The World: Dinh Tuong: Hell in a Small Place

THE South Vietnamese are no strangers to bombing. Since 1966, an estimated 65% of all American bombs have been dropped on the South, making the mighty B-52 an object of dread and fear. The giant bombers, silent and invisible at 30,000 ft., are first announced by the whistling of scores of falling bombs. On contact, the strike shakes the earth for miles around, raising a holocaust of dust, smoke and debris. Well-dug-in guerrillas can frequently survive an attack, but a peasant in his field has little chance.

Though most attention in recent weeks has focused on the air war over North Viet Nam, there has also been a dramatic step-up in the bombing of the South. In the single month of July, American B-52 bombers flew 900 missions over South Viet Nam—111 missions more than were flown in all of 1971. For the first time the big B-52s flying out of Thailand’s Utapao Air Base are striking the heavily populated Mekong Delta. With ARVN forces deployed elsewhere to counter the North Vietnamese offensive and unable to cope with the growing enemy threat in the Delta, the U.S. has apparently decided on a policy of massive and calculatedly destructive airpower as a substitute for manpower.

The most heavily hit region of the current campaign has been Dinh Tuong province, where 600,000 Vietnamese, mostly small farmers, are crammed into a tiny area one-third the size of Rhode Island. In the past two months, American planes have flown more than 125 missions over Dinh Tuong—an average of more than two a day. Each mission is composed of anywhere from three to 36 B-52s; each plane is loaded with 30 tons of bombs. A few of the victims at present in Dinh Tuong Hospital:

> A 14-year-old peasant boy is rushed into the emergency room. Half of his left arm has been blown away and the other half is wrapped in a blood-dripping bandage. Three hours earlier, he had been walking his family’s water buffalo in an open field when B-52 bombs rained down near by.

> Bui Van Si, a 58-year-old rice farmer, was cutting rice with ten other men in Sam Giang district several weeks ago. About 11 a.m. several B-52s dropped bombs in the field. Eight of the men were killed outright. Only Si and one other made it to the hospital. “I heard nothing,” he says. “Then the loud, shaking sound of the falling bombs. I dived. The others were killed instantly.”

> Le Van Du, 12, resembles an Egyptian mummy, wrapped from head to foot in bandages. The boy’s father says that there had been fighting in the area three days before, but after the soldiers passed, he allowed his son to leave the house. The boy was walking in a field near home when the bombs fell.

The U.S. maintains that civilians are not being bombed in the Delta. But last week Tom Fox of TIME’s Saigon bureau paid a visit to Dinh Tuong province. He found that in fact the bombing has claimed numerous civilian casualties. When they heard Fox inquiring about the bombing, more than a dozen other patients came forward to offer the names of civilians and villages that have been struck. “The bombs are falling everywhere, and the civilians are getting killed,” one woman said.

Officials do not categorize each kind of “war-related” casualty that enters the hospital, so no accurate count of bombing victims is possible. But a spot check by the head nurse revealed that patients from eleven different civilian bombing incidents—many involving multiple deaths—were recovering in two of the hospital’s largest wards. To be sure, the bombing victims represent only part of the war casualties. Others are suffering from mortar wounds, Communist-fired B40 rockets and AK-47 rifles; some do not know what hit them.

But the B-52 bombing adds an entirely new dimension to the fighting in the Mekong Delta. A high-ranking U.S. military official, who refused to be named, said that he knew of “no B-52 civilian casualties”—though he later admitted that there might be a few. His office is right across the street from the hospital. The officer insisted that intelligence for the plotting of B-52 raids was good, then added, incredibly, that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had recently broken contact in the province, and that no one really knew where they were. In the American effort to eliminate this elusive, wandering enemy —numbering 5,000 by the officer’s estimate—the bombs are dropping night and day on the friendly Vietnamese of Dinh Tuong, who can only do their best to stay out of harm’s way.