The Vietnam War, This Week, The Evening Gazette, Indiana PA
Vietnam War Weekly Front Pages
15 August 1965 – 21 August 1965
The Evening Gazette, Indiana PA
Incentive to wed.
*****
While two girl accomplices engaged a guard in conversation, Viet Cong terrorists drove a Jeep and a car loaded with explosives into South Vietnam’s national police headquarters Monday and blew up several buildings. Four policemen were killed by the blast and terrorist gunfire, reliable sources said. About 20 persons were wounded, including possibly six Americans. The terrorists escaped under cover of submachine gun fire from two other cars outside the police compound. A police guard claimed to have hit one of the escaping men.
The next day a Vietnamese government force killed 27 Viet Cong in a clash 30 miles below the border with North Vietnam. The clash, with an estimated company of guerrillas, brought to 30 the total of the Viet Cong killed since the search operation was launched four days previously in the Ba Long Valley. South Vietnamese casualties were not reported. The ground drive began after B-52 bombers from Guam hit the area. The offensive was described as one of the largest government actions in months in the northern most sector of South Vietnam.
On Wednesday, US Marines and 7th Fleet gunners hammered at a reinforced Viet Cong regiment on the Van Tuong peninsula, about 60 miles south of Da Nang, in a battle they called the biggest American ground engagement of the war. The Marine commander said that Viet Cong casualties would run into the hundreds. Of American losses – officially described as light – the general said 75% of the casualties were people who got shot in the back. It was very, very treacherous terrain, he said. The Leathernecks attacked in full regimental landing force, some from landing craft and others from helicopters, and quickly established heavy contact with the Red enemy. Officers said the Viet Cong force, well dug in, might number 2,000 men. Next day the battle assessment was that US forces may have killed more than 600 of the Red enemy in the battle of the peninsula. Marine spokesmen said 550 Viet Cong bodies had been counted and casualties were light among the Marine regimental landing force. But the US military spokesman said the Americans had suffered their heaviest loss of any single engagement in the war.
No married men had been drafted since 1963. An Associated Press survey showed marriages by young persons on the increase in many major cities since the American commitment in Vietnam was stepped up the previous month. Some of the people who manned the marriage license bureaus said the Vietnam crisis was the main factor behind the increased marriages. In New York City, men between 20 and 21 applying for marriage licenses were asked by the clerks if avoiding the draft had anything to do with her decisions to marry. “None of your business" was a typical first reaction, said one city clerk.
(Photo courtesy newspapers.com, Indiana Evening Gazette)