The War: The Organization Man

THE WAR

Viet Nam is for men with double vision. There has never been a war quite like it. Tt is two kinds of combat against a two-faced enemy, and the combination is deadly. One fight pits the U.S. and its allies against North Vietnamese and main-force Viet Cong regular soldiers whose primary mission is as old as war itself: to kill and maim the opposing armies. The second fight is waged by a second enemy, the clandestine Viet Cong guerrilla. His uniform is the peasant’s black pajamas, and his mission is a Communist innovation: to steal people as well as territory away from the South Vietnamese government.

For the Communists and for the West —and for history—the dual confrontation is critical.

No Longer a Contest. For the enemy, both elements of the Viet Nam war are coordinated and directed from Hanoi. And both have the same aim: the takeover of South Viet Nam and the reunification of the Vietnamese under Hanoi’s Red rule. But the dual assault, with all its variations, has made the task of the U.S. and its allies doubly difficult—tough to assess and hard to explain. Victories over the North Vietnamese troops do not readily translate into visible progress in the guerrilla war. The bombing of North Viet Nam may slow the southward flow of arms and aid, but as yet has not notably diminished the vast acreage of land now in Viet Cong hands. That differential in payoff is the chief reason for the war’s frustration. For it is accepted as axiomatic by everyone concerned that the war will be won or lost in the countryside, that final victory requires the defeat and dispersal of those faceless little men in black pajamas, the Viet Cong.

More than anything else, the current talk of stalemate in Viet Nam stems from the disparity in the progress of the two wars. In the big-unit war that is being fought largely by U.S. troops, success is real and measurable. In a long string of aggressive campaigns stretching back to the first major U.S. North Vietnamese battle in the la Drang Valley in 1965, American fighting men time and again bested Hanoi’s best; they have prevented the Communists from getting a major offensive of their own under way. The combat toll in Red manpower, Hanoi’s most precious asset, has been horrendous: 50,000 Communist dead so far this year alone. By frequent ground sweeps and incessant bombing, the U.S. has destroyed the sanctuaries in mountain and jungle that the enemy so long enjoyed. On the brink of falling to the Communists when the U.S. buildup began in mid-1965, South Viet Nam is now a citadel of sovereignty that even Hanoi admits cannot be taken by overt aggression. In that sense, the conventional war is no longer a contest. “The U.S. can defeat us in positional warfare,” is the blunt admission of North Vietnamese Lieut. General Nguyen Van Vinh, deputy chief of staff in Hanoi.

Impromptu Tollbooths. As U.S. forces faced up to the vital job of coping with the regular Communist armies, the hope was that when the big Red units began to topple in defeat, the guerrillas in the rear would lose heart. It seemed reasonable to believe that as their supply lines were bombed and as their soldiers were denied their customary rice rations, the Viet Cong would lose their stomach for revolution. So far, there are few signs that the elusive and dedicated guerrillas have lost either heart or stomach for carrying on their second war.

Part of the reason lies in the vast areas of countryside they still control. The countryside is what Mao Tse-tung called “the true bastion of iron” for a revolutionary and guerrilla war, and from that bastion, particularly the populous, rice-rich Delta, comes food for the ten or so North Vietnamese divisions fighting south of the DMZ as well as fresh recruits for the V.C. main-force units. V.C. women assemble hand grenades in jungle factories, stitch uniforms, care for the wounded. Small boys dig trenches and bunkers, carry messages, build booby traps and learn to throw an occasional grenade. The V.C. tax collector is everywhere levying piasters to pay for the war. Even in neutral or government-controlled areas, Allied pilots have learned that a line of trucks stopped on a road below usually means that the V.C. have set up an impromptu but effective tollbooth. With the piasters that their taxmen collect, well-dressed V.C. agents in Saigon buy medicines, cement, cloth and food for their troops.

A Cache of Insights. For all the heavy fighting and numerous Allied victories of the past two years, progress in wresting that green bastion away from the Viet Cong has been painfully slow —and some of that progress has recently been undone by the necessity of freeing U.S. Marines from the day-today chores of pacification so that they can face North Vietnamese regulars newly active in the DMZ. The South Vietnamese government’s guess—and it is admittedly only that—is that 60% of the national population is now “under government control,” up from a little more than 50% when the U.S. buildup began in mid-1965.

