South Viet Nam: A New Kind of War

(See Cover)

It was only three months ago that the lethal little men in black pajamas roamed the length and breadth of South Viet Nam marauding, maiming and killing with impunity. No highway was safe by night, and few by day; the trains had long since stopped running. From their tunneled redoubts, the Communist Viet Cong held 65% of South Viet Nam’s land and 55% of its people in thrall. Saigon’s armies were bone weary and bleeding from defections. As the momentum of their monsoon offensive gathered, the Communists seemed about to cut the nation in half with a vicious chop across the Central Highlands. The enemy was ready to move in for the kill, and South Viet Nam was near collapse.

Today South Viet Nam throbs with a pride and power, above all an esprit, scarcely credible against the summer’s somber vista. Government desertion rates have plummeted and recruitment is up, and it is now the Communists who are troubled with rising defections. Some roads are being reopened for the first time in years, and the much-vaunted Viet Cong plan to move into their mass-attack “third phase” is now no more than a bedraggled dream.

The remarkable turnabout in the war is the result of one of the swiftest, biggest military buildups in the history of warfare. Everywhere today South Viet Nam bustles with the U.S. presence. Bulldozers by the hundreds carve sandy shore into vast plateaus for tent cities and airstrips. Howitzers and trucks grind through the once-empty green highlands. Wave upon wave of combat-booted Americans—lean, laconic and looking for a fight—pour ashore from armadas of troopships. Day and night, screaming jets and prowling helicopters seek out the enemy from their swampy strongholds in southernmost Camau all the way north to the mountain gates of China. The Viet Cong’s once-cocky hunters have become the cowering hunted as the cutting edge of U.S. fire power slashes into the thickets of Communist strength. If the U.S. has not yet guaranteed certain victory in South Viet Nam, it has nonetheless undeniably averted certain defeat. As one top-ranking U.S. officer put it: “We’ve stemmed the tide.”

“We Will Stand.” It was late July when the President of the U.S. summoned his aides to a three-day secret session to deliberate Viet Nam. Just back from Saigon was Defense Secretary Robert McNamara with the grim prognosis of peril. When Johnson announced his decision, it was the most significant for American foreign policy since the Korean War: “We will stand in Viet Nam.” To stand meant in fact that the U.S. would go to Viet Nam in overwhelming force and stay until the job was done. Why? “If we are driven from the field in Viet Nam,” the President told the nation and the world, “then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise or in American protection.”

By then, 75,000 American servicemen already were present in South Viet Nam or pledged to go. The President promised 50,000 more by the end of this year, and the promise was soon outstripped by the deed. The 50,000 were on the scene by mid-September—and they just kept coming. Today the total is 145,000, and it will pass 200,000 by New Year’s Day. Target by next summer: 280,000.

Appropriately, the world’s most mobile division (TIME, Sept. 24), the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile)—or “the First Team,” as its men proudly style themselves—was among the first off the mark. Within two weeks after Johnson’s announcement, the first of four supply ships carrying the bulk of the division’s 428 helicopters was on its way, and on their heels came the first of the division’s 16,000 men, commanded by Major General Harry William Osborn Kinnard. At the same time, an advance party of 1,000 men, 254 tons of equipment and nine “huey” helicopters was quietly whisked to Viet Nam from the division’s Fort Benning base in a secret, seven-day airlift.

By late August the advance party was on the job: preparing near An Khe deep in the Viet Cong-infested Central Highlands a giant helipad for the First Team’s covey of copters. The division’s assistant commander, Brigadier General John M. Wright, took machete in hand to show his men how to do it, chopping away the scrub without disturbing the grass, so as to avoid dust storms as the choppers rotated in and out. Today the First Team’s garrison at An Khe is the largest concentration of fighting men and machinery in Southeast Asia since the French left Indo-China in 1954—and predictably its well-turfed 12,000-sq.-ft. helipad is known far and wide as “the golf course.”

