South Viet Nam: The Pinprick War

Lumbering low over Stone Age villages and thick jungles, troop-carrying helicopters swarmed across the wild central highlands of Viet Nam last week. On the ground, 10,000 South Vietnamese infantrymen and marines spread out over a vast, inhospitable sector south of Tamky where no government troops had set foot since 1938. In one of the biggest drives against the Communist Viet Cong since the guerrilla war broke out in 1959, South Viet Nam’s government hoped to flush six Red battalions and a headquarters company from its longtime stronghold in the mountains. Main object of the month-long operation was to destroy Viet Cong food caches and cut the Reds’ main supply line, the 400-mile Ho Chi Minh trail to North Viet Nam through neutral Laos. The Reds had plainly evacuated the area in advance, but Vietnamese officials explained that they did not aim to kill Viet Cong guerrillas, only to isolate them. If successful, said one, the sweep “wall solve 50% of our military problems in the central highlands.” Not so, retorted some of the U.S. officers who were taking part. “It would take a whole U.S. Army division to block that trail,” said one. The clash of opinion extends to virtually every aspect of the frustrating, wearisome war in South Viet Nam—and reflects its shadowy, hide-and-seek nature. It is a war with no front lines and no decisive battles; a war of containment, not of conquest; a war of Lilliputian pinpricks and Brobdingnagian stakes. It is a day war and a night war, in which the government controls most highways and waterways by daylight (though a U.S. lieutenant and two Vietnamese soldiers were killed in a daylight roadside ambush last week), and the Viet Cong slip in from jungles and swamps to take charge after dark. In the rugged north, it is a mountain war, in which the Reds are short of food, medicine, weapons, and largely on the defensive; in the south, it is a battle for the nation’s rice granary, where the guerrillas have cunningly foiled every government attempt to clean them out. Turning the Corner. How is the war actually going? Measured against the desperate situation that faced General Maxwell Taylor on a fact-finding mission for the President 19 months ago, there is room for qualified optimism. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a conference with service chiefs in Pearl Harbor last week, the Pentagon said “the corner has definitely been turned toward victory.” No one was setting any timetable, but U.S. military chiefs and South Viet Nam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem say that the war should be won “within three years.” There are many soldiers in South Viet Nam who consider this wildly optimistic; some believe that the war may never be won. But almost everyone agrees that things have improved. Today there is little danger that the Viet Cong will take over any of South Viet Nam’s cities. Captured Red documents indicate that they have given up hope of a swift conquest, now aim merely, as the guerrillas’ North Vietnamese Boss Ho Chi Minh said recently, “to wait out the Americans.” The South Vietnamese government and its 14,000 U.S. military “advisers” pin their hopes on an integrated, long-term plan that aims at isolating and driving out the Viet Cong. Basic element of the government’s battle plan is to resettle almost the entire rural population in some 12,000 “strategic hamlets,” with bamboo fences, barbed wire and armed militiamen to keep the predatory Viet Cong from exacting food and manpower from a helpless peasantry. Already 8,000,000 villagers—59% of South Viet Nam’s population—are living in the 6,000 hamlets that have so far been completed. Problem with Peasants. Though the government admits that fewer than one-third of the hamlets are defensible against a determined onslaught, the Reds are reluctant to attack the villages for fear of antagonizing the people. In some areas, thanks to higher standards of living in the hamlets, peasants are for the first time informing government troops of the movements of the Viet Cong. “If these people believe we can protect them with the hamlets,” says one U.S. adviser, “our problem may be licked.” However, most South Vietnamese peasants are still either passive or actively resentful of the Diem regime, which is often personified by oppressive, corrupt local administrators. For all his high hopes for the program, aloof, autocratic President Diem seldom stirs far from his yellow palace in Saigon to visit the hinterland and generate enthusiasm for his cause. Sneaky Petes. The area of the government’s greatest frustration is the Mekong River Delta, where 55% of South Viet Nam’s population is centered and 75% of its rice is grown. The peasants there have resisted the hamlet program—and have often