That slim decline in strength has not noticeably disheartened the Viet Cong. To Americans, who are often troubled by a feeling that “our Vietnamese don’t fight as hard as their Vietnamese,” the Viet Cong’s motivations and methods have long had an aura of mystery and mystique. How and why do they hang on so persistently under constant harassment from bombs and artillery, while their manpower dwindles and their food supplies shrink? A large part of the answer was supplied when the U.S. captured a massive cache of fresh insights into the activities of an exasperatingly stubbon enemy. Last winter and spring. Operations Junction City and Cedar

Falls turned up literally tons of enemy documents, many of them thought to have come from the top secret files of COSVN (Central Office for South Viet Nam), which is Hanoi’s command post for all enemy operations in South Viet Nam. Ranging from requisitions for maternity pay to top-level speeches to a blueprint for creating a Red labor union, the captured papers and photographs—together with recent prisoner and defector interrogations—gave U.S. intelligence a clear and reliable view of the Viet Cong from the inside. They added up to both a history and a handbook on V.C. operations.

Creatures of Bureaucracy. In depth and detail, the seized documents spell out how the Viet Cong have gone about their four primary occupations: organizing themselves, fighting, terrorizing and governing the peasants they control. Paper after paper proves that the Viet Cong rank among the most thorough plotters in history. With their compulsion for keeping notes, records, vouchers and receipts, they are the model organization men of conspiracy. Whether he be a cadre (Communist coinage for a trained political agent), guerrilla or main-force soldier, the Viet Cong is a creature of bureaucracy, a product of his own planning—and a far cry from the tabloid image of an ignorant peasant on a senseless rampage.

The Viet Cong function as part of a massive, well-oiled machine with controls that stretch northward from the smallest hamlet all the way to Hanoi. Their stubborn skills in the use and abuse of the Vietnamese people have been honed by decades of practice, starting with the Viet Minh guerrillas of Ho Chi Minh, who finally defeated the French in 1954. The Geneva accords that same year partitioned the country into North and South Viet Nam, a partition that Ho assumed would last only until he won a plebiscite on reunification that was scheduled for 1956. The

Communists, after all, were superior in numbers and organization. So well prepared was Ho that when the Diem government in South Viet Nam called off the vote, he was ready to try another kind of takeover. To a 10,000-strong network of Viet Minh he had left behind in the South, he sent orders for the start of what has now become the century’s second longest war in Asia (after the Malayan guerrilla war against the British, 1948-60).

In 1954, Ho had also taken back to North Viet Nam some 44,000 mainly Southern-born Viet Minh officers, soldiers and cadres. In a few years the revolution was ready for the 44,000 “re-groupees” to begin infiltrating back to South Viet Nam to flesh out the Viet Cong’s fledgling army. They did not call themselves Viet Cong, which means simply Vietnamese Communists. That term was first applied to them by the press—and resented, presumably because Hanoi hoped to draw all the country’s dissidents into the struggle, Cong or not. The enemy prefers to be known as the National Liberation Front, which is in turn a wholly owned subsidiary of North Viet Nam’s ruling Lao Dong (Workers) Party. The Liberation Army is the Front’s military arm. But North Vietnamese prejudices aside, the name Viet Cong remains a handy catch-all for the enemy in South Viet Nam.

Down with Diem. During the Diem regime, the Viet Cong slowly gathered momentum. Diem’s government tended to be remote from the people, and the rural administrators sent out from Sai gon were seldom honest, nor were they native to their assigned areas. They were considered foreigners by the peasants, and the V.C. were quick to exploit and exacerbate grievances. They harped on local issues, set up cells, village committees and small military units. Political terrorism was started, and the first armed attacks began in 1958.

By 1961, the Viet Cong were ready for an all-out campaign to subvert the countryside. Diem responded with repressive measures that only fueled the Viet Cong’s enlistment program. When Diem was finally overthrown by his own generals (without U.S. protest) in 1963, the Viet Cong took a dip in strength. But during the revolving-door sequence of governments that followed Diem, the peasants lost faith in Saigon’s ability to rule. The Viet Cong picked up strength again. They began to roam at will through the countryside, backed up by North Vietnamese regular soldiers who had come down the Ho Chi Minh trail, poised to consolidate and supervise the victory the Viet Cong were on the verge of winning. By early 1965, the South Vietnamese army was losing a battalion and a district capital to the V.C. every week. The country was almost cut in two across the Highlands.