Building to Stay. If “the golf course” is a triumph of sweat and ingenuity, Cam Ranh Bay, abuilding 190 miles north of Saigon, is the manifesto of American engineering. Fifteen miles long, five miles wide, deep enough for any ocean vessel, rimmed by smooth, sun-blanched beaches, Cam Ranh Bay was probably the world’s most underdeveloped great natural harbor. Until, that is, four months ago—when the 4,000 men of the 35th Engineer Group went to work.

With bulldozers and dynamite, they have moved mountains of sand, built some 40 miles of road, helped construct a 10,000-ft. runway from which the first jets will blast off against the enemy next month (see map). Ammo depots, a ten-tank fuel dump with a capacity of 230,000 gal., and a T-pier are all under construction; next month a floating 350-ft. De Long pier will be towed in from Charleston, S.C.

When finished early next year at a cost that may run as high as $100 million, Cam Ranh will be a port the size of Charleston, easing the pressure on Saigon’s chockablock facilities. It will need all the dock space the engineers can clear: one measure of the U.S. commitment in Viet Nam is that last January only 65,000 tons of military equipment were fed into the nation by sea; during November more than 750,000 tons will arrive—a tenfold increase. Eventually, Cam Ranh’s facilities will be able to store 45 days’ supply for all the U.S. forces in Central Viet Nam. As much as any single installation in Viet Nam, Cam Ranh is concrete and steel testimony that the U.S. is in Southeast Asia to stay.

PXs & Pup Tents. Around South Viet Nam’s four present jet fields—Danang, Chu Lai, Bien Hoa and Saigon—are clustered most of the rest of the U.S. presence in Viet Nam. On the “hot pads” at the runway ends of each stand the silver planes, bombs aboard, on phased alert: the first wave is on five-minute call, the next on 15-minute call, then a group on 30-minute call, finally a wave on an hour’s notice. On the average, within 17 minutes of a platoon leader’s radioed call for help, the jets can be over the target with almost any combination of weapons he might need: .50-cal. machine-gun bullets, cannon shells, Bull-Pup missiles, Zuni rockets, napalm, 260-lb. to 3,000-lb. bombs. At the newest of the fields, Chu Lai, leveled and surfaced with aluminum matting by the Seabees in less than 30 days last spring, the runway is still so short that the jets take off in a double-throated roar of engines and Jet Assisted Takeoff bottles, sometimes returning to land carrier-style with an arresting cable at runway’s end.

The marines at Chu Lai are accustomed to the roar over their tents on the steaming dunes. Less easy to take has been the choking dust, now damped down by the first northern monsoons, and the fact that the nearest liberty is the Marine headquarters town of Danang. “That’s like being allowed to leave the state prison to go to the county jail,” snorts one leatherneck. In Danang and Phu Bai, the rains have turned the infernal red dust into infernal red mud, in which a truck can sink to its door handles. On the perimeters, the marines and infantrymen live like soldiers on perimeters everywhere—primitively, with pup tents, ponchos and C rations. The airmen at Danang boast big airy tents with screened windows and solid floors, a new PX and mess hall. Most of the 173rd Airborne and Big Red One troops at Bien Hoa now have hot meals and floors under their tents.

From Defense to Offense. The U.S. military has been in Viet Nam in an advisory role to government forces ever since the French were swept out in 1954 —a role that grew with the swelling magnitude of the Viet Cong threat until eventually it required 24,000 men. But it was not until last March, when the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade of 3,500 men swarmed ashore at Danang, that the first U.S. combat troops entered the fray. Like the 7,500 men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and the 101st Airborne’s Danang 1st Brigade that soon followed, the marines’ first assignment was defensive: creating a protective enclosure around bustling Danang airbase and harbor. The 173rd was thrown around Bien Hoa airbase, together with the 2nd Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division—the Big Red One—which arrived in July. The Screaming Eagles of the 101st helped reopen Route 19 from the coast to An Khe, stood watch while the 1st Air Cavalry’s advance party hacked out their “golf course.”

