Word: sapper
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...TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud reported: "If Nixon meant that Vietnamization has been successful on the battlefield, his assessment was premature. During the past two years-the years of Vietnamization-the war inside South Viet Nam has been primarily a war of nerves, featuring mainly sapper attacks and small-scale skirmishes. But not even the occasional battles between main-force units in Cambodia and Laos have been conclusive in any real sense." The first test of Saigon's forces on their home ground is likely to come in the Communist offensive that is widely expected...
...minutes later, after Schulte had drifted back to his bunker, the base exploded. Hundreds of mortar shells arced down out of the moonless sky with uncanny accuracy. Hunkered down in their bunkers, the G.I.s never even saw the 50 or so North Vietnamese sappers who slipped through the perimeter wire, wearing nothing but shorts, black grease and strings of rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). One group wiped out the 155-mm. howitzers, another tossed tear gas grenades and satchel charges into the TOC, killing or wounding virtually everyone inside. Methodically, the others went from bunker to bunker, blowing them with satchel...
Eight-Day Notice. One thing Washington does not seem to be able to give Cambodia is a sense of urgency. Before the recent sapper attacks, U.S. experts repeatedly pointed out the vulnerability of fuel-storage areas, electric-power utilities and other facilities in Phnom-Penh. Last week the Cambodian government blandly revealed that it had known eight days beforehand that an attack on Pochentong was coming. Nothing was done, because there was just not enough barbed wire on hand...
...Flame. The Communists gutted Pochentong with scandalous ease. When the first rockets and mortar rounds came pounding in on the airfield and a nearby army camp at 2:30 a.m., some of the Cambodian guards were killed and the rest took off in fear of their lives. Then one sapper squad of about ten men simply strolled into the main terminal building while another cut its way through the barbed wire on the airfield periphery. At their leisure, the Communists carried powerful satchel charges to nearly every building, hangar and operational aircraft on the field...
...reflects Giap's thinking. Henceforth, says the resolution, Communist cadres are to organize and prepare for the time when U.S. forces leave and Communist troops can once again operate freely in South Viet Nam. Among other things, the order calls for a step-up in terror and sapper attacks; it also urges guerrillas to form secret three-to five-man cells that can operate "legally" in towns and hamlets. They will be poised to help Communist assault forces and thus correct the failures of the 1968 Tet campaign...