The Heart of the Matter

In success and in suffering, the American stake in Viet Nam last week continued to mount. Items:

> U.S. Air Force F-105 fighter-bombers for the first time struck north of the "Hanoi line." In five separate raids, they hit a major military base and ammunition depot at Sonla, 125 miles northwest of Hanoi and only 80 miles from the Red China border. Result: more than 70 buildings destroyed, nearly 50 others damaged. Other targets were Ban Nuoc Chieu, 80 miles northwest of Hanoi, and Nasan, 115 miles northwest of the capital, where 18 attacking planes blasted airfield runways, destroyed two buildings and fired a big aircraft fuel storage tank. At the same time, U.S. aircraft continued their daily raids against North Viet Nam below Hanoi, where they are beginning to run out of targets. The toll: one railroad bridge, three highway bridges, five barges, one coastal lighter, one ferryboat.

> Six hundred U.S. paratroopers" moved into the jungle area only 25 miles north of Saigon that had been plastered six days before by Guam-based U.S. B-52s. Scouring the zone, the paratroopers found underground Viet Cong redoubts, but few Reds.

> Four U.S. Navy Skyraiders, slow, piston-driven fighter-bombers, were jumped by two MIG jets over North Viet Nam. The American pilots went down to the deck, dodged around hills and through valleys. When one pursuing MIG fired two rockets that went wide, two of the Skyraiders got a bead on the Red jet, nailed it with 20-mm. cannon fire, and sent it down in flames.

> U.S. Army Sergeant Harold G. Bennett, 25, of Perryville, Ark., a radio operator captured by the Viet Cong last December while serving as an adviser to a South Vietnamese Ranger battalion, was executed. According to Radio Hanoi, Bennett was put to death in reprisal for recent public executions of Viet Cong terrorists by the Saigon regime (see THE WORLD).

> Twelve Americans were among the 42 persons killed in the terrorist bombing of the fashionable My Canh (Beautiful Scenery) restaurant, actually a converted houseboat anchored near a Saigon River bank. The force of the blast hurled diners through plate-glass windows, left the decks of the vessel awash with blood and strewn with bod ies. In an agony of grief, a Vietnamese man held up the dead body of his little boy, begged photographers to picture it.

While some Americans were inflicting punishment in Viet Nam and others were dying, the debate within the U.S. continued unabated. It centered partly on the mere fact of U.S. involvement (see following story). But even more, it dealt with the degree and dimensions of that involvement.

Doubling the Force. In Chicago, retired General Mark Clark, veteran not only of World War II but at one time the U.N. commander in chief in the Korean War, cautioned against getting involved in a predominantly land war in Viet Nam. "The great lesson learned in the Korean War," said Clark, "was that we must not fight the Communists in a manpower war. The way to win is to hit hard and use all our air force and naval aviation powers." Above all, said Clark, the Reds must be made to feel the brunt of overwhelming force. Communists, he added, "respect force and stop, look and listen when they see it."

For his part, Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen last week walked into the Senate press gallery, perched himself cross-legged on a small table and reported on a recent trip to South Viet Nam by Robert Stevens, who was Secretary of the Army under President Eisenhower. Stevens' general impression, said Dirksen, "was that we were going to be there for quite a while." That being the case, continued Dirksen, U.S. forces in Viet Nam, now numbering some 75,000, may yet have to be doubled.

But the toughest--and perhaps the most cogent--talk of all came from none other than U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman in a New York speech. Harriman, who has been mentioned as a possible successor to Maxwell Taylor as U.S. Ambassador to South Viet Nam, was plainly fed up with all the hemming and hawing about the war there. "If you listen to some of the bleeding hearts in this country," he said, "you begin to think that we started the troubles in the world instead of the Communists." The conflict in Viet Nam "is not a civil war. I don't care how many liberals say it is. The aggression is from the north."

"Absolutely Essential." Harriman paid tribute to "the spirit and determination of the people of South Viet Nam," insisted that the U.S. has no choice but to stick with the Vietnamese in their fight against the Communist aggressors. Said he: "The Communists are trying to take over through 'wars of national liberation,' but we must oppose them. You see the beginnings of such tactics in Venezuela and the ul timate in South Viet Nam."

And then Harriman went to the heart of the whole matter: "It is absolutely essential that we back up the people of South Viet Nam. This isn't a question of if we can afford it or how far away it is. We have to prove to Moscow and Peking that they can't win." To prove that, Averell Harriman for one would clearly be willing to double, triple, or even quadruple the number of Americans in Viet Nam.

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