Standing watch was all that many critics thought U.S. combat troops would —or could—do in Viet Nam. Even as the number of G.I.s swelled, the myth remained that Americans were somehow not up to the wiles of the Viet Cong or the woes of the Asian jungle.

U.S. troops were soon besting the Viet Cong in fire fights from Chu Lai to An Khe. The 34,000 marines in Viet Nam boast a 5-1 kill ratio over the enemy, have spread their original beachhead until now they control 400 sq. mi. of territory. When a bad bit of intelligence unloaded the 101st Screaming Eagles from their helicopters right into a battalion of Viet Cong near An Khe, the Eagles fought hand-to-mortar until the field was theirs. Soon the increasing aggressiveness of American ground troops everywhere was adding yet another dimension of fear and uncertainty for the V.C., already long harassed by U.S. air and sea power.

Planes & Ships. The U.S. first bombed the north in August 1964 in tit-for-tat retaliation for a torpedo-boat attack on two Seventh Fleet destroyers in the Tonkin Gulf. Regular bombings began last February; since then U.S. and South Vietnamese planes have flown more than 50,000 sorties against the enemy. The 800 planes in use range from the old prop-driven Skyraider, whose fond jockeys insist that it can fly home with nearly as much enemy lead in it as the four tons of bombs it can carry out, to the droop-nosed, brutal-looking (“It’s so damn ugly it’s beautiful”) F-4B Navy Phantom, at 1,700 m.p.h. the fastest machine in the Vietnamese skies. Then there is the Navy’s Intruder, a computer-fed, electronics-crammed attack ship that virtually flies itself once aloft.

Along with the fighter-bombers goes a covey of other craft: jammers to knock out the enemy’s radar, flying command and communications posts, planes whose radar sweeps the sky for signs of attacking Communist aircraft. RF-101 photo-reconnaissance planes dive into the smoke to film the raid’s damage for analysis back home, using strobelike parachute flares at night. Backing the raids also are the planes and helicopters of the Air Rescue Service, ready to pluck a downed airman out of the enemy heartland.

Some 400 of the daily strike planes are based aboard the carriers of Task Force 77 of the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet. The two flattops on “Yankee Station” shoot their planes off over North Viet Nam, while the “Dixie Station” carrier normally hits only V.C. in the south. The 30 ships, 400 warplanes and 27,000 men of “77” are not included in the 145,000-man total of forces now in Viet Nam. But they are very much a part of the war, and not merely of the air war. When U.S. Marines systematically took apart a V.C. regiment on the Van Thuong peninsula south of Chu Lai last August, two destroyers and a cruiser of Task Force 77 bombarded V.C. bunkers, blasted to pieces a Red company that tried to escape over the beach. Fact is, Seventh Fleet Commander Admiral Paul P. Blackburn’s floating artillery can make life miserable—and hazardous—for the V.C. up to fifteen miles from the coast, and his screen of smaller craft on patrol duty in “Operation Market Time” has sharply limited V.C. gunrunning by boat along the shore.

The Gadgetry. Also at work for the U.S. in Viet Nam is an array of ingenious gadgetry that smacks of baling wire—and of Buck Rogers. Puff the Magic Dragon is an old C-47 transport rigged with three 7.62 Gatling-type guns —each a fascine of six machine-gun barrels. In the time it takes to say “puff,” the Dragon can spit 300 bullets at Viet Cong on the ground. “It’s a solid bar of fire,” explains a U.S. officer, “and the noise is a terrible roar.” The Lightning Bug is a UH-1B helicopter fitted with seven brilliant landing lights. It goes sampan hunting at night along Viet Cong rivers or canals. Antipeople peepers include Tipsy 33, a ground-surveillance radar first used by the marines along their Danang perimeter. By the end of this year, a steel-mesh net platform that can be laid by helicopters across jungle treetops will be in use by choppers as a do-it-yourself landing pad; the disgorged troops shinny down through the branches on a metal and nylon ladder.

