Word: deltas
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Though he was the son of a successful Los Angeles realtor, David Gitelson, 26, lived in Viet Nam like the lowliest peasant. His home was a palm-frond shack in Ba The, a tiny Mekong Delta village 25 miles from the nearest U.S. settlement. Carrying all his worldly possessions in a wheat sack, Gitelson traveled the back canals of the Delta in sandals and faded Levi's, entertaining peasants with his concertina and instructing them in the modern farming methods he had picked up as an honor student at the University of California at Davis. The peasants called...
...Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the south. No target was too or too impossible, including Saigon itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. In peasant pajamas or openly insigniaed NVA uniforms, by stealth or attacks marshaled by bullhorn, the raiders struck at nearly 40 major cities and towns...
...Cavalry (Airmobile) has so often punished the enemy, the Communists hit an Air Cav base, destroyed two helicopters and penetrated the perimeter before being repulsed. At the Dong Ba Thien airfield just north of Cam Ranh Bay, attackers using satchel charges destroyed nine helicopters. In the Mekong Delta, long a Viet Cong haven, the situation seemed even more serious. The Communists held half the important city of My Tho and parts of several provincial capitals...
First in the Delta. Some captured documents suggest that just such an enemy escalation would accompany any move to the conference table. The U.S. command in Saigon does not interpret what is happening now in that optimistic light. Rather, it thinks that the Red offensive, emphasizing hit-and-run attacks in populated areas, reflects Hanoi's need to refurbish its once awesome image among the Vietnamese peasantry and to regain control of vital coastal areas and rice bowls, such as Binh Dinh province, that growing allied success has denied its troops...
...infiltrating the South in order to fill the ranks. Westmoreland estimates that the average Viet Cong main-force unit is now 10% North Vietnamese. NVA units have lately been found operating as far down the command ladder as squad-size in hamlets. And two weeks ago in the Delta, hitherto the exclusive preserve of indigenous Viet Cong, the first North Vietnamese soldier was captured...