Word: rivers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...beach smashers had to learn to become pinpoint artillerists. It was no easy task. The spin-stabilized 5-in. rocket is not nearly so accurate as a naval rifle shell. Moreover, no one knew if the squat, underpowered ships could safely negotiate Viet Nam's tortuous Mekong River Delta-a prime necessity if their rockets' five-mile strike range was to be applied effectively against inland Viet Cong installations. Slowly but steadily, the rocket men overcame the built-in limitations of their ships and in the process wrote a new manual on shore bombardment...
...ever thrown into any combat in Viet Nam, together with sizable South Vietnamese army and marine units. When it got under way fortnight ago, the total allied strike force numbered 11,000 men. It was a daring, defiant and, by its very nature, often disorderly operation. Into the dense river valleys and high mountains, marines were lifted by helicopter to begin a sweep through a 300-mile crescent of land, destroying Communists as they went. Their paths often led through jungle so thick that it seemed as dark at noontime as at night, and the troops were forced to slog...
...range fire fights began almost at once. In rapid order, each of three Marine battalions found and named its own "Ambush Valley." Two of the battalions moved into a landing zone surrounded on three sides by mountains filled with enemy troops. The marines were to move up the two river valleys on either side of Hill 208, which intelligence reported was the 324th Division command post. It was also a fortress. No sooner had the leathernecks advanced within range of the hill than mortar fire rained down on them from all sides, while hidden machine guns opened up. The marines...
Trapped at the river, the marines called in air strikes. Even so, the heavy attack continued. "The air was chopping them to pieces, but they kept coming at us," said Staff Sergeant John J. McGinty. All but ten men of McGinty's platoon had been wounded before a relief company arrived to pull them out. Ho Chi Minh's men got off even worse. Napalm, McGinty said, "cooked them" in the formerly Marine foxholes they had taken over, and at least 200 were killed...
...modern vision of ancient agonies bred in the scorching sun. They convey a sense of decaying grandeur, human endurance and often bizarre imagination. Only 324 years before, below this newly established refuge of Iberian abstraction, Philip IV's noblemen staged a bullfight in the nearby Júcar River, charging the wading beasts from gondolas built in the shape of dolphins and sea monsters...