Word: sapper
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...Bunting drew heavily on his experience as a U.S. Army officer in Viet Nam to describe how ignorance and careerism were undermining the military. In The Advent of Frederick Giles, set in a tranquil English town thousands of miles from the nearest rice paddy, Bunting proves himself a resourceful sapper in the perennial and usually undeclared war between social classes...
...front. This book offers the reader dreadful panoramas of the Hieronymous Bosch Viet Nam landscape as it can be seen only by the insider: American interrogation experts presiding over whippings and water torture and electric-shock "therapy" of V.C. suspects (including women), fire bases overrun by enemy sapper squads because the defenders were all stoned on grass, the fragging, the profiteering, the six-month ticket punchers, the "cover your ass" mentality...
Partly because of the attrition caused by the bombing raids, and partly because of the deliberate caution of North Viet Nam's General Vo Nguyen Giap. Communist main-force attacks have recently been replaced by a campaign of probes, sapper assaults and artillery barrages. The Communists' failure to follow up initial advantages suggested that they might indeed be running out of steam, but the situation in the three main trouble spots remained ambiguous...
...Highlands city of Kontum, Communist sapper forces attacked from the south and east, and for a time held part of the city. After several hours they were driven to the south but continued to fight tenaciously near the Kontum airstrip...
Over the next three days, the Communists followed up with sapper attacks that crippled two freighters moored near Phnom-Penh's docks and severely damaged an important bridge. But there was no sign that they wanted to take the city, or even to increase the considerable swath of Cambodian territory under their control. What was the point of it all? According to some speculation, the attacks were a counterpoint to the festivities surrounding the second anniversary of the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, under whose rule North Vietnamese troops had free use of Cambodia's ports and jungle...