Word: combating
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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...March 8, 1965, a 1,400-man force of the 9th Marines splashed ashore at Danang to become the first American ground-combat unit in South Viet Nam. The Communists were threatening to cut the country in two and the South Vietnamese army was collapsing. But that morning, the grunts in green met only rain, surf and a welcoming force of pretty girls. It was a placid preface to one of the bloodiest chapters in Marine Corps history...
Courage v. Cunning. Marine casualties in Viet Nam both dead and wounded stand at 97,500 compared with 87,000 in World War II and 28,000 in the Korean War. Because their ratio of combat to support personnel is high, and because they engaged North Vietnamese regulars on the enemy's border, their losses were proportionally higher than those of the Army. Lacking large helicopter forces to carry out the vertical envelopment tactics that they developed in Korea, the Marines often seemed immobile and oldfashioned, as if forced to substitute raw courage and tenacity for flexibility and cunning...
...debate leaves the Marines a unit in search of a mission, but a unit nonetheless. A 1952 law guarantees the Marines three combat divisions and three aircraft wings, and though Marine strength will shrink from its March 1969 level of 317,400 to below 200,000 as part of the general military cutback, the Corps itself will doubtless survive. Having fought heroically in some of the nation's fiercest battles, it has won the admiration of a vast number of Americans as well as powerful friends in Congress. Even if the U.S. in fact ceases to be "the world...
Massive Infusion. South Viet Nam's economic problems gathered momentum in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. military buildup was pouring millions of new dollars into the national till. Inflationary pressures mounted, but the "swinging-door" regimes of those years were far too shaky to combat those pressures by the normal methods of taxation, price controls and enforced savings. Instead, the government was forced to keep prices low by keeping the supply of goods high...
...illustrations-possibly because they look as if they were traced from a 1945 copy of the Saturday Evening Post. His wife has a combination of eros and vulnerability rarely seen outside Scandinavian movies, but Wilson prefers his hostile inamorata-possibly because she has almost no dialogue. To combat the strains of shuttling, the uneasy rider takes on huge loads of alcohol and begins alienating wife, children, colleagues and himself...