Word: shau
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Aware that North Vietnamese regulars are concentrating troops in the A Shau valley 60 miles west of Danang, the U.S. sent B-52s to bomb the area. Air Cavalry troopers landed by helicopter on top of a nest of tunnels in the central province of Quang Ngai, rooted out the North Vietnamese defenders and blew up the bunkers. In the same province, 4th Division troopers flushed an entire North Vietnamese battalion and killed 65, losing only one man themselves...
...province, which abuts on the Demilitarized Zone. Hanoi has put three divisions of North Vietnamese regulars (some 35,000 men) into Quang Tri. Together with the local Viet Cong, in the last six months they have made nearly all the roads of the province too dangerous for travel. A Shau, in Western Quang Tri, the Special Forces camp that the Communists overran last March, is being transformed with bulldozers into a major Red base. Only last summer, 10,000 Marines had to be rushed to Quang Tri to fend off a threatened invasion directly across...
...late to stand and fight whatever the cost, plus evidences of a mounting buildup of forces now coming directly across the demilitarized zone separating North and South Viet Nam, suggests that Hanoi is desperately in search of a victory. One reflection of this need was the attack on A Shau fortnight ago.-Large Red forces have been moving eastward from the mountainous regions around A Shau along the Laotian border, building base camps and supply depots as they go. In effect, the Communists are shortening their supply lines...
Next night the Communists used bangalore torpedoes to blow a path through the wire. A Shau's defenders cut down the first Reds with Claymore mines. Still the North Vietnamese poured in. At 4:25 a.m., A Shau's radio man reported that he was the last man alive, the camp overrun. Not quite. Fighting hand-to-hand, the defenders had pulled back into the northern corner of the triangular fort...
...bravery of its defenders, A Shau was a lost fortress, and reluctantly the allies decided to "close the camp." In two days, rescue helicopters plucked 204 survivors, twelve of them American, from the ruins of A Shau. The rest of A Shau's defenders were dead or missing, but the North Vietnamese had paid dearly for their victory in an estimated 500 dead of their...