South Viet Nam: The Rockpile

The terrain was as tough as any the U.S. Marines had ever contested. It combined the horror of a Guadalcanal jungle with the exhausting steepness of the slopes at Chapultepec. Added to that were fusillades of bullets as ferocious as at Tarawa and showers of shrapnel that turned the forest into a tropical Belleau Wood. But "the Rock-pile," as Viet Nam's latest big battleground has come to be called, is weirdly unique. There, just south of the inaccurately named Demilitarized Zone, a task force of six Marine battalions has been battling two entire divisions of North Vietnamese regulars whose...

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