Word: utapao
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...hour-long NSC meeting that morning, Ford ordered F-4 Phantoms, A-7 Corsair light-attack planes and F-111 fighter-bombers from Utapao to try to keep any Cambodian boats from moving between Koh Tang and the mainland. When the gunboats moved, the U.S. planes circling overhead fired 20-mm. machine-gun bullets into the water off their bows. At one point, the Cambodians?their force now grown to eight gunboats?fired back with antiaircraft machine guns and small arms. One bullet struck a reconnaissance plane's vertical stabilizer, but the craft made it safely back to Utapao...
...nightfall on the Gulf of Siam, U.S. forces were massing for the assault. The amphibious brigade from the 3rd Marine Division had been flown aboard an Air Force C-141 transport from Okinawa to Utapao, over the protests of the Thai government, which had been trying to head off trouble with the neighboring Cambodians by refusing the U.S. permission to launch attacks from Thailand. Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj of Thailand ordered the Marines to leave by Thursday morning or face unspecified "serious and damaging" circumstances. Meanwhile, the Holt and the Wilson had closed in on Koh Tang; the Coral...
...Thailand and aboard the U.S. flotilla, meantime, the operation was beginning under the overall command of Air Force Lieut. General John J. Burns. At 5:45 a.m. local time, he ordered 210 Marines led by Lieut. Colonel Randall W. Austin, the ships and warplanes at Utapao and aboard the Coral Sea to make final preparations. Three HH-53 Jolly Green Giant helicopters fluttered from Utapao to the destroyer escort Holt, where 40 Marines clambered down ropes to the deck...
...Scowcroft told Ford: "Mr. President, we are reasonably sure that all of the Marines are out." The casualty count was five dead, 70 to 80 wounded and 16 missing and presumed dead after a damaged helicopter crashed into the gulf. A few hours later, all of the Marines left Utapao and returned to Okinawa, thus meeting the Thai deadline for getting...
...last week, something less than a red-carpet welcome awaited him. Student radicals had festooned the airport with banners reading BASTARD FORD, GET YOUR TROOPS OUT! and FORD, YOU DESTROY INTERNATIONAL LAW. Thai government officials denounced the Pentagon's dispatch of Marines and helicopters from the U.S.-operated Utapao airbase to the rescue of the American merchant vessel Mayaguez as "madness"; Prime Minister Kukrit Pramoj reacted with what he first described as "displeasure" and later as outright "fury." At week's end an emergency Cabinet meeting voted to recall Whitehouse's counterpart, the Thai Ambassador...