee village, with its ludicrously colored wooden packing-case houses, appears on the horizon. As one drives closer to Quang Tri city, however, nothing but the rusting carcasses of trucks, ambulances...
...Quang Tri city itself is total desolation. As far as the eye can see there is nothing but rubble-this and the protesting skeletons of former hospitals, offices and shops, as well as the blanketing mud that seems to follow lasciviously in the wake of war. Once home for 15,000 people, Quang Tri looks like Berlin in May 1945. It does, however, contain about 4,000 South Vietnamese troops, who are holding what General Lam Quang Thi, deputy commander of Military Region I, calls "the northern front." Although secure for the moment, it is a narrow front indeed. Across...
...them are some of the best troops Hanoi can put in the field: elements of the 304th, 308th, 312th and 320th NVA Divisions, recently reinforced by regiments from the 325th, which had been stationed in Laos. Both sides have suffered heavily in the fighting. During October and November, Quang Tri was shelled by 2,000 to 3,000 rounds of artillery and rocket fire every day; more recently, 500 rounds a day has been the average figure. The South Vietnamese estimate that their losses have been around 200 a week; air strikes and suicidal attacks against well-held South Vietnamese...
...past ten years, the Montagnards have been forced-either by the encroaching Communists or by the professedly protective South Vietnamese-to leave 85% of their villages and towns. Some have started new communities, though sometimes far from their old ones; last April 883 Montagnard families were airlifted from Quang Tri province and each given 25 acres of new land to till in Darlac province, 300 miles to the south. Many far less fortunate hill-tribe refugees are still stuck in so-called resettlement camps, waiting for a chance to re-establish themselves...