Toward the Showdown?

SOUTH VIET NAM

(See Cover)

Across the weary, tortured land, the strange conflict grinds on in its savage way, filling the eye with myriad tableaux of tragedy. At an army camp in Tayninh province, surrounded by moldy bags and barbed wire, a Jeep arrives containing one dead soldier and five live ones, who almost casually share the vehicle with the corpse. On a canal bank in Chuong Thien province, the body of a Communist guerrilla sprawls among the water lilies. On a track through a swamp in Hau Nghia province, a young Vietnamese rifleman happily plucks a duck for supper, white feathers sticking to his mud-spattered battle dress. At an isolated Special Forces post near the Laotian frontier, a supply helicopter arrives carrying, in a sling under its belly, two bewildered cows.

Always there are the innocent caught in the crossfire. On a Mekong Delta back road, a country cop flags down a row of buses packed with peasants, cabbages and poultry, to let a column of armored personnel-carriers rumble past to a fire fight just ahead. In a village hut in Kienhoa province, an old woman lies dying, broiled lobster-red from napalm, while a soldier spoons watery soup between her flayed lips. At another hamlet a teen-age girl, driven mad from the explosions of mortar shells, runs screaming from her house across the paddy-fields, stark nude.

Some Under the Ground. There are the tall, serious Americans. At Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport, a line of UH-1B "Huey" choppers, cigar-chomping U.S. Army pilots at the controls, shatters the morning calm with a roar of cranked-up motors and the whip-whip-whip of whirling rotors. In Quang Due province, the local American adviser, a Negro captain, jounces along a red-dust path in his familiar Jeep, packing a .45 on his hip and speaking Vietnamese with a Basin Street beat. In a sandbagged patrol base in Binh Duong province, a U.S. captain sprawls in a hammock, exhausted after a night's march, a carbine across his belly and a can of Schlitz in his hand. In cemeteries back home, many of his less-fortunate buddies rest underground.

Such is the war in Viet Nam--a dirty, ruthless, wandering war, which has neither visible front lines nor visible end and in which the U.S. over the past three years has become increasingly involved. Last week the involvement was carried a step further with the revelation that President Lyndon Johnson has ordered thousands of additional American troops into the struggle. At the same time the war took on a new dimension with increasing talk of carrying it to the home ground of the principal force behind the battling: Communist North Viet Nam. The loudest calls for such a move have come from the man on whom Washington has desperately placed its chips in Viet Nam: Major General Nguyen Khanh, the moonfaced, goateed, 36-year-old career officer who seized power six months ago.

"Communists are the aggressors, not us," insists Khanh. "If we were to go back to the north, it should be termed a counterattack." The U.S., hoping to avoid a direct attack on North Viet Nam as long as possible, was vexed at Khanh's cries but in a way sympathetic, for his outburst reflected the frustrations of a people who have been at war for the better part of two decades.

Policy Reversal. South Viet Nam's morale was one very good unannounced reason for the big new buildup of arms and men. Pentagon spokesmen would reveal no hard figures, but confirmed that the U.S. will send "several thousand" more men to Viet Nam over the next six months, most of them "military advisers." This would increase the American military contingent there, currently numbering 16,323, to probably 20,000 or more. Also to be sent are more helicopters, planes, trucks, Jeeps and armored cars--plus at least 300 additional AID technicians, to join the 414 already at work on the Viet Nam economic front.

The new muscle will increase American aid to Saigon from its present $625 million a year to nearly $700 million. It is the largest expansion of Washington's commitment in Viet Nam since the U.S.'s first big buildup there in 1962 under President Kennedy. And it represents a reversal of policy for the U.S. Government. Only ten months ago, shortly before the overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara was talking of bringing most American training troops home from Viet Nam by the end of 1965. Now there is no more talk of being out by 1965--or any other year in the foreseeable future. Of McNamara's statement, one Administration colleague confessed last week: "We hope it's forgotten."

Same Medicine. The hard facts are that infiltration from North Viet Nam is on the increase. Of late the Viet Cong have boosted their hard-core strength from an estimated 25,000 regulars to 31,000 (not counting 80,000 part-time guerrillas); approximately 25% of the increase is thought to be elite infiltrators from the north. The tempo of tension and terror rises weekly, with the Reds showing no signs of being rolled back.