The single most expensive piece of equipment in use in Viet Nam is an Air Force C-130 loaded with $2,500,000 worth of communications equipment. Known as the ABCCC (Airborne Battle Control and Command Center), the plane is in fact a flying command post, equipped with eight television screens for projecting slides and maps from its data storage drums, which contain 5,000 pieces of military intelligence—the last word for armchair-borne commanders.

Still Saigon’s War. When massive U.S. intervention in Viet Nam was bruited, there were those who argued against it on the grounds that weary South Vietnamese troops would simply quit in relief, let the Americans do their fighting for them. The U.S. buildup has indeed been decisive in halting the Viet Cong drive toward victory—but in large part because it has given the South Vietnamese, whose 600,000-man army continues to bear the brunt of battle, the help they need to go on fighting.

It remains very much their war. In the four months after U.S. combat units largely went into action, some 3,000 government soldiers were killed in action compared to 275 Americans. Over the same period, U.S. troops ran 384 company-size operations resulting in contact with the Viet Cong; South Vietnamese soldiers conducted 1,605. As the U.S. buildup has mounted, the monthly government losses have been pared: from 1,300 in July, to 800 in August, to 567 in September.

While Saigon’s soldiers got some breathing room, the once-cocksure Viet Cong found themselves choking in a new kind of war. Their massive mon soon assaults never materialized—be cause quick-scrambling allied planes all too often flew off through the rainstorms to blast a company apart before it could attack. Whereas in the first flush of their summer successes the Reds could count on an eye for an eye, by August the kill ratio had dropped to 1 to 3 against them—and they are likely to lose 27,000 men in action this year against an estimated 12,000 for the allies (including 1,000 Americans).

Not only was the mass-assault third phase in Mao Tse-tung’s guerrilla rule-book arrested, but the V.C. found themselves being rooted out of havens they had long considered invulnerable. Twice in the last month—first near Ben Cat in the “Iron Triangle” north of Saigon, then last week in Operation Concord in Binh Dinh province—rhas-ciwc allied sweeps penetrated preserves lethally off limits to anyone but Communists for 15 years.

The Sleepless Enemy. Sweep forces usually encountered few Viet Cong but often found supplies, such as enough rice in the Triangle to feed a V.C. regiment for four months. They also uncovered dirt-fresh evidences of the Communists’ long-famed trenching arts: tunnels up to 40 feet deep and several hundred yards long, with angled corridors and galleries to reduce blast effects, air vents and emergency exits.

Even the deepest tunnels are not safe from the 1,000-lb. bombs of the Guam-based B-52s, falling in sticks neatly bracketed to decapitate a small mountain. When the big bombers, converted from carrying nuclear weapons, first began making the 5,200-mile round trip from Guam to Viet Nam, critics snorted that it was overkill run riot, using elephants to swat mosquitoes. But the point was to hit the V.C. without warning (the B-52s fly so high that they are seldom seen or heard by their targets) in the heart of their eleven major strongholds, keep them edgy and off balance. The SAC planes have hit such strongholds as the Iron Triangle hard and often, and it is now so pitted with B-52 bomb craters and caved-in V.C. tunnels that wags call it the “Gruyere Triangle.” Airpower may well prove to be the guerrillas’ worst enemy. The Reds are less and less welcome in villages, since the villagers are learning that their presence may well bring the planes. Forced to move oftener, the guerrillas are getting less and less sleep. Captures and desertions are rising. Recently captured in the Gruyere Triangle: a V.C. battalion commander’s order that his troops eschew, among other things, “collective singing of folk songs” and handclapping for fear of detection.