Learning to Fight. Then the U.S. stepped in with its dramatic buildup of American troops. Victory was snatched away from the Communists; Hanoi and the Viet Cong were presented with vast new problems, both military and political. When word spread through village and hamlet grapevines that the Americans were coming in force, suddenly the Viet Cong no longer looked like such sure winners. As a result, the V.C. had to start working overtime to keep large areas of the countryside from drifting out of their control.

To learn how to cope with their new military problem—the heliborne mobility, the massive artillery and air support that the U.S. had brought—Hanoi devised a costly experiment, which was conducted in the la Drang Valley in November of 1965. During six weeks of bloody fighting, the North Vietnamese commander was instructed to accept battles he could not possibly win. He was ordered to keep up the fight longer than any good hit-and-run guerrilla army should. “We had to learn how the Americans fought,” explained a high-ranking defector later.

One month after la Drang, a top-level meeting of main-force Viet Cong and North Vietnamese officers convened in a jungle auditorium to assess the results purchased at the cost of over 1,500 of their men.

Much of the news was bad: U.S. mobility and firepower did indeed pose difficult problems. But la Drang also demonstrated that Communist soldiers would stand and fight against the Americans; Hanoi had had considerable fears that they might not. Eventually, the jungle colloquium worked out an important new tactic: the use of bunkers manned by a small force to screen main-force units and inflict casualties on U.S. infantrymen while the main-force fighters escaped. The Communists have been using that tactic with considerable success ever since. Last month, for example, a company of the U.S. 173rd Airborne ran into a small group of Red soldiers and gave chase. The pursuit led them into a crossfire of massed machine guns concealed in 30 sandbagged bunkers; 25 Americans were killed and another 35 wounded.

In a variation of the same maneuver, instead of running, a small V.C. force stands and fights a larger U.S. unit. Then, while the Americans are busy but not overly concerned about their safety, a larger Communist force slips in to surround the U.S. unit. That tactic worked all too well last month in the jungles just north of la Drang, where a company of the U.S. 4th Infantry Division was enveloped by a force of 1,000 Communists. U.S. casualties were 44 dead and 27 wounded.

Defense against helicopters was developed too. Choppers bringing U.S. troops to the rescue may be greeted by sharp, 6-ft. stakes pointed skyward to rip open their bellies, or electrically detonated mines sown beneath the sod. So prized is a helicopter kill to the Viet Cong that a soldier who shoots one down is rewarded with a month’s leave, a bicycle, a pen and a watch.

Sand-Table Practice. The arrival of the Americans intensified the Viet Cong penchant for rehearsing every attack in advance. Sand-table models of fortresses are used to brief each man on his mission. Sometimes a unit will go off into the deep jungle and construct a full-size replica of a critical outpost gate or other attack point. The men are then run through practice assaults over and over again until they know exactly where they must go in the dark, with split-second timing. The U.S. also spurred Hanoi to modernize the Viet Cong weaponry. Mortars, once a rarity, are now abundant in V.C. units, as are the Soviet-made rockets that were used in three recent attacks on Danang Airbase. Though perhaps as much as a fourth of the V.C.’s hand weapons remain old U.S. issue, captured or stolen, more and more of the V.C. troops are being equipped with modern Chinese assault guns.

For Viet Cong who distinguish themselves in combat, a military Liberation Medal, first, second or third class, is the reward. But in a people’s army, officers may not bestow a decoration on a man unless his comrades in battle agree that he deserves it. More often, a good soldier is simply commended publicly, and perhaps given a title—”Determined to Win Soldier” or “Valiant Killer of Americans.”

Until 1964, the Viet Cong ranks were entirely volunteer; conscripts were disdained as utterly untrustworthy. Then, on the brink of victory and needing extra manpower for the final push, the Viet Cong began drafting men. Today, conscription is one of the Viet Cong’s most serious problems, required not for victory but simply to replace the lengthening roster of casualties. Viet Cong troopers are paid only from 300 to 500 per month, v. a government recruit’s pay of $27 per month, and few youths in V.C. areas volunteer any more. Instead, they are given an ultimate choice: join or be shot on the spot—a factor that undoubtedly contributes to the record 20,000 Viet Cong defectors so far this year.

Even so, the Viet Cong recruiters have their standards. Any man under 4 ft. 10 in. is rejected, as are those with kinfolk fighting for the government, those with such ailments as stomach trouble, tuberculosis, asthma or an amputated trigger finger. To avoid infiltration by government spies, one captured document enjoined against recruiting former ARVN volunteers, Roman Catholics, and “those young men whose father or mother were killed by the Revolution, landlords’ sons, and those whose parents, brothers and sisters were tyrants, opponents and distributors of the Revolution.”

