Word: stingings
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Understandable Reluctance. Overall, few experts would question that Abe Abrams' aggressive tactics in Viet Nam have been markedly more successful than those of his predecessor, General William Westmoreland. Last fall Abrams replaced Westmoreland's ponderous battalion and brigade assaults with squad-sized thrusts. His Operation Sting Ray called for hundreds-sometimes thousands-of small patrols daily. The enemy's infiltration trails through the jungles, mountains and paddies were denied him. American troops began operating after dark, and for the first time in the war the night no longer belonged to the Viet Cong. Last year more than...
...mostly Luo, jammed the cathedral square. When venerable President Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, arrived in his black, bulletproof Mercedes, the car was pelted with anything handy, even shoes. The police reacted with flailing batons and white-foaming tear-gas grenades. The gas penetrated the cathedral, and its sting set children wailing. Some of the harried congregation used holy water to rinse their eyes, and one retired government official died the next day of the gas's aftereffects. The words of Archbishop J. J. McCarthy were lost in the shriek of sirens, the lamentations of women, the crash of plate...
...Sting-Ray Tactics. In one important sense, this response sidestepped the point of what is going on today in Viet Nam under U.S. Commander General Creighton Abrams. By last week the Army had mustered its case and through a number of spokesmen was spelling it out in Saigon. As so often before in the baffling, complicated war, it was a case easy to fault but difficult to refute, possessing an interior logic of its own, but lacking in reference points to reality on which all reasonable men might agree...
...Communists has increased-in the form of many more smaller-scale actions. Abrams has found that forays by sub-battalion-size units -companies, platoons, even squads -can be mounted more quickly, more often and in more places. Such surprise sweeps also achieve better results. Thus the general's sting-ray tactics, designed to interdict the movement of North Vietnamese units and supplies, involve the same number of men but hundreds and sometimes thousands more of what Abrams prefers to call "initiatives" rather than "offensives." As Abrams explained it last week to TIME Correspondents Marsh Clark and Burton Pines...
...only do sting-ray tactics unsettle the Communists, U.S. commanders in Viet Nam claim, but they also keep down casualties better than the defensive war that some critics would prefer the U.S. to fight now. A recent study shows that the ratio of Communist to U.S. casualties is 12-1 when U.S. troops take the initiative. When they remain in defensive enclaves, the ratio drops to 3-1. Those figures may have an "illusionary nature" too, but they doubtless have some basis in fact. Sting rays also keep the Communists away from cities and reduce civilian casualties, Saigon argues...