It once was a rare day when more than a handful of Viet Cong weapons was left on a battlefield, but of late the V.C. have become quite untidy: Operation Starlight netted 614 dead V.C. and 109 weapons. More recently, Vietnamese troops killed 34 of the enemy—and captured 34 weapons—on an operation. Government figures showing a 300% increase in the number of Viet Cong defecting under the “open arms” amnesty program may be exaggerated, but the curve is definitely up.

Though harassed, the Viet Cong are far from beaten. Despite their heavy losses and their loss of tactical momentum, they still hold vast chunks of South Vietnamese real estate. Thanks to an infiltration rate still running at an all-time high of 1,000 men a month from the north, the Communists have actually managed to increase their strength, now have in South Viet Nam an estimated 65,000 main-force and regional troops, 80,000 to 100,000 guerrillas, and perhaps 40,000 fellow travelers in logistical and political cadres.

Ky to Power. Yet the enemy now faces an irrevocable U.S. commitment, and as a result, Saigon of late has had a spring in the step and a sparkle in the eye missing for years. Its visible embodiment is jaunty, popular Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, 35, who has moved with verve from scarf-clad air force commander to chairman of the board in the military collegium now ruling the nation. Ky is the closest thing to a national hero that South Viet Nam has and wherever he goes in Saigon, admiring teen-agers gather round.

Ky’s promises of social reform and a vigorous attack on corruption, coupled with the recent allied successes against the Viet Cong, have so far kept the nation’s fractious Buddhists and Catholics quiescent: they simply cannot find credible grievances that will bring crowds into the street. Even though the Ky government has made no dent in the nation’s two big problems—its 680,000 refugees and its soaring inflation—Saigon’s political situation, say old hands, is the most stable that it has been since 1960. From time to time, there are complaints that it is too stable, precisely because the military junta is running it, and that civilians ought to be in charge. Ky’s Chief of State, Major General Nguyen Van Thieu, answers that bluntly: “I don’t believe that any civilian government would have enough power to fight the Communists.”

Before Ky and the U.S. buildup, Vietnamese desertions were running at a disastrous 500 a month and recruiting was at an alltime low. The desertion rate has now fallen to minimal levels, and Saigon’s reserves are at last swelling at the targeted rate of 10,000 new men a month.

Working Together. Perhaps the best measure that the nation increasingly shares Ky’s credo is the fact that negotiation with the Viet Cong is seldom even discussed. “The only way we can lose this war now,” says Thieu, “is in a political or moral way — not in a tactical way. So why should any of us talk of negotiation? If we talk about negotiation now, we give the enemy hope and confidence.” Still no one in Saigon — or Washington — has any illusions about the job remaining to be done. General Harold K. Johnson, Army Chief of Staff, used to think in terms of ten years to finish off the Viet Cong, now says cautiously, “Maybe I’m a 9½-year man.” Even the most optimistic U.S. officials think five years the outside minimum.

With the arrival of the 5,000 marines of South Korea’s 15,000-man Blue Dragon brigade at Cam Ranh Bay last week, the allies’ combined strength rose to nearly 750,000. Orders for the Vietnamese forces issue from the quiet, air-conditioned offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two acres of yellow stucco French colonial buildings in Saigon that once housed the French high command. Chief of State Thieu heads it. Downtown, in his offices on Pasteur Street, the American commander in Viet Nam, General William C. West moreland (TIME cover, Feb. 19), presides over the complex of U.S. commands ranging from Lieut. General Joseph Moore’s 2nd Air Division to Major General Lewis Walt’s Third Marine Amphibious Force. The Army’s biggest clout is contained in the recently created Field Force Viet Nam under Major General Stanley (“Swede”) Larsen. Headquartered in Nha Trang in the largest and hardest-pressed of Viet Nam’s four corps areas, Force V includes the First Team at An Khe, the 101st Airborne’s 1st Brigade, and the arriving South Koreans, who will be under American command. The Royal Australian Regiment and the Royal New Zealand Artillery batteries are largely under their own command. Working from the long-established pattern of the advisers’ program, U.S. officers confer with their Vietnamese counterparts virtually on a daily basis up and down the line.