Washington's medicine may best be described as a big dose of more of the same. It "does not imply," U.S. Ambassador to Saigon General Maxwell Taylor was quick to warn, "any change in U.S. strategy or in the command structure"--meaning that the U.S. was still not taking over direct command in the war or changing the rules. Like those who preceded them, the bulk of the new men will fan out into the most harassed provinces, not to command but to teach, cajole, curse, exhort, and occasionally inspire Vietnamese soldiers half their size, in what must be history's first war fought by on-the-job training.

The "adviser's" role is not easy. Last week five more U.S. servicemen died in Viet Nam--two Army officers and an Air Force captain killed when an electric mine was detonated under their Jeep; an Army major shot dead by guerrillas in broad daylight in a village ten miles from Saigon; another major caught by machine-gun fire that raked his Vietnamese Ranger battalion. The roll of American dead would grow at a swifter pace as reinforcements arrived. Said a senior U.S. official in Saigon dryly: "When you put more people in a zone traversed by enemy bullets, your casualties are going to increase."

High Noon? The U.S., as President Johnson reiterated in June, "seeks no wider war." Yet even as it tried to shush Khanh, American officialdom privately conceded anew that retaliation against the north has not been ruled out. At least three turns of events could trigger direct retaliation against North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh: 1) assassination of Khanh by the Viet Cong, 2) a renewed terrorist campaign against U.S. noncombatant personnel or dependents, 3) a disastrous turn in the war that threatened collapse of the entire U.S.-aided program.

Thus, unless the new buildup saves the day, the U.S. is quite possibly heading for a showdown with the Communists in Asia over Viet Nam. Already Viet Nam is an important issue in what promises to be a hammer-and-tongs U.S. presidential campaign. The words of Barry Goldwater at San Francisco will be repeated and repeated by the G.O.P.: "Yesterday it was Korea; tonight it is Viet Nam. And yet the President . . . refuses to say. refuses to say, mind you, whether or not the objective over there is victory . . ." Plagued by the civil rights and law-and-order crises at home, Lyndon Johnson can ill afford a debacle abroad.

Changeless Nightmare. In his allusion to Korea, Goldwater touched a responsive nerve, for the American people's experience in South Viet Nam has been the most frustrating since the long, tragic "police action" of the 1950s that ended in a stalemate with the Reds, at a cost of 33,629 U.S. lives. Small wonder that a recent American visitor to Viet Nam, on his third night in Saigon, had a dream in which he discovered the solution to the Vietnamese problem. "It was brilliant and simple," he recalls, "but somehow it kept slipping away." Feeling slightly embarrassed, he confided his vision to another American, who replied. "Everybody in Saigon has that dream."

But if its solution is an elusive dream, the Viet Nam dilemma to Americans is also an all-too-real nightmare. For after three years of intensive effort and considerable pain, including the expenditure of $3.3 billion in aid, after the loss of 262 Americans killed, 1,196 wounded or injured and 17 missing, the war is still not being discernibly won. Probably no conflict has ever been more elaborately computed, analyzed, studied: the Pentagon even sent out a team of psychiatrists to examine the "attitudes" of frustrated G.I.s. Yet, as a Washington policymaker said tiredly, "nothing really changes."

Crippling an Infant. In 1954, after Ho Chi Minh's North Vietnamese guerrillas smashed the French at Dienbienphu and Viet Nam was partitioned, the U.S. threw its support in the south to an ex-law student and anti-Communist nationalist, Ngo Dinh Diem. But Diem's infant state ,was soon crippled. Though the Red guerrillas who had been fighting the French in the south were supposed to be repatriated to the north, many of them stayed in the south, disguising themselves as peasants and caching weapons. In 1957 they rose up against the government.

In six years the Viet Cong assassinated 13,000 village leaders. With the infiltration of cadres from the north and the brainwashing of village youths, the guerrillas' ranks grew. Washington responded to Diem's requests for help by expanding the military advisory mission in Saigon and later sending its men to counsel the Vietnamese in the field.

By 1961 the U.S. had 1,000 advisers slogging around Viet Nam. After an inspection trip by General Maxwell Taylor, then military representative of President Kennedy, the latter announced a crash 'program to bolster Diem even further. In six months U.S. troops in Viet Nam burgeoned to 12,000 men.

When Is a War? As their involvement grew, American advisers were given the right to return fire if necessary. American pilots began flying combat missions, carrying fascinated Vietnamese "students" in the rear cockpits. So reluctant was the Pentagon to call ii a war that it took a presidential executive order for U.S. servicemen in Viet Nam to receive the Purple Heart and other medals.

