South Viet Nam: Attack at Dawn

North and South, the war continued last week to gather in intensity. The big decision was in the air. U.S. fighter-bombers hit gasoline and oil depots north of Hanoi twice, and it looked as if President Johnson at last was ready to blast the main fuel-storage areas outside Hanoi and Haiphong. U.S. commanders have long wanted to hit the vital “source” targets that enable North Viet Nam’s trucks to feed supplies southward into the Ho Chi Minh trail. Until now, in Washington’s judicious application of pressure on Hanoi, the petroleum dumps have been off limits to U.S. pilots.

In the week’s major action on the ground, North Vietnamese regulars who had been rampaging through Phu Yen province felt another kind of pressure. Flushed with victory over a lightly armed South Vietnamese company of C.l.D.G. (Civilian Irregular Defense Group), more than a regiment of Red troops positioned itself around a bloodied battalion of U.S. 101st Airborne troopers probing the district of Tuy Hoa as part of Operation Nathan Hale. Communist Company Commander 1st Lieut. Lu Due Thung, 35, was sent out after dusk to “find and fix the weak American force,” as he later told his captors, then report back so that the Reds could launch a massive attack on the 101st the next night.

Lieut. Thung, however, decided to play the hero and attack on his own. Trouble was, the U.S. command had dispatched a battalion of 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) by Caribou transport and then helicopter from Kontum to join up with the 101st in Tuy Hoa. All night, Thung’s mortars blasted away at the U.S. position on a small plateau, but with little effect.

As dawn was breaking, a whistle shrilled and the Communists charged. Within two hours the U.S. defenders were running low on ammunition, but helicopters came in under the U.S. artillery barrage to resupply, then lifted out the American wounded. When the Communists charged across an open paddy area in front of the defenders’ plateau, U.S. fighter-bombers showed up promptly to splash napalm on them.

Within five hours the battle was over, Lieut. Thung was a cowed and loquacious prisoner, and the ground was littered with the bodies of North Vietnamese dead. That brought to nearly 400 the number of enemy destroyed in Nathan Hale’s continuing sweep of the coastal highland area, which has long been the sanctuary of the Viet Cong but is now an increasingly perilous area for an estimated 2,500 North Vietnamese troops.