Word: viet
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...China has launched an aggressive war all along the border of our country." With that terse statement, Hanoi radio announced Saturday that Chinese troops, which had been massed along the Vietnamese border since Hanoi's invasion of Cambodia, had poured into Viet Nam at several points along their joint frontier. Hanoi charged that before the predawn attack, the Chinese had softened up the Vietnamese with long-range artillery, followed by infantry and tank assaults. By the end of the day, Chinese forces had advanced as much as six miles into Vietnamese territory...
...Chinese and the Vietnamese have been exchanging insults and occasional gunfire along their mountainous 480-mile-long common border since last spring, when Hanoi forced an exodus of Chinese nationals who had lived in Viet Nam for years. But since December, the level of violence and invective has risen sharply, with shootings, cross-border raids and other clashes now occurring at a rate of about 30 a week...
Before the Chinese action, Viet Nam's Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh had denounced what he described as "feverish war preparations" by Peking, including the massing of 20 divisions along the frontier. Trinh also called on the United Nations to "examine the grave situation" and move to defuse it. The Soviet Union entered the rhetorical fray by warning Peking not to "overstep the forbidden line" in its quarrel with Hanoi...
...Soviets evidently agree. They have kept two small task forces, including warships, steaming off the Viet Nam coast, with the apparent aim of monitoring Chinese military communications as well as showing Soviet support for Hanoi. The U.S., for its part, has kept two Seventh Fleet aircraft carriers, the Constellation and the Midway, poised near by to discourage any rash action...
China, the country that Mao Tse-tung promised would always be Viet Nam's "reliable rear area," began to get really exercised about its neighbor's actions last Christmas when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, whose regime was a Chinese client. After Viet Nam's forces ran Premier Pol Pot out of Cambodia's capital, Phnom-Penh, and seized control of that country's other cities last month, China's Vice Premier Teng Hsiaop'ing began talking of taking "punitive action...