Word: shau
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...nature of war across a wildly rugged, often inaccessible countryside, no shield can ever be impregnable everywhere, as the tragic fate of a Vietnamese compound called A Shau demonstrated last week...
...some 350 Montagnard mercenaries, their families and their 20 green-bereted American Special Forces advisers, A Shau in the best of times was an uneasy home. A barbed-wire and earthen-walled fortress bordered by a small airstrip, A Shau stood deep in Viet Cong-controlled territory not far from the Ho Chi Minh trail on the Laotian border. The camp existed for only one reason: to monitor traffic coming down the trail. Over the months, a kind of truce between the local Viet Cong and the Special Forces had evolved: live and let live by leaving each other alone...
First warning of trouble to come was the muffled clomp of steel biting into earth as entrenching tools signaled the fact that the enemy was digging in near the camp's wire. Then a white phosphorus mortar shell exploded inside A Shau, and the valley night erupted in recoilless cannon and machine-gun fire, the flash of shells and burning buildings. All night long the enemy poured fire into the compound. Daylight brought dive bombers to the aid of the besieged defenders, though the clouds hung so low that enemy antiaircraft guns were often firing down on allied planes...
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...
Shavli (Sialiai): shau'ley Kaunas: cow'nahs...