Frustrated but Firm

How goes the morale of U.S. troops in South Viet Nam? Healthy enough, by all accounts.

As "advisers" to the government against the Viet Cong, the 16,000 American servicemen may give no orders, and gripe sessions in the U.S. barracks pour forth stories of daily duodenals. There was, for example, the time not long ago when three government battalions totaling 1,400 men encountered a single Viet Cong sniper, who fired three shots, then fell silent. But the government commander refused to dispatch a patrol after the sniper, explaining: "If we send men out there he might start shooting again." The three battalions painstakingly skirted their way past, at the cost of an hour's delay.

Another time a government advance party burst into a Viet Cong encampment so hot on the enemy's heels that there was steaming food on the table. But the Reds had fled. Asked by his hand-wringing American adviser where the troops were that were supposed to have surrounded the camp, the Vietnamese officer in charge confessed that they had stopped in the last paddyfield to cook their own breakfast. Last week, in a Jeep bouncing along the dirt road outside Tanan in the Mekong Delta, a young U.S. Army captain cheerfully explained to TIME Correspondent Frank McCulloch how a new "clear and hold" operation was to sweep his area clean of Communists. In mid-sentence he stopped, ordered his driver to turn around. Just ahead, atop a tree, rippled the yellow-starred flag of the Viet Cong, a unit of which had evidently managed to slip back into the neighborhood after being swept out.

Veterans say that most Americans in the field go through almost the same emotional pattern. First comes two months of gung-ho spirit, then four months during which their sense of humor keeps them going, followed by five months of growing exasperation and often outright disgust, and one month of relief because the one-year tour of duty is coming to an end. But for all that, the average U.S. soldier while on duty in Viet Nam retains the basic condition of good morale--the continued desire to fight. There is little illusion about the enormity of the task, the snail's pace of progress, but there is also the unflagging conviction that the war must be won.

For all their disappointments, most Americans sincerely praise the average South Vietnamese soldier as a gutsy little guy capable of surprising courage if given the training and the leadership. They cling to the hope that such leadership will be forthcoming, despite two government overthrows in Saigon in three months. "What you've got to learn in Viet Nam," says a U.S. Army major in the Delta, "is that the name of the game is frustration, and you simply have to live with it." Another Yank keeps a card in his wallet to pull out in moments of despair. It reads: "Patience."

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