Word: tet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the start, Lyndon Johnson had been worried that Hanoi was less interested in launching talks than in pressuring the U.S. into a permanent bombing pause that would allow the North to resupply its forces without interference. As it turned out, Hanoi used the Tet pause to do just that, mobilizing 2,200 trucks and 1,572 vessels to speed between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of materiel to the South. That is enough to enable the 282,000 Communist troops engaged in the war, who lately have been averaging only one or two days of fighting a month...
...military tactics go, than to close with substantial numbers of Viet Cong. In hit-and-run guerrilla attacks, the Viet Cong are too often hard to get at; in larger units, they are usually no match for Allied forces. Last week, replenished and emboldened by the Tet truce, Communist ground forces came out to fight aggressively in unusual numbers. The results were predictable: when the smoke cleared, their thrusts had been blunted and they had lost more than 1,000 men, one of the highest tolls for a single week...
...Vietnamese festival of Tet combines the qualities of Christmas and the end of Ramadan, the Hindu feast of lights and the pagan rites of spring. To welcome the Lunar New Year, Vietnamese housewives last week prepared mounds of hanh chung - rice cakes covered with a stew of pork fat, pickled onions and rancid fish sauce. Fathers wrapped money in red paper for the children and raised the cay neu, a 30-ft. bamboo pole topped with offerings of betel nuts to propitiate the spirits. Before Tet begins, the good spirits of forest and stream, garden and hearth, head...
...South Viet Nam celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Goat* amid an international flurry of peace talk, neither noise nor nostrums seemed to have much effect on the true devils of the South: the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies. During the four-day Tet truce, the Reds who were not fighting doubtless paid heed to the Liberation radio's directions about how to celebrate the festival: "Organize collective entertainment-including bayoneting the effigies of Americans, Thieu and Ky." But despite their own announcement of a seven-day truce (the U.S. and South Viet Nam agreed...
...aware that the Reds would use the truce to reposition their forces-as they did to move men and supplies southward-U.S. troops kept up a steady surveillance. In War Zone C 75 miles northwest of Saigon along the Cambodian border, the U.S. mounted "Operation Gadsden" shortly before Tet to prevent the buildup of the Viet Cong's tough 9th Division. Though two companies of American infantrymen were lured into an ambush and took "moderate" casualties in escaping, the U.S. sweep gained good field positions for the post-truce period. It also turned up and destroyed two camouflaged...