Word: troop
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Almost immediately, the Pentagon sharply questioned State's interpretation of the infiltration data. "They are making hard assumptions based on soft estimates," said one officer. During the first six months of 1969, said the Pentagon, some 100,000 North Vietnamese troops joined enemy units in the South, more than replacing the 94,000 Communists killed during the same period. The Pentagon refused to release the figures for July and August, which reportedly show a 50% decrease in Southbound troop movements. It did note, however, that even so dramatic a decline could be explained by record monsoons in Laos, which...
Hanoi, convinced that Nixon's delay of troop withdrawals was essentially an empty gesture, reacted with smug cockiness. After the 32nd session of the Paris peace talks last week, North Viet Nam's Nguyen Thanh Le loftily declared that rising American opposition to the war at home, combined with what he described as a near mutiny among U.S. troops in Viet Nam (see following story), would compel Nixon to accept the N.L.F.'s ten-point peace program. A pivotal point calls for unilateral U.S. withdrawal...
...Viet Nam took a grim turn. For two months, a lull had hung over South Viet Nam's battlefields and U.S. diplomats and military men debated its meaning. Many of the diplomats argued that the decline in combat signaled a favorable response from Hanoi to U.S. troop withdrawals and meant that there would soon be progress in the deadlocked Paris peace talks. But the combat commanders contended that the enemy was using the pause only to prepare for a new offensive. Last week the Communists apparently settled the argument...
...Viet Nam: Do I approve of what he's done in Viet Nam? Of course I do. It's what I advocated during the campaign-troop reductions at a sensible rate. We are on the right course...
...Hanoi signal of genuine deescalation, following a period of rethinking of strategy by Ho Chi Minh and his men. The allies generally assume that orders from Hanoi take around four weeks to filter down to Communist troops in the South. If President Nixon's eight-point Viet Nam proposal of May 14, which included a plan for mutual troop withdrawals, caused a reevaluation by the North Vietnamese, then orders implementing any changes would have reached Communist units by mid-June-just about the time the lull began. The theory is bolstered by the fact that a push, expected...