Last year, after Diem was toppled from power and killed, the generals who succeeded him promptly fell to squabbling among themselves, while the Viet Cong look advantage of the contusion to make their biggest gains of the war. And barely 14 weeks after Coup No. 1, Diem's successor, General Duong Van ("Big") Minh, was himself thrown out in Coup No. 2.

The man who stepped in to succeed Big Minh, and who has since been in charge of the struggle to deny rice-rich South Viet Nam to the Communists, is possibly the world's most improbable-looking leader of a nation at war. Yet little Nguyen (rhymes with You Win) Khanh. who stands only 5 ft. 4 1/2 in. and weighs 155 Ibs., has been deeply concerned with the cold war since he was a youth. Son of modestly well-to-do landed parents, Khanh was born in the hamlet of Caungan, 75 miles south of Saigon in the Mekong Delta, on Nov. 8, 1927. During World War II, when Indochina was ruled by the Vichy French and Japanese, and the tides of nationalism was running high, Khanh as a teen-ager joined Ho Chi Minh's guerrillas, which at the time billed themselves as nationalists. Armed, as he puts it, "with only a piece of bamboo," he and a dozen other youths began operating in the highlands, captured or stole 20 weapons. But then, Khanh says, the Viet Minh disarmed his group "because we were nationalists, not Communists.'' After this sobering experience, the young activist moved in the opposite direction, embarked in earnest on a military career at the French army academy at Dalat, where Paris trained Vietnamese officers to command France's native Indo-Chinese units.

He was commissioned a second lieu tenant of infantry in 1947, sent to metropolitan France for advanced training, and after his return given command of Viet Nam's first native airborne battalion in 1950. With the French engaged in their war against the Communist Viet Minh, Khanh led his paratroopers in a jump onto the Hoabinh battlefield of North Viet Nam, scene of a French defeat that was only slightly less disastrous than Dienbienphu, carried out a valiant rearguard action covering the French retreat. Khanh finished the war, in which he was wounded (he still likes to pull up his shirt to show his scars), as a lieutenant colonel in charge of a regimental combat team.

Pajama Party. After partition, Khanh was chosen by Diem as the first commander of South Viet Nam's fledgling air force, soloed after eleven hours' instruction (he still does some flying now and then). His first exposure to American military methods came in 1957, when he spent a study tour at the U.S. Command & General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Back home again, Khanh was promoted to brigadier general at 32, later named chief of staff of the Vietnamese Joint General Staff --from which post he helped crush the abortive 1960 paratrooper revolt against Diem. Later Khanh, as commander of the II Corps area in central South Viet Nam, impressed American advisers with his inroads against the Viet Cong and his efforts to win over the peasants, particularly the half-savage montagnard tribesmen, whose multiple dialects Khanh learned to speak.

Khanh evidently took no part in the anti-Diem coup, though it is clear that he knew about the plot in advance. A week before the coup took place, he began to grow his black goatee. Apparently he did not like what he saw ahead, and a beard was his enigmatic symbol of future plans. After three months of watching the bickering and lethargy of the Big Minh junta, Khanh arrived in the capital to attend an officers' meeting, quietly rallied some fellow officers, including the commander of troops surrounding Saigon, and on the night of Jan. 30 pulled off his own coup, a silent one that caught his rivals in their pajamas. While persuading Big Minh to stay on as titular chief of state, to maintain at least a facade of continuity, Khanh took power as president of the Military Revolutionary Council and Premier.

Salems & Sea Swallows. In his new job Khanh has even less time for his handsome wife, Pham Le Tran, a North Vietnamese by birth, or his children: a six-year-old daughter and three sons, aged eleven, nine and two (a fourth son drowned in a Saigon fish pond last year). Neither does he get to pursue his favorite hobbies--the breeding of tropical fish and sea swallows. A clean-living type, Khanh rarely drinks; his only visible vice is chain-smoking. He puffs through three and four packs of Salems a day, shrugs: "I read all the reports about cancer, but I decided to go on smoking anyway. A soldier must never mind to be dead."

Such fatalism suits Khanh well, for should he fail, his task could turn out to be a killing one--literally. He is constantly under guard against the danger that an assassin will try to put a bullet in him. Working a 17-hour day in his grey and white headquarters, his office watched over by a soldier with a Colt .45 and a ferocious ornamental stuffed tiger, Khanh has striven to launch reforms and breathe new fire into the war effort. He has got a trickle of additional government administrators into the countryside. Though a Buddhist, he is a moderate one and has placated the Catholics. For the military he has increased salaries, pushed promotions. It is a difficult task, but he seems to have had some success in instilling more fight into the ranks, which appear more willing to face up to the Viet Cong in combat.

