Word: mudding
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...Delta warfare are far from ideal. Helicopters swoop in low and drop troops in the open. Other armed choppers orbit overhead, ready to help out if the enemy is in the trees, but the infantryman must slog forward, sinking up to his knees at times in oozing, smelly mud, wading through canals that cut across the fields every few hundred yards, and finally rushing into the village to overrun the enemy's positions. Vietnamese troops, who seldom weigh much more than 100 Ibs., move with considerable ease through the mud and can keep going from sunup to dark. Heavier...
...Smelly Mud. D-day in the Delta will bring the American fighting man a set of challenges unique even in Viet Nam. The principal fact of the Delta is water, water everywhere: drowning the great, flat expanses of paddyfields that reach to the horizon, running in brown, lazy fingers through 2,500 miles of navigable canals, tributaries and the Mekong itself. Only long, lush tree lines and the populous villages they shelter break the landscape's monotony, and it is in the tree lines and villages that the Viet Cong are most often found...
...units are equipped with modern Chinese weaponry that equals in firepower the South Vietnamese force that has opposed them up to now. Principal Red sanctuaries are the mangrove swamps along the coast, the Plain of Reeds, which is alternately under monsoon waters or a brick-hard bed of dried mud in the dry season, and the U Minh "Forest of Darkness" infested by poisonous snakes and king-size stinging ants as well as by the Viet Cong...
When the Arne River burst over the parapets of Florence on November 4, it submerged the city in unimaginable quantities of mud, a thick layer of oil, and an average of 15 to 24 feet of water. Thirty-three persons were drowned, several are still missing, and the damage to art works, libraries, and architectural monuments -- to say nothing of homes and businesses -- staggers the imagination...
...frame of one of the doors was carried more than a quarter of a mile. Five of the bronze panels for the Gates of Paradise were torn off and badly damaged, and four of the Baptistery's mosaic floors were washed away. Immense quantities of water, mud and heating oil, which polluted the water when the floods burst open storage tanks, inundated both the Pizza Chapel and the Horne Museum. The waters battered the lower portion of Giotto's Campanile so severely that it was feared the tower might collapse...