Tactics of Terror. Fighting other soldiers is only one use that the Viet Cong find for their weapons. Just as often, knives, guns and bombs are employed on civilians in calculated acts of intimidation. The Viet Cong have made a veritable science out of what 19th century anarchists called “the propaganda of the deed”: terrorism.

The sniper’s bullet, the machine-gun burst in the night, a bus full of farmers dynamited, the satchel of plastique, the grenade tossed into a crowd—all are surgically planned by the Viet Cong to specific ends. In the countryside, terrorism often aims to stamp out the peasants’ sense of security, always tenuous at best. A few guerrillas firing a dozen shots near a lightly defended government village pose an agonizing problem for the local commander. If he calls for reinforcements, it is almost certain that no enemy will be found. If he does not, the villagers may begin to wonder whether the government really means to protect them.

Often, murdering the village elder or headman deprives the peasants of their traditional authority figure. In the past decade, the Viet Cong have systematically wiped out some 15,000 local offi cials—disposing of the worst as well as the best. Killing the best undermines Saigon capacity to govern; killing the worst wins the villagers’ gratitude. The result not only makes for mediocrity among those remaining, but serves as a sharp warning to them not to prosecute their tasks too diligently.

To have its desired effect, terror must be judiciously applied. So in 1962, Hanoi sent down orders to “set up specialized units and clandestine forces” to take over most such operations. Since then, the level of violent incidents has risen from 5,000 a year to 25,000, the work of elite three-man cells that travel from job to job, like any gangster gun for hire. They take pride in their work, often pinning a note on the chest of a victim describing the reasons for his execution. They do not like to be blamed for other people’s murders. Sometimes the V.C. go so far as to issue leaflets denying responsibility for a killing and blaming the death on bandits posing as Viet Cong.

Larger attacks, such as the shelling of Saigon on National Day last Nov. 1, are designed to demonstrate that the Viet Cong are everywhere able to strike at will, even in the cities that are under government control. Oddly enough, there is evidence that the National Day attack was spoiled by the Viet Cong’s own stupidity. Loyal V.C. often operate on Hanoi time, an hour behind Saigon, and set their watches accordingly. The shells fell before the festivities had begun, while the reviewing stands were still comparatively empty—in short, an hour too soon. Timing has been ruthlessly better in other attacks. On March 30, 1965, a terrorist drove a sedan loaded with explosives up to the guard post of the American embassy in Saigon and killed 20, wounded 190, many of them Vietnamese passersby. Three months later, a V.C. bomb blasted the My Canh houseboat restaurant where Americans often ate, killing 43 people. A favorite terrorist gambit is to set a Claymore mine to go off some minutes after a primary explosion, thus killing rescuers and the inevitable crowd that gathers at a disaster.

Contradictions of Government. For the task of ruling the people they have stolen from the government of South Viet Nam, the Viet Cong use every type of propaganda and coercion at their command. Loudspeaker teams travel through V.C. villages, whispering rumormongers scuttle through government zones, U.S.O.-type song-and-dance troupes and armed propaganda teams enter a village to “protect” it after advance men have sounded out the villagers’ grievances. Whatever the complaints—whether they deal with a corrupt headman or a lack of land reform—the Viet Cong move in and offer redress where they can. Their methods are direct: shoot the corrupt chief, redistribute the land.

Nor do they ever let villagers forget any improper behavior on the part of South Vietnamese troops, who often steal pigs and chickens as they forage across the land. The large entry of the U.S. in the war has provided a variety of fresh verbal ammunition. The Americans are depicted as the new French colonialists, out to rule Viet Nam economically. G.I.s are whispered to have brought three new strains of venereal disease into Viet Nam. After a bombing raid on a V.C. village by U.S. planes, a cadre will quickly take out his notebook and, like the mayor of a riot-torn U.S. city, calculate the amount of damage. Then he reports it to the villagers to fuel their anger.

Even the simplest of peasants, though, can hardly avoid the contradictions between V.C. propaganda and fact. Though the Communists claim to drive out bad government, soon after they capture a village there is usually a marked decline in public services: schools close down, medical aid disappears, roads are cut and sabotaged. As they liberate the peasants from Saigon’s “oppression,” the Viet Cong demand far more than Saigon would dare ask. Taxes are several times higher, and though the Viet Cong rail against the government’s draft laws, which conscript young men at 20 for three years’ service, the Communists take boys as young as 14 and 15 for service until the end of a war that they predict may last another 20 years. Promises of a better life and a certain Viet Cong victory are belied almost daily by the burgeoning graves of Communist dead.