The Heroes. There are many Vietnamese heroes of the long war. One of the most bemedaled is Lieut. Colonel Nguyen Thanh Yen, 42, of the Vietnamese marines, who has spent 15 years fighting the Communists. A bitter, brown gnomish man called the “Little Tiger,” Yen last week, as he always does, was walking every step of the way with his 1,400-man Vietnamese task force in Operation Concord. Beside him was his adviser, U.S. Marine Major William Leftwich, 34, whom one of his superiors has called “the best American adviser in the country.” They set out early in the dazzling morning sun, trudging past the napalmed black bodies of V.C. killed in a battle the week before.

By midday the heat had Yen’s men gasping. Some were vomiting. Then the V.C. sprang their ambush. Two marines were killed instantly, and five were wounded. “Get up, you bastards,” snarled Yen. “It’s only a few snipers—get up and move after them.” The marines went, and Bill Leftwich, one of the 6,500 U.S. advisers who sometimes feel that they are the “forgotten men” in the new war, went too. The brittle Yen had run through five U.S. advisers until Leftwich came along. By quiet persuasion, Leftwich got Yen to add an engineering platoon, a 75-mm. howitzer platoon, a support and a signal detachment to what had been a medieval band. Since then, Colonel Yen and his men have been killing V.C. at a 9-to-1 ratio.

The Elusive Target. The basic U.S. strategy in Viet Nam today, now that its defensive enclaves are secured, is to go over to the offensive, hitting out from the bases in fairly large-scale thrusts at main V.C. striking forces—to break them up, keep them off balance, erode their influence. For the present, the U.S. is less interested in expanding its geography than in wearing down the enemy. The priority targets, as the U.S. sees them now: first, the U.S. Marines’ Hué-Danang-Chu Lai area, then as much of Binh Dinh province as can be cleared, finally the Hop Tac region around Saigon.

The very success of U.S. firepower so far is likely to make big kills harder and harder to come by, as Operation Concord in Binh Dinh province last week proved. An estimated 45,000 Viet Cong have been in Binh Dinh, and in the largest operation of the war, 14,000 allied troops went in at three points to try to kill a sizable batch of them. Two hundred helicopters made 358 sorties to drop 5,500 men into Suoi Ca Valley, where a V.C. regiment was reported. Another 2,500 of the First Team were out to clear “Happy Valley” next door to the west, while Vietnamese marines and army battalions closed in from the coast. But as all too often in the frustrating war, there was virtually nobody home. Even where the enemy is decisively smashed, unless allied troops stay, the V.C. soon slip back.

After the Shooting. The real reason that the battle for Viet Nam is only beginning is that battles themselves are only the beginning. When the shooting stops, some sort of Vietnamese authority, ideally local police, must be ready to move in at once to keep the hamlet secure from the V.C. After security, the needs multiply: reconstruction of the local economy, land reform, better food and medical care, schools, the beginnings of justice. “In order to win,” in the long run, says Ky, “there must be a full social revolution in Viet Nam—our revolution, no one else can do it for us.” U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge agrees, and a large part of his working day and that of the U.S. mission is spent in helping the Vietnamese lay the foundations for their own revolution. “These people,” says Lodge, “have always had a strong sense of peoplehood. What we are now trying to give them is a strong sense of nationhood.”

U.S. officials estimate that if pacification is really going to work, ultimately each district (comparable to an American county) will need at least 200 administrators, public health officers, teachers and engineers. South Viet Nam has 220 districts, so 45,000 trained men will be needed. Nowhere near that many are in sight.