been forcibly resettled in fortified villages—because they resent having to walk miles to their paddies. In a successful attack on two hamlets last month, some 2,000 villagers simply vanished. The Reds are particularly hard to flush out of the delta because they often are impossible to distinguish from peaceful peasants. On the other hand, U.S. Special Service troops—”Sneaky Petes”—have made dramatic progress in the north by winning over and training the dark-skinned, aboriginal montagnards. Though they have for centuries been victimized by the lowland Vietnamese, who contemptuously call them Moi (savages), 150,000 montagnards now belong to an aggressive, native force. Help for Bananas. Militarily, the decisive factor in the war to date has been the introduction of some 170 U.S.-piloted helicopter transports, which give the government’s troops the advantages of surprise and mobility that had hitherto been the guerrillas’ monopoly. The antiquated “banana” copters have become increasingly vulnerable as the Viet Cong learn how to use new rapid-fire weapons; in one sortie near the delta village of Apbac last January, they downed five of 14 helicopters, including one of the 24 fast, rocket-firing HU-1B (“Huey”) helicopters that now escort most missions. Last week a second company of 24 Hueys arrived at a new base near Vinh Long. “Operations were down in the hundreds a year ago,” says General Paul Harkins, commander of U.S. forces in South Viet Nam. “Now they’re in the thousands.” But normal battlefield statistics are largely meaningless. The Viet Cong’s casualty rate is rising, but the Reds have actually increased their hard-core strength (to an estimated 25,000) by recruiting more peasants. And though the Reds are losing many weapons, those that they are capturing are modern mortars and machine guns, while those that they lose to government forces are generally crude devices and obsolete rifles. Vain Pleas. As the government troops become more efficient, the wily Viet Cong are also learning new techniques. One of the Viet Cong’s latest tactics has been to mount a series of feinting attacks on a target, then to withdraw, luring government reserve forces into a well-laid ambush. As a result, badly needed reinforcements often hang back for fear of walking into a trap. Such a war is a new and frustrating experience for U.S. military advisers. Mindful of the fact that 73 Americans have lost their lives in the fighting so far, their most bitter complaint is that military operations are constantly hobbled by political considerations. The big command decisions have to be cleared with President Diem, who still leans heavily on such members of his family as Brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and the beauteous Madame Nhu, for advice and support in the struggle against the Communists. Diem is mistrustful of many of his best soldiers and fears also that continued heavy casualties will undermine what public support he enjoys. U.S. officers have pleaded in vain with Diem to allow more small-unit sallies and night operations to challenge the Viet Cong’s after-dark supremacy. In their impatience with Diem, some exasperated U.S. officials wish that he could be replaced by a more flexible man. But they admit that there is no other leader in sight. The regime tends to exaggerate its successes and minimize its failures, insists that its airborne attacks have finally “disheartened” the Reds and “caught them off balance.” Many combat-seasoned U.S. advisers think that this is hardly enough. “Hell,” says one, “if all we did was to keep them off balance on Guadalcanal, we’d still be there.” The Coaching War. Strategically and politically, of course, the war for Viet Nam has little in common with the Battle of Guadalcanal. The U.S. is not running the war, but is trying to help a sensitive young nation to win for itself. It is a guerrilla war in which, as President Diem says, “psychological aspects” may prove more important than killing the enemy—even though, in the U.S. view, his regime has done far too little, too late, to win the support of the rural populace. After prolonged pressure, the government agreed only last week to assume the $17 million annual cost of the hamlet program—the U.S. in addition has been spending $400 million a year in South Viet Nam—and even this reluctant decision by Diem was largely influenced by fear that the villagers were showing greater loyalty to U.S. administrators than to the regime. Distressing as they may be, the differences of opinion between the government and its U.S. advisers are unlikely to abate. In fact, if the war turns more clearly in South Viet Nam’s favor, the regime will probably become more impatient of U.S. advice. For the Vietnamese, it is, after all, a war for independence.