South Viet Nam: A Problem of Help

The U.S. Air Force 707 transport had barely cleared Maryland’s Andrews Air Force Base when President Kennedy’s special military adviser. General Maxwell D. Taylor, summoned the first conference in his forward cabin. For the next three days and 9,000 miles, Taylor and members of his top-level team were almost continuously locked in consultation. Only a few hours after their jet touched down at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport. South Viet Nam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem underscored the urgency of their mission by announcing a state of national emergency, admitting that his country is engaged in a full-scale war with the Communists.

The immediacy of the Red threat was demonstrated for Taylor last week after the discovery of the savagely mutilated body of Colonel Hoang Thuy Nam, a liaison officer with the International Control Commission who was kidnaped and murdered only a few miles from Saigon (TIME, Oct. 13). Thousands of Vietnamese took to the streets to protest Nam’s death. In comfortable Saigon, their demonstration marked the first occasion on which the populace had seemed genuinely aroused by the war.

Toward Winning. With his eleven-man staff, Maxwell Taylor plunged into an intensive round of sessions with U.S. political and military experts, South Vietnamese leaders and President Diem. For all the complexity of South Viet Nam’s military, economic and political problems, Taylor emphasized from the start that he was not in Saigon to formulate long-range plans. If South Viet Nam can be saved, U.S. help must be effective and immediate.

With heavy reinforcements from North Viet Nam, the Communist Viet Cong has doubled its strength (to some 20,000) and effectiveness over the past six months, is switching its strategy from isolated guerrilla raids to full-scale warfare aimed at “liberating” the country, region by region. A major disadvantage faced by Diem’s 160,000-man army is that Viet Cong rebels, who mostly come from South Viet Nam and speak the local dialect, have won widespread support among the villagers.

With Helicopters. How can the U.S. help? Conventional tactics against the shadowy Viet Cong, a Vietnamese official pointed out last week, are “like playing soccer with a tennis racket.” Despite an impressive speedup in the flow of U.S. supplies, for example, Saigon warehouses are stacked with deteriorating carbines, cloth, medical and communications equipment. Reason: Diem’s six-year-old army has made no” provision to handle the increased flow. Many combat units have to use guns that have no gun sights or are so badly worn that they jam more often than they fire. Yet new U.S. weapons seem to reach the Viet Cong in quantity.

Among military measures, short of full-scale intervention, the U.S. could profitably assign more advisory and support units to Diem, send in a flock of helicopters to give the army mobility, provide jet transports to ease the supply problem. Since much of the fighting takes place in the south’s network of waterways, the Vietnamese would have a major advantage over the enemy if they had the amphibious equipment to move them fast and in force. Pentagon experts have long argued that the U.S. should also send in pilots, ground crews and logistics specialists in numbers that would not risk large-scale intervention by the Chinese Communists but would help the Vietnamese—and would gain the U.S. invaluable experience of guerrilla warfare.