Richer Prize

As the Western position in Laos tottered strategists began to look to the next line of defense. They did not have far to look. Down Laos' spiny eastern border runs what is called the Ho Chi Minh trail, which North Viet Nam's ex-guerrilla President used in his fight against the French. Last week there was almost as much activity along the trail as there was in Laos, as the Communists pushed supplies and reinforcements to the jungle fighters who are battling to take over South Viet Nam--a far richer prize than Laos.

The Communist guerrillas in South Viet Nam, called Viet Cong, burn villages, capture rice barges, mine roads, extort money and food from peasants. Last year, in thousands of little quick strikes, they blew up 284 bridges, killed 4,000 officials, village elders, soldiers and farmers. Last week, with South Viet Nam headed for the polls in a presidential election, fighting broke out all over. Just north of Saigon, an army patrol blundered into a Viet Cong ambush, lost 13 dead and eleven wounded. Forty miles south of Saigon. the army surprised seven companies of Viet Cong, killed 54 and captured 80. In the capital, Saigon terrorists tossed a grenade into the garden of a U.S. aid official, seriously wounding him. Another grenade landed in front of the U.S. Military Advisory Group headquarters, killing a passerby.

Predictions Off. The Communists' enemy No. 1 is South Viet Nam's tough President Ngo Dinh Diem, 60, and their drive is given added fury by the fact that after the Geneva conference that divided Indo-China seven years ago, just about everybody predicted that Diem could never last. Not only has he lasted, but South Viet Nam has prospered to become an even more tempting target for the Reds--and a standing contrast to the poverty-stricken Communist North. Helped along by $150 million in U.S. aid each year, the South is a hard-working country of paddyfields, coconut groves, rubber plantations and flourishing light industry. South Viet Nam exported 350,-ooo tons of rice last year, seven times the 1957 figure, and currency reserves swelled to a tidy $218 million. Per capita income has jumped 20% in five years, at $120 a year is one of the highest in Asia.

Diem's 150,000-man army, made up mostly of refugees from North Viet Nam, is tough and well-trained. But it has not been able to beat the Viet Cong, who strike and slip away. Junks slip down the coast from Hanoi, at night sneak into remote beaches to deliver arms. In a year, the Viet Cong strength has almost doubled to 9,000 men. Though they have captured no major towns, they now have effective control of almost half the fertile southern delta of the Mekong, where half of South Viet Nam's 14 million people live. If hard pressed, they simply retire across the border to Cambodia, where they maintain a hospital and supply dumps. Though the Geneva International Control Commission has protested the attacks, North Viet Nam replied bluntly last month that "this struggle will not only be carried on but will score ever greater victories until the final defeat of Ngo Dinh Diem."

Diem's army is handicapped in its fight by poor communications and worse roads. Often, by the time the nearest army unit hears about an attack, the Viet Cong have already fled, and they make pursuit more difficult by booby-trapping the jungle trails behind them. Diem's army hierarchy is too rigid, and for a counterattack in force, permission must come all the way from Saigon and often from Diem himself. Some overly suspicious army commanders make recruits for 'the Viet Cong by indiscriminately jailing villagers. One colonel, taking over a new post, found 1,500 people in jail and discovered that there was no shred of evidence against 1,200 of them.

Family Show. But with his country in a virtual state of war, President Diem believes that civil liberties are a luxury it cannot afford. A man with a mandarin mentality, he runs South Viet Nam as a kind of family corporation. One brother, Thuc, is the country's leading Roman Catholic bishop. Another, Ngo Dinh Nhu, runs a strong-arm secret society, the Can Lao, that is known as "the invisible government." Diem's pretty sister-in-law, Mme. Nhu, is widely credited with having a major voice in the control of patronage and government contracts. The system is inefficient and corrupt, and Diem himself is as aloof from his people, says one Vietnamese, "as a French governor general." Moans a top civil servant: "Trying to talk to him is like pouring water on a rock--he absorbs nothing." Diem's hated "political re-education camps" hold 30,-ooo prisoners. One result of popular unrest was last November's army mutiny, which saw Diem's best troops slaughtering one another before the presidential palace (TIME, Nov.11).

Another result was widespread apathy about this week's election. Most of Diem's major opponents were in jail, and his only rivals for the presidency were a bankrupt planter and a doctor of Oriental medicine. The doctor, Ho Nhat Tan, began his first rally bravely by declaring that Diem had killed the constitution "like a mother killing its child"--but then broke down in tears, and after that had his speeches read by an assistant.

Five to Go. Against such lightweights, Diem had no worries about winning. Junketing about the country, he had his feet ceremonially washed in buffalo blood, accepted the gift of a 500-lb. white elephant from hill tribesmen. To a heckler at a rally who raised the charge of nepotism, Diem replied smoothly: "What about Nehru and his sister? And what about President Kennedy?" The Viet Cong denounce the elections, both over Radio Hanoi and from a clandestine transmitter operating from a barge somewhere in the Mekong swamps. And one Western diplomat cracked: "I hope Diem has the good sense not to win 99% of the vote."

More to the point is how Diem will fare in his new five-year term. It is fashionable among the 650 U.S. military advisers in South Viet Nam to talk of some eventual "Malayan solution" for South Viet Nam, meaning a military victory over the Communist guerrillas. Malaya had a fine British-led, 350,000-man army, no borders with a Communist state, and still took twelve years to exterminate about the same number of guerrillas as now threaten South Viet Nam.

The Viet Cong's big hope is for a revolutionary explosion in the army or the cities, born out of frustration at Diem's dictatorial controls. Diem's hope is that however much they dislike the prospect of an unending state of war, his countrymen dislike the Communists more.

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