Aware that, like Diem, he has yet to capture the imagination of the countryside, Khanh week after week has stumped the backlands, pumping peasant hands, delivering speeches, doing what he could to rally the populace behind his Central Government. Last week, still at it, Khanh took time out to climb aboard his special DC-3 for a flying tour of the central coastal region. Dropping in on the fishing town of Hamtan, by the South China Sea--the first time in the republic's history that its head of government had visited the place--Khanh set the locals agog. Elegant in camouflage-pattern combat fatigues, he strolled down a sandy street, chatted with a crowd, asked a dumfounded schoolgirl, "Did you pass your exams?"--and drew cheers of "Hoan ho trim tuong [Hail to the general]!"

Ant & Boulder. But viewed against the enormity of South Viet Nam's problems, Khanh--a visibly wearier man than the bouncy fellow he was when he took over six months ago--seems like an ant struggling with a boulder. "All he needs," says an American adviser, "is some competent administration at lower levels"--and this is precisely what Khanh lacks. In a land where colonial France deliberately restricted the Vietnamese participation in government (the French even posted their own traffic cops in Saigon), Viet Nam's civil service is shot through with inefficiency, not to mention graft, favoritism, inexperience, sloth; many ranking military leaders act more like petty politicians than professional soldiers.

Khanh is also handicapped by the fact that his country lacks a sense of nationhood, being a hodgepodge of disparate tribes, clans and religious sects. Fortnight ago, when the Viet Cong slaughtered 40 women and children at a rural compound, other villagers expressed private satisfaction. Reason: the victims were temporary residents, strangers from outside the Delta, who apparently had been lording it over the locals at the marketplace.

Touching Bottom? What with all the handicaps, the large infusion of U.S. aid often shows few immediate concrete results, and any progress made is at an inch at a time. As always in this complex and shadowy war, the question of who is winning is difficult to answer. There are the doom criers and the professional optimists, and as usual the truth lies somewhere in between. But Viet Nam's has not been the kind of war that turns on a single battle or successful ambush, dramatic as it may be.

Things were going downhill sharply toward the end of Diem's regime, and they plunged even more sharply in the confusion that accompanied the two coups afterward. About last April, there were signs that the descent might have halted. Of late, while more aggressive government troops push into areas that had previously been Viet Cong sanctuaries, the overall level of guerrilla attacks has decreased slightly. Air power is being applied with increasing effectiveness. Possibly reacting to the increased pressure, the Reds are turning more and more to terrorism against peasants. There is the feeling among competent observers that for South Viet Nam the situation has bottomed out, possibly at a dangerously low level, but nonetheless bottomed out.

"Talk to My Gun." Yet the Viet Cong still control vast sections of the country (see map): of 43 provinces, the guerrillas have significant control in 22, operate widely in all the others. In their "liberated zones," the Reds fly the yellow-starred Viet Cong flag, collect taxes from local peasants. Near Tanan, south of Saigon, the local Red tax chief is a woman, Kim Luom; when peasants plead that they have nothing with which to pay, she lays her .45 on the table saying: "Don't talk to me; talk to my gun."

Saigon's most pressing concern is the area that includes the capital itself. In eight surrounding provinces, the Communists have tightened what American advisers call a "doughnut" around the capital. To the south, between Saigon and the Mekong Delta, the Viet Cong are so strong that more than 50% of the population there is estimated to be under varying degrees of Communist control. To the north, the Viet Cong are steadily increasing their pressure, last week hit four government battalions in three days. The guerrillas operate right up to the capital's doorstep. One night last week they opened a barrage on the army post of Vinhloc, only five miles west of the city. The crump of guerrilla mortars and government artillery shook buildings at Tan Son Nhut Airport on the city's edge, and flares dropped from patrol planes were clearly visible from downtown Saigon.

The objective, obviously, is to get a psychological strangle hold on the capital, a sprawling, pseudo-sophisticated city of more than 1,000,000, which has never seemed to take the war very seriously. But terrorism has increased, and people get off the sidewalks quickly at night, even the streetwalkers. Last week five U.S. servicemen and 15 Vietnamese were wounded when a bomb was heaved into Saigon's Shadows Bar while the dance floor was crowded with rhumba dancers. The day before, a man on a motorcycle tossed a grenade at six American advisers standing at a Saigon bus stop, missing them but injuring four Vietnamese shoppers.

