Word: saigon
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...since January 1973, when the Paris Accords supposedly brought peace, had the fighting in Indochina been so bloody. Following up their capture of Phuoc Long province earlier this month (TIME, Jan. 20), Communist forces last week kept relentless pressure on the Saigon government with small-unit action throughout the country. Saigon claimed that in the nine days following the fall of Phuoc Binh, capital of Phuoc Long, 3,066 Communist soldiers were killed while 484 government troops died and 1,661 were wounded...
...heaviest main-force fighting took place in the provinces of Thua Thien and Binh Dinh, several hundred miles northeast of Saigon, where government troops tried to block Communist efforts to push into rice-rich coastal regions. Viet Cong shells fell intermittently on several towns like Bien Hoa near Saigon while south of the capital, in the economically crucial Mekong Delta, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in small-unit action disrupted river and road communications and raided small government outposts in an effort to push Saigon's men back into provincial capitals and district towns. Saigon's response...
...contrary, it provoked a flurry of threats of and preparations for stepped-up military involvement in Indochina such as have not been seen since Congress finally forced Richard Nixon to stop bombing Cambodia, two and a half years ago. North Vietnam charged last weekend that U.S. planes have directed Saigon bombers operating in South Vietnam and that U.S. reconnaissance planes have been flying over Hanoi. The long record of lies and cover-ups by the U.S. embassy in Saigon and the Defense Department made their responses--"nonsense" and "no comment," respectively--less than reassuring, particularly in view of other official...
President Ford went into hasty consultation with his top advisers last week, emerging with a plea for Congress to vote more military aid to Saigon. For Congress to accede to his request would be a terrible thing. It would result in killing more Vietnamese in defense of an indefensible government. Congress should enormously increase aid to Vietnam--but not Ford's kind of aid, and not to the Saigon government...
...America's best-known Nobel laureate likes to think of himself as a pragmatist, less interested in lofty principles than in immediate results and specific issues. So as the Saigon government and its American supporters mass for a renewed assault on the people of Vietnam, maybe we should stick to the most specific of the issues involved in his call for more flexibility...