Word: saigon
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...South Viet Nam, however, no special observance of the anniversary is planned. Instead, fighting will probably continue as it has every day since the signing of the cease-fire agreement. During the past year, nearly 13,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 2,150 civilians have been killed. According to Saigon, 44,850 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers also have died. The Vietnamese fatalities since the cease-fire exceed the total number of Americans killed in the course of the war (45,941). "What we have here," observed one of South Viet Nam's top military officers, "is simply...
...support these forces, Hanoi has commit ted 700 heavy artillery pieces and 300 tracked vehicles, including T-54 and T-55 heavy tanks; it has built a network of strategically important roads running from the Demilitarized Zone in the North to within 100 miles of Saigon. It also has refurbished twelve former U.S. airfields and set up SA-2 missile sites around the former U.S. Marine airfield at Khe Sanh. Though Saigon's forces have acquitted themselves well in com bat in the past year, they have not been able to prevent the Communists from destroying bridges, blockading...
From the start of the ceasefire, the four-nation International Commission of Control and Supervision has been powerless to halt the hostilities. The Canadian members of the ices were so frustrated by the commission's impotence that they quit last August. Upon leaving Saigon, Canada's chief delegate, Michel Gauvin, remarked: "We were sent to observe a peace and came to watch a war." Since then the commission's other members, Poland, Hungary, Indonesia and Iran (which replaced Canada), have displayed no enthusiasm for looking too closely at anything...
...North Vietnamese offensive ever takes place, that cost will quickly multiply. The Communists demonstrated their ability to knock out South Viet Nam's reserves when sappers last month blew up the Nha Be petroleum depot near Saigon, destroying about 50% of the civilian stores. Attacks on the military's reserves of 2 million bbl. might well be part of a major Communist drive. Even if the military reserves remained intact, the drain would be great. If the war steps up again, the South Vietnamese will open the throttle, the Singapore refineries will be urged to open the taps...
Long estimates that Saigon's air force has flown 15,000 bombing and reconnaisance missions, its army has carried out some 35,000 military operations, and its police have executed about 200,000 "pacification" operations--all in the year since the peace agreements were signed...