Spinning Wheels. It was the fear that Khanh might be the country's last hope for survival that prompted Washington to rush to his support, chiefly through Defense Secretary McNamara, who has shuttled repeatedly to Saigon to confer with Khanh and to join him on tours of the countryside. Little by little, it became clear to McNamara that the doughty Vietnamese needed more--not less--U.S. personnel and equipment if he were to make a dent in the growing Viet Cong strength. Four months ago, the wheels began turning. McNamara's recommendation was seconded by then-U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, thrashed over again in June at the high-level conference on Southeast Asia in Honolulu, got the nod from new Ambassador Maxwell Taylor shortly after he arrived in Saigon a month ago. In Washington fortnight ago, limousines carrying McNamara and Secretary of State Rusk rolled up at the White House, and moments later the pair--joined by National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy--sat down in the oval office with Lyndon Johnson. They outlined the detailed plan for the further U.S. buildup. Johnson nodded, declared: "Let's go ahead."

Conquering the Virgin. The reinforcements will be partly concentrated on the hardening "doughnut" around Saigon but will also make possible more military advisers throughout the country--currently pegged at two U.S. officers and one enlisted man for each government battalion. The locals manning isolated outposts who comprise half the government's 400,000-man military force, will also get more U.S. help.

Also on the way are more of the fast, powerful AD1 Skyraider dive bombers. 85 of which have already been sent to replace battle-worn T-28 converted trainers: by year's end 150 Skyraiders will be in Viet Nam. Capable of hauling 10.000 Ibs. of rockets, bombs and other weaponry (for the T-28's 1,500 Ibs.), the stubby, potbellied Skyraiders can thus multiply the number of attacking runs possible during each sortie. Together with the U.S. Army's ubiquitous helicopters, the ADIs are increasing the effectiveness of the air-to-ground fighting that is becoming ever more important in Viet Nam. Last year, of 7.000 guerrilla dead, one of every three was killed from the air.

Especially heartening to the beleaguered Vietnamese leaders is the impending increase of U.S. Special Forces men, whose numbers will be doubled to 1,400. Gung-ho guerrilla warriors themselves, who are experts in stealth and the quick kill, the green-bereted Special Forces work with specially trained Vietnamese units to beat the enemy at his own game, have constructed a string of 50 outposts from which 150-man teams prowl the Cambodian and Laotian frontiers in search of Communist infiltrators. "I'll never forget the expressions on the faces of the villagers when we killed the Viet Cong tax collector, district chief and propaganda officer in one day," says one U.S. Special Forces officer. As the Special Forces prepare to move into new areas, they often send in a squad of natives weeks ahead bearing gifts: often the advance men are under orders to marry village maidens to establish local connections.

Last week, in jungle-shrouded Tayninh province northwest of Saigon, a burly American Special Forces colonel stood triumphantly atop Black Virgin Mountain. Just a month ago, the heights of Black Virgin were a stronghold of the Viet Cong; now, thanks to the Special Forces, 200 peasants were building a government fort on the rugged peak.

Buffalo & Dysentery. Another band of hardy heroes is Viet Nam's U.S. civilian AID brigade. Half of them are always posted in the boondocks, counseling peasants on everything from seeding to irrigation. They often sleep on bamboo mats, eat buffalo meat (roasted with hair, hide and all), contract dysentery--and live in constant danger. Driving through Quangngai province one day, AID-man Robert Kelly spotted a Vietnamese he had known in the past and stopped to say hello. "You had better get out of here," the Vietnamese replied. 'Tm Viet Cong now and an attack is under way." Sure enough, as he sped away, Kelly saw dozens of guerrillas pop out of the bush and move toward a nearby target. Ed Navarro, provincial AID representative in Tayninh, has twice found himself one Jeep back of deadly explosions on the mine-infested roads of the province.

Along with the promise of more men and funds, AID has a brand-new boss, a table-pounding ex-union leader named James Killen. Naturally, the hope exists that the expanded U.S. assistance will slowly turn the tide, and some observers see optimistic signs that it just might. But if it should fail to do so--or not do so fast enough--there remains the question of what then?

