Word: shau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Mountain anchors the northwest corner of South Viet Nam's A Shau Valley, since 1966 a major infiltration route for Communist forces from the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos to the coastal cities of northern I Corps. It is a mountain much like any other in that part of the Highlands, green, triple-canopied and spiked with thick stands of bamboo. On military maps it is listed as Hill 937, the number representing its height in meters. Last week it acquired another name: Hamburger Hill. It was a grisly but all too appropriate description, for the battle...
...Communist soldiers. Only 40 miles from the capital, the overgrown, colonial-era plantation was being used as a staging ground for what the allies feared would be an assault on Saigon. In I Corps, the 3rd Marine Division completed their eight-week-old sweep through the A Shau Valley, long a Communist-infested staging shelter. From the forested slopes of this valley pour a steady stream of Communist troops bound either for the imperial capital of Hue or for Danang, the nation's second largest city, whose outskirts were penetrated during the current offensive and which has been shelled repeatedly...
...Possibly to signal a willingness to cool the conflict, U.S. withdraws sizable reconnaissance force from A Shau Valley...
...Green Berets still do their fighting mostly on the fringe of the big battlefields: quick, sharp clashes in the jungle along infiltration routes used by the Communists. Occasionally, one of their isolated redoubts is overrun (A Shau two years ago, Lang Vei this year) by an all-out attack. More oftenone is hit by rapid mortar and small-arms harassment probes, which are usually repulsed by the garrison. The camps are generally supplied by air, which provides the only link with the outside world...
Whether the allied force of some 12,000 men would attempt to root out the North Vietnamese gunners dug into the hills above them remained to be seen. But, in any case, the allies are not likely to elect to stay in A Shau, given the weather and the number of men who would be tied down in de fending it. Instead, Operation Delaware aimed to even an old score for the men of the Special Forces who fell there in 1966-and to destroy all the equipment and tools of war the Communists have so painstakingly assembled...