Word: tuong
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...dispersal of the Viet Cong prepared the way for Phase 2 of Operation Sunrise-the rounding up of Ben Cat's peasants. In each hamlet, the assembled farmers were told that they were being moved to a nearby strategic village called Ben Tuong, to be equipped with a school, clinic, market, deep wells, and a defense force of soldiers. They were promised a down payment of $25 and a free daily ration of rice and dried fish to tide them over the first three months...
Seventy families agreed to the move, but 140 other families had to be convinced at gunpoint. Leading their cows and water buffaloes, with their belongings piled on ox carts, the 1,200 displaced peasants filed into the jungle clearing of Ben Tuong to be greeted by a banner bearing the somewhat ironical message: "We will root out all the Viet Cong who destroy our villages." A concrete administration building and clinic is already standing at Ben Tuong, but the peasants must erect their own thatch-roofed houses, dig a protective ditch around the site, and crown it with a dirt...
...while, South Viet Nam's Seventh Division-which smashed two Red guerrilla battalions on the Plain of the Reeds five weeks ago-was laying a trap for another showdown. U.S.-trained Colonel Huynh Van Cao traveled around Kien Tuong province telling villagers exactly where and when he intended to attack the Communists, showily deploying his men to back up his threats. Predictably, the cautious Viet Cong melted deep into their Plain of the Reeds stronghold, exactly where Colonel Cao wanted them. Suddenly shifting his troops, he deployed four infantry battalions on the Viet Cong's south flank. Three...
...easy. Freed landlords went back to their villages, threw the squatters off their old property, beat up those who had denounced them. Sometimes the new owners cut down fruit trees, stripped the houses, killed the cows and buffaloes and ate them rather than give them back. Warned Nguyen Manh Tuong, dean of the Hanoi Law School: "The movement of revenge is widespread all over the country, and is pushing us back to the dark ages of prehistoric barbarism...