Longer & Harder. One top Washington official believes that war-weary Vietnamese morale could stand at most two more years of hopelessness without cracking severely--and that a string of dramatic Red victories could advance the date. For if it has been a "long, hard war" for Americans, it has been incalculably longer and harder for the 14 million South Vietnamese. To date, the war has cost 100,000 Vietnamese dead on both sides, and an estimated 20,000 more will die this year. Thus Khanh is increasingly squeezed on one hand by neutralist sentiment and on the other by desperate cries of "Bac tien [To the north]!" The loudest grumbling is coming from officers who are under renewed Red pressure. To make matters worse, General Big Minh is surly. At a recent meeting of the Military Revolutionary Council, Minh reportedly contradicted Khanh several times. Khanh finally stopped the meeting, looked straight at Minh and said: "If you want this job, you can have it any time. But just remember: when you take this job, you have got to work and work hard and make decisions. Well, do you want it?" Minh, according to the version, quickly decided that he did not.

Responding to the pressures, Khanh. addressing a Saigon rally fortnight ago, called in effect for "liberating" North Viet Nam. Next day Taylor paid a visit to the Premier, asking an explanation, since South Viet Nam had always shared Washington's position that the Geneva accords, guaranteeing both north and south, should simply be observed. Taylor was assured that it was a political gesture not to be taken seriously. But then the to-the-north campaign bloomed again in Saigon's government-influenced press, and several of Khanh's generals began similarly sounding off. Back to Khanh's office went Taylor. This time Khanh explained that he had to offer his people some hope of bringing the war to an end, added that the Vietnamese are studying plans for extending the war above the 17th Parallel, and might some day have specific proposals to present to the U.S.

Bomb for Bomb. No one in the American mission in Saigon expects Khanh to move against Hanoi unless he is assured of full American backing. "After all," noted an American, "we supply the Vietnamese air force. The bombs are ours. The fuel is ours." But even if the U.S. decided to change its policy and go along with a blow against the north, such an action would be precise and designed to minimize the possibility of further escalation. To discourage further subversion in the south, the first steps would probably be air strikes against Viet Cong supply lines in the Laotian corridor. Most likely target: the big staging center of Tchepone, which has an airfield. The purpose would be to put Hanoi on notice that the U.S. was ready to do more if necessary. If that didn't work, the next step would be bombings inside North Viet Nam. First would come tit-for-tat reprisals: if the Viet Cong sabotaged an oil dump in the south, there would be immediate destruction of a similar installation in the north. From there, if need be, there would be general punishment of North Viet Nam from the air; one reported plan calls for bombing, after a week's notice in advance (to minimize civilian casualties), any one of 200 North Vietnamese villages each time a South Vietnamese village was overrun. Another contingency plan, falling somewhere in between: blockading or mining Ho Chi Minh's ports.

Pointed Power. There are those who believe that such retaliation, if carefully limited to its purpose of dissuasion, might be carried out without further escalation. Despite angry howls, the Communists swallowed the U.S. air strike two months ago against Pathet Lao antiaircraft guns in Laos--a pointed demonstration of power that has shored up anti-Communist morale all over Asia. But the U.S. would still have to be prepared to back up a blow against North Viet Nam all the way. Peking has so far stopped short of an outright commitment to intervene if North Viet Nam should be attacked, but warned last month that in such an event, "posing a threat to China's peace and security, the Chinese people naturally cannot be expected to look on with folded arms."

Message for Mao. Even so, the risk might conceivably have to be taken, for the fall of South Viet Nam would probably mean the Communists' overrunning of all Southeast Asia. There is also the question of how long American opinion will accept being told that the war is endless, or as a U.S. official in Saigon puts it: "Only a fool would pick a date when we can consider the job done. Three years? Five years? Ten? Fifteen? You make your own bets." One even suspects that in officialdom there is a tendency to take the war for granted. Some Administration policymakers are fond of pointing out that more Americans are killed in traffic accidents in Washington, D.C.. each year than in the Viet Nam war--while adding, with more logic, that a single battle in a major escalation could cost more American lives in one day than have been lost altogether in Viet Nam.

True. But the root question is still whether the war can ever be won so long as the north continues its input of terror. Last week Washington officials would not predict that extension of the war could be avoided before the November election, although of course they hoped that with the buildup in the south it could be avoided. Said one: "Whether we can get through the election [without escalation] is almost up to Hanoi. If it turns out that they are infiltrating very large numbers into South Viet Nam, we would have to rethink." U.S. policymakers could only hope that Hanoi--and Mao--would bear the consequences.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.