Down to the Sea

Finding the enemy is often half the battle in the Viet Nam war. To keep from being found, every Communist soldier is under orders not to give away his unit's position by firing needlessly at an Allied reconnaissance plane. Last week more than 1,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese lay dead in the rice fields rimming Sweet Water Bay north of Qui Nhon, and another 950 captured --all because a Communist took an ir resistible potshot at a helicopter of the U.S. 1st Cavalry (Airmobile).

Closing the Vise. The H13 chopper was routinely inspecting the lacework of dikes and mangrove swamps controlled by the Viet Cong since the early 1960s, when red tracers lanced up and dropped the two-seater into a paddy like a stunned moth. Two larger Hueys, bristling with rockets and M-60 machine guns, came to the rescue almost at once. If the Viet Cong had lain low while the Hueys picked up the downed H13 crew, they might still have escaped the bother that was soon to follow. In stead the Reds shot down the Hueys too, and the gauntlet was thrown.

Aircav Commander Major General John Norton quickly picked it up. Pulling his heli-borne cavalrymen out of three-week-old Operation Thayer five miles away, he dropped a 29-man Blue Team near the downed choppers. Within hours, in fierce fighting, often in chest-deep water, the Blues had killed 91 of the enemy. Some 70 of them turned out to be from the Aircav's old foe in previous Binh Dinh battles: the North Vietnamese 610th Sao Vang (Yellow Star) Division. With the Sao Vang as quarry, Operation Washington Irving rapidly mounted in scale. A large force from South Korea's Capitol Division wheeled in from the south. A contingent of South Vietnamese troops rushed in from the west. Closing the vise, the 1st Cavalry bored in from the north. With their back to the sea, where the rockets and guns of U.S. Navy vessels made escape impossible, the Reds could either fight and die, or surrender. A record number chose the lesser part of valor, producing the highest prisoner count of any operation in the war. As Operation Irving progressed, some 320 surrendering Viet Cong stumbled into the grasp of the Aircav alone.

To the north, along the increasingly militarized Demilitarized Zone separating the two Viet Nams, 15,000 U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops continued Operation Prairie, aimed at denying transit to Hanoi's legions headed south. In Prairie's nine weeks of hillto-hill combat, the Allies had poured 1,000,000 artillery shells and 2,200 air strikes into the fray, killing 992 Red infantrymen. South of Danang the Marines were searching out Viet Cong in Operation Macon, and in the rice-rich Delta, two search-and-destroy missions --Sioux City and Sunset Beach--were aimed at denying the enemy his breadbasket. South of Tuy Hoa on the coast, the 101st Airborne's Operation Seward has robbed enemy granaries of 2,500 tons of rice--enough to feed 32,500 men for a year--as well as accounting for nearly 200 enemy dead.

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