Word: saigon
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Already the Lam Son 719 bloodshed has reached a scale that Major General Frederick Weyand, the deputy U.S. commander in Saigon, describes as "worse than Tet." Even so, until last week the Laotian venture in some respects resembled what one Washington official describes as "an Alphonse-Gaston show. The South Vietnamese fought hard, but they also sat back and waited to see what the North Vietnamese would do. The North Vietnamese attacked outposts, but their main forces sat back and waited to see what the South Vietnamese would...
Arms Linked. In resuming the advance, Saigon and its U.S. mentors were apparently seeking not only further disruption of the trail but also a badly needed military and psychological triumph. With a visible victory, some critics noted, the allies could call the whole operation a success and then call it off. What about the talk of severing the Ho Chi Minh Trail? "To really cut the trail," said a U.S. officer, "you would have to have ARVN stretched from one Laotian border to the other with their arms linked." Nevertheless, most estimates indicate that truck movements along the trail have...
...South Vietnamese commanders hope, most of the kinks have been worked out of Lam Son. Certainly, Saigon has not overlooked anything that might improve ARVN's chances in the fighting to come. Vice President Ky has even commissioned Vietnamese composers to fashion songs celebrating ARVN bravery, nobility and sacrifice. Whether they will be tunes of victory, too, remains to be seen...
...secret that several officers in the U.S. command's secret information-gathering center in Saigon keep Japanese-made "laughing bags" on their desks. The little battery-operated noise boxes emit an 18-second burst of hysterical laughter at the push of a button. Officers have been known to push the button during working hours-quite possibly in response to the latest batch of statistics to arrive from the battlefields or hamlets of Indochina...
...command in Saigon, for example, announced last week that 708,544 enemy troops have been killed in Viet Nam since 1961-more than the total number of Communist troops estimated to be in all of Indochina at present (650,000). "If the figures are not true," says a U.S. embassy source in Saigon, "then we are not hitting them as hard as we think. If the figures are true, then they demonstrate a frightening commitment on the part of the enemy." In Cambodia, similarly, more than 22,500 Communists have been reported killed since the allied invasion began last April...