In the end, the credibility gap is closed by violence. Last week a Viet Cong tossed a grenade into the living room of a village chief on Danang Bay. They killed a member of a government propaganda team distributing leaflets in Quang Nam province. They kidnaped two elders from a hamlet less than a mile from Hue. And they shot a villager in a hamlet in Thua Thien as a lesson to all the villagers not to vote in South Viet Nam’s presidential elections. It was all in a week’s work of governing, Viet Cong-style.

The Structure of Command. Each Viet Cong guerrilla is a cog in a complicated, disciplined command structure. At the apex in Hanoi sits Ho Chi Minh and his top political commissar, Le Duan, 59, who handles overall strategy for Ho’s revolution. Also in Hanoi is Lieut. General Nguyen Van Vinh, 50, who directs the southward flow of men and supplies. It is to him that COSVN reports. Until he died last month, General Nguyen Chi Thanh commanded COSVN, aided by at least six other

North Vietnamese generals stationed in the South. COSVN keeps a close watch on all the military and political activities of the Communists in South Viet Nam; its authority is ensured by the fact that even in Viet Cong regular units, one-third of all the officers at battalion level and above are from North Viet Nam—not indigenous guerrillas.

The relationship between the Liberation Army and the political activities of the National Liberation Front is equally tightly controlled. The power-wielding part of the Front is the People’s Revolutionary Party, the southern branch of Ho’s Lao Dong Party that the Hanoi journal Hoc Tap calls “the soul of the N.L.F.” Its five regional committees, .supervising the five areas into which COSVN has divided South Viet Nam, are each headed by a man with military experience. From province to district to village committee, and on down to hamlets where everyone has both a military and civilian job to do, everyone takes his orders from overhead, meaning ultimately from Hanoi. The organization embraces all.

The Wages of Sin. At local levels, the Viet Cong bureaucracy has some obvious virtues. Whereas the South Vietnamese government tends to pull the best civil servants into Saigon and sends the worst to hardship duty in the boondocks, the Viet Cong, with only hardship posts to hand out, can afford to emphasize local quality. “Their greatest strength is the offer of upward mobility and opportunity to the young men and women of the villages,” says a U.S. official. “Viet Nam’s traditional society doesn’t offer much in the way of opportunity. The V.C. promote pretty much on merit; that’s what attracts and excites the youth.”

To help the unlettered young bureaucrat or soldier, the Viet Cong have devised a catchy numbers indoctrination game. Thus there are the Three Firsts (first in combat, indoctrination and observing disciplines) and the Three Defenses (against spies, fire and accidents). Life is a series of the Five Togethers (eat, work, play, sleep and help each other); battle is the Four Quicks (advance, assault, clear the battlefield and withdraw quickly) and One Slow (prepare slowly). There are Three Strongs (attack, assault and pursue strongly), Three Ravages (seize, burn and destroy rice and houses), Five Uniformities (unified training, equipment, command, reorganization and organization) and the Five Main Skills (weapons firing, mine detonating, bayonet drill, grenade throwing and armed combat). Presumably the One Headache is peasants so illiterate that they cannot count.

Nothing so illustrates the inclusiveness of the Viet Cong organization as the ubiquitous tax collector. Everything grown in areas governed by the Viet Cong, everything manufactured within Viet Cong purlieus, every item that passes through its roads and waterways, is taxed. Peasants in marginal areas are often taxed by both sides. Merchants in cities under government control find it prudent to disgorge a portion of their profits to undercover V.C. taxmen, who audit their accounts and give them stamped receipts. Restaurant and nightclub owners in Saigon pay protection money. The harlot in bed with a battle-weary G.I. must turn over part of her wages of sin. Even the U.S. pays indirect monetary tribute to the enemy by hiring civilian truckers to transport aircraft fuel; the truckers in turn pay up at Delta roadblocks.

Only two years ago, the Viet Cong were doing a brisk business selling victory bonds redeemable after Saigon’s defeat and pegged to the price of rice as a hedge against inflation. The bottom has long since dropped out of that market, but last year the V.C. tax collectors still gouged out enough revenue to pay a third of the war’s cost, the rest being made up by North Viet Nam, with a major outside assist from Moscow and Peking. Like everything else the Viet Cong organize, their taxation system is premeditated and calibrated in the extreme.

