Word: saigon
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Despite the speed with which it spread, the fighting was still indeterminate. There had been no big set battles, certainly none with crack ARVN outfits like the 1st Division. "The ARVN hasn't stopped the [North Vietnamese] drive," said a U.S. officer in Saigon last week, "but the initial surge has ended. So far, continued this thing has had peaks and valleys. But the peaks haven't been too high, and the valleys haven't been too low." The big peaks, evidently, were still to come...
...months or years-were committed to the adventure in South Viet Nam. Some 35,000 North Vietnamese troops were present in the provinces south of the DMZ in Military Region I; there were perhaps 25,000 in the Central Highlands, 16,000 in the hard-pressed provinces around Saigon, 6,000 in the Delta. Counting Viet Cong soldiers, the total Communist troop strength in South Viet Nam is well over 100,000 men-the highest total since the months before the convulsive Tet 1968 attacks. Against them stand 492,000 South Vietnamese regulars and about 513,000 militia troops...
Despite the intelligence forecasts, the location and timing of the attack caught the military men in Saigon and Washington off guard. When the first North Vietnamese troops appeared below the DMZ, Pentagon experts assumed that it was a feint. The main offensive, they believed, would come in the vulnerable Central Highlands. Not until the eve of Easter Sunday, four days after the beginning of the massive artillery barrage, was it clear that a major assault was under...
General Creighton Abrams, U.S. commander in South Vietnam, who had been spending the holiday in Bangkok with his family, rushed back to Saigon. So did U.S. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who had been in Katmandu with his wife Carol Laise, the U.S. Ambassador to Nepal...
...phase sometime before May 1, when the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam dips below 69,000. The President also directed that the 6,000 U.S. combat troops currently stationed in Viet Nam should not be shifted from their defensive positions around U.S. installations at Danang and in the Saigon area to aid ARVN's fight against the North Vietnamese. To emphasize that it was "their war," it was decided that reporters' inquiries about the South Vietnamese situation would be bucked to the State Department. The President demonstrated his confidence that the situation was under control by leaving...