Word: viets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Virginia Democrat, was sitting on Air Force One sipping soda with several congressional colleagues. They were flying to Bosnia with President Clinton, and the conversation turned to land mines. Robb related an experience he had as a Marine in Vietnam. His unit was escorting supply convoys passing through Viet Cong-held territory, and the mission included searching for mines by poking bayonets into any disturbed soil. One afternoon, an engineer several yards in front of Robb struck a detonator with his bayonet. "He was literally vaporized right in front of my eyes," Robb remembered. "We searched for 30 minutes...
MEMORIES OF THE VIETNAM War, for those who did not serve in it, tend to be drawn from the image bank of television footage: a U.S. soldier applying a Zippo lighter to a peasant hut; a Saigon official shooting, on camera, a suspected Viet Cong terrorist through the head. But before the war escalated into a staple item on the nightly news, a much smaller conflict had played itself out in South Vietnam. This one pitted U.S. military brass and members of the Kennedy Administration against a small group of young print reporters assigned to cover a communist guerrilla insurrection...
Then what went wrong? Why did these reporters slowly lose their faith in a war they were eager to cover, even at the risk of their own lives? Prochnau blames Washington and Saigon for an unworkable strategy against the Viet Cong and for a refusal to listen to journalists who discovered it wasn't working. The more the officials tried to bamboozle or stonewall reporters, the more they drove them to dig for themselves and to unearth a disaster in the making...
...knew our formal role here: we were to establish a "presence," a word with a nice sophisticated ring. More specifically, we were supposed to engage the Viet Cong to keep them from moving through the A Shau Valley and fomenting their insurgency in the populated coastal provinces. But Hieu's words were the immediate reality. The base camp at A Shau was there to protect an airstrip that was there to supply the outpost...
...that covered up our noise. For once, our point squad spotted the V.C. before they spotted us. For once, we did the ambushing. We nailed them. A hail of fire dropped several V.C., and the rest fled. We approached gingerly. One man lay motionless on the ground, the first Viet Cong that I could definitely confirm we had killed in action. He lay on his back, gazing up at us with sightless eyes. The man was slightly built, had coarse, nut-brown features and wore the flimsy black short-legged outfit we called pajamas. My gaze fixed on his feet...