Larger plantations are taxed an annual rate of $1.75 to $4.15 an acre, plus a 2%-4% sales tax, the precise levy in both instances based on the owner’s nationality. French planters are charged the most, Chinese next and Vietnamese the lowest. A rice farmer may have to give up to half his crop after deducting his family’s rations, but sons serving with the V.C. forces may be counted as an extra deduction, while sons in the government army mean a penalty tax. The Viet Cong also use taxes to legislate consumer morality and discourage peasant consumption of goods that good Communists frown on. Thus rates as high as 100% are levied on beer and cigarettes. The nylon that Vietnamese women prize for making the diaphanous national costume known as ao dais is often not taxed at all: it is banned.

The intricate collecting and disbursement system runs right up the organization ladder to COSVN, and vouchers are required for all expenditures, adding to the snowstorm of paper circulating inside the V.C. administration. Corruption is dealt with severely, but it is persistently present. At least one tax collector in Dinh Tuong told the Allies that he was chosen “because my family was rich and the Front did not have to worry about whether I would flee with the cash.”

1,000,000 Americans. It is on just such thorough control of the peasants that the Communists are counting for ultimate victory. Well aware that they no longer have any hope of winning the war militarily, the North Vietnamese strategists in Hanoi still insist that they will triumph. They are sure that the U.S. cannot wage conventional war against Red regulars and secure the countryside as well. “If the enemy tries to oppress the People’s Movement in South Viet Nam,” said General Vinh, “he will not be able to stop our reinforcements from North Viet Nam. If he concentrates all his forces to defeat us on the battlefield, he cannot protect his rear areas. To fight and secure his rear areas at the same time, he must have 1,000,000 troops.”

Convinced that the U.S. is hardly likely to commit so many men to the defense of South Viet Nam, Hanoi is determined to keep the U.S. forces that are there as busy as possible on the battlefield so that they cannot harass the Viet Cong operating in the countryside. North Viet Nam’s recent aggressiveness along the DMZ, for example, is viewed by U.S. intelligence sources as an attempt to tie down large U.S. Marine forces in static defense, in order to relieve pressure on the local Viet Cong in populous contested areas where the Marines’ pacification efforts have been succeeding all too well for Red taste.

At the same time, Hanoi now talks constantly of a war of decades, a war that will last until the U.S. loses patience with lack of tangible progress, with victories measured in mere numbers of enemy dead, with big-unit operations that leave unaltered the balance of control between the government and the Viet Cong in rural hamlets.

Freeing ARVN. General Vinh’s assessment of U.S. limitations in fighting a double war in Viet Nam are largely correct. But the U.S. never intended to tackle both the front and the rear of the struggle. From the beginning, Washington defined the American mission as a holding action in the cities and populous coastal zones; then, as the U.S. buildup provided the forces, to lash out into a big-unit war against Communist regulars. The South Vietnamese were to hold the countryside against the Viet Cong and pacify it. Just as Hanoi employed North Vietnamese troops to take the pressure off their men in the countryside, so the U.S. was to free the South Vietnamese for counterguerrilla civic action.

So far the formula has not worked as well as it should have. The South Vietnamese army has taken to pacification duty only reluctantly; it contains pockets of corruption and indifference toward the peasants. Saigon’s Revolutionary Development Teams formed to carry out pacification in hamlets behind the ARVN shield have had hard going, largely because the Viet Cong have killed nearly 1,000 team members.

The Crossover Point. But there are hints that the cumulative U.S. effort in the fighting war, and the steady bombing of supply lines from North Viet Nam, is taking its toll on the Viet Cong. It has, after all, jeen only a year since General Westmoreland got sufficient manpower to begin to apply genuine pressure. With average losses as high as 15,000 a month this year, the Communists may be starting to feel a manpower pinch of their own. Recruitment for the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam is down to between 3,000 and 5,500 a month. Infiltration from North Viet Nam has been held steady at 6,000 to 7,000 a month, and the Communists may at last have reached the “crossover point” where they can no longer adequately cover their losses. Moreover, U.S. bombers have made the Ho Chi Minh trail such a highway of death that the desertion rate for units moving southward has gone up significantly. One former North Vietnamese soldier told his interrogators that his unit left North Viet Nam with 300 men—and arrived in the South with only 30. Eventually, if the U.S. keeps up the pressure, Hanoi, for all its boasting, might find the prospect of a long and losing war too wearing to endure.