Word: tet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...question confronting Clifford and every other top policymaker from the President on down is whether to commit scores of thousands of additional troops to Viet Nam to regain the momentum lost when the Communists launched their Tet offensive in January. U.S. commanders are pleading for 100,000 to 200,000 more troops beyond the 525,000 already authorized. Seven or eight separate plans are under study at the Pentagon, all calling for sizable reinforcements and all entailing substantial political risks for the President...
Winking Lights. In the first two weeks after Tet, food prices rose sharply. Rice, for example, rose to 150 per lb. v. 70 pre-Tet; fish went from 370 to $1.44 per lb., and live chickens from $1.50 to $7.00 apiece. But farmers in the area were in such a rush to take advantage of the high prices that they hurried supplies into the city. Result: prices dipped downward again-though they still remain about 15% above pre-Tet levels. Despite the higher prices and some temporary shortages of vegetables and chicken, most Saigonese have continued to eat fairly well...
...piles of garbage that accumulated during the first two weeks after Tet have mercifully been cleared away, even so, Saigon remains the dirtiest city in Asia, and the marks of war further blotch the city's face. In the Chinese quarter of Cholon, the heaviest damaged area, only rubble and fragments of walls mark the places where row upon row of one-story houses once stood. Patched up and painted, the U.S. embassy shows few scars from its dust-up with the Viet Cong, but many buildings elsewhere are pockmarked by bullets and bomb fragments...
Cunning Window Dressing. The sense of despair is deepened by the growing realization of just how destructive the Communist Tet offensive really was to South Viet Nam's life and institutions. To houses, schools and hospitals, the damage is far greater than from any single action during almost three decades of nonstop warfare. The country's budding industrial economy is all but shattered. The number of new homeless refugees now clogging city slums stands at 650,000 and is still climbing; and there were already 800,000 refugees pre-Tet. Saigon has not even begun to calculate...
...Development Teams have been pulled into cities for their own safety and to aid the urban refugees; few of those remaining are able to move out on pacification tasks. In some areas, supposed pacification has been exposed as cunning window dressing. The fortified villages outside Hué, which until Tet were considered showplaces of pacification in I Corps, last week resupplied the North Vietnamese defenders inside the city. So hostile has rural Viet Nam turned that last week the International Voluntary Services, whose teachers and agricultural advisers have scrupulously tried to work independently of the war, regretfully announced that...