50 Years Ago This Week: Doubt Spreads as Marines Take Fire in Vietnam

Milestone moments do not a year make. Often, it’s the smaller news stories that add up, gradually, to big history. With that in mind, in 2017 TIME History will revisit the entire year of 1967, week by week, as it was reported in the pages of TIME. Catch up on last week’s installment here. Week 40: Oct. 6, 1967 The latest report from Vietnam, based largely on files from correspondent David Greenway, who also took the image that appeared on this issue’s cover, found U.S. Marines under fire at Con Thien. The name of the area, the magazine explained, meant “place of angels”—but had come to seem like “something more akin to hell”: Since Sept. 1, the outpost, less than two miles from the southern edge of the six-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that separates the two Viet Nams, has been under relentless bombardment from Communist guns. In one barrage last week, the Communists sent 903 artillery, mortar, rocket and recoilless-rifle shells whistling into the perimeter around Con Thien’s three barren, red clay hills—probably the greatest single Red bombardment of the war. In August, the leathernecks took 388 casualties along the northern defense line that stretches from the South China Sea to Khe Sanh in the mountainous borderlands near Laos; in September, more than 2,200 Marines were killed and wounded. …In the U.S., 10,000 miles away, Con Thien dramatized all the cumulative frustrations of the painful war. A...
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