Showing the Way. It is the U.S. Marines who are providing the best pilot model for a pacification program. No fewer than 10,000 marines stood guard recently while the peasants near Danang brought in their rice crop free of the Viet Cong—who are accustomed to seizing a large part of it for their own supplies. Navy doctors and corpsmen are treating more than 500 civilians a day in forward military Marine areas. To the peasants lined up for sick call, the marines hand out food, clothes, toys and soap (donated in 100-ton lots of slightly used bathtub bars by the Sheraton and Hilton hotel chains), on occasion have even fed the peasants’ livestock and rebuilt their pens. They have built schools and paved over the long-unused Saigon-Hué railroad to make the only road in the Danang area that is passable during the monsoons. Result: for the first time in eleven years, peasants are getting their produce to the Danang market.

Recently in Phu Bai a Navy doctor paused in the midst of treating a long line of village children to wipe his brow and expostulated: “Dammit, if we could just get these people to wash their kids off with soap and water, half of the cases we’re treating here today wouldn’t be sick.” A marine corporal near by listened and nodded. Next day five marines, four washtubs and a bag of towels pulled into Phu Bai in a Jeep, and an assembly line was soon set up. One by one the village’s toddlers were dunked, scrubbed and rinsed (twice) and finally toweled off. By the time the job was done, the villagers had clearly concluded that it was the finest, funniest show ever staged in Phu Bai—and public health had taken one more small step forward in Viet Nam.

Meanwhile the marines, day in and day out, in methodical, grinding patrols against the Viet Cong, are killing an average 40 Viet Cong a week—at roughly the cost of one marine dead and five wounded a day. Typical was a night’s work last week. After dusk a Marine platoon surrounded a hamlet in which V.C. had been reported hiding out, split into five squads and sat down to wait. No one spoke, no cigarettes were allowed, nor was mosquito repel lent, despite the stinging swarms—for a trained soldier can smell the chemical 50 yards away. Around 3 a.m. a drenching monsoon rain roared in from the northeast, but still not a marine moved. It lasted two hours. Finally the wan moon reappeared and picked out four men, its light gleaming from their weapons heading out of the village. The marines opened fire, a grenade exploded, and the leathernecks had one more kill and three wounded V.C. prisoners. “I hate this goddamned place like I never hated any place I’ve ever been before” growled a leathery Marine sergeant, ‘but I’ll tell you something else: I want to win here more than I ever did in two wars before.”

The Gauntlet Taken. What happens next in the war in Viet Nam depends in part on the Communists. Having been halted in midstride, the Viet Cong can drop back to the small-unit actions and the sabotage of Phase 2 adding perhaps massive terrorism in Saigon to try to bring down the government. It is the kind of war they are best at, but “deconcentrating,” as U.S. strategists call it, would be a political retreat that might well affect the morale of their troops and their hold on the peasants. Alternatively, they could go into Phase 3 anyway, perhaps even with a mass assault of divisional size on U S units in the hope of discrediting the U.S. presence by a major, one-shot victory. But that might well prove suicidal tor the Viet Cong have discovered that these days a mass assault all too easily turns into an avalanche of airborne bullets, napalm and bombs. Or they might simply fade away to lie low, Br’er Rabbit fashion, in the hope that sooner or later the U.S. would get weary of waiting and go back home.

That would be the unwisest course of all. For in deciding to stand in South Viet Nam, the U.S. means just that After all, we’ve kept 250,000 men in Western Europe for 20 years,” observes a general. “We can wait too.” The U.S. also means much more. It means to counter the Red revolution with a genuine revolution in health, education, welfare and self-sufficiency for the Vietnamese that the Communists can hardly be expected to understand. The Communists themselves chose South Viet Nam as their test case and springboard to the conquest of all Southeast Asia. There are signs that they are already beginning to regret it. The U.S. has picked up the gauntlet, and it is not only Vietnamese nationhood but all of free Asia that stands to be ultimately strengthened by the extraordinary—and still burgeoning—commitment of the lives and talent and treasure of America in Viet Nam.