Word: thanh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Communist attack opened suddenly with a fiery burst of 60-and 81-mm. mortar fire that jolted the residents of Thanh My and two nearby hamlets out of their sleep at 1:30 a.m. one night last week. Many of the shells were white-phosphorous ones that set fire to the flimsy huts...
...Popular Forces that were on night ambush duty near by. A Regional Forces platoon was trapped inside its compound near the village's only military target, a bridge across the Ba Ren River. After pounding the three hamlets with some 200 mortar rounds, enemy troops slipped into Thanh My. By then, many of the residents, trying to escape the mortar explosions, had taken refuge in bunkers. They soon became graves...
...Communist troops moved through Thanh My hurling various sorts of explosives-grenades, satchel charges and homemade devices called "Chicom grenades," which are fashioned from Coca-Cola cans filled with plastique or TNT, rocks and nails. Explosives dumped into one large bunker killed 24 persons. "When the V.C. came, they shot every house," says Hoan Than Tick, 56, a resident who escaped. "When people ran, they shot them too. Then they threw grenades into the bunkers...
...hamlets were heavily damaged, and Thanh My was virtually destroyed. At least 114 inhabitants died in the raid in the worst Communist massacre since the deathly days of the 1968 Tet attacks. The survivors wandered dazedly through the smoldering ruins of their homes. One old dwarf carried two severed hands wrapped in paper-all that he could find of his twelve-year-old son, who was in one of the bunkers. Even as the people of Thanh My mourned their dead, the women of a village controlled by the Viet Cong only a few miles away showed up to carry...
...years ago, during the Communists' Tet offensive of 1968, Viet Cong regulars overran the tiny hamlet of Huu Thanh in the Mekong Delta and destroyed nearly every building. Last week, as South Viet Nam celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Dog, government flags flew from every home and the town was almost completely rebuilt. In Hue, nearly wrecked by savage street fighting two years ago, crowds flocked to the reconstructed market, buying New Year gifts for their families from the 2,000-odd vendors. Pretty Saigon girls in ao dais posed for their boy friends' cameras...