Taking Stock

"North Viet Nam is paying a tremendous price with nothing to show for it in return. The war is not a stalemate. We are winning, slowly but steadily." So said General William Westmoreland last week in Saigon as he briefed Robert McNamara at the outset of the Defense Secretary's ninth visit to Viet Nam. If his tone was uncharacteristically defensive, that was understandable. In recent months, it has become apparent that the war in Viet Nam is not going entirely according to the U.S. scenario for 1967. McNamara's trip will help to determine whether Westmoreland gets some or all of the additional 100,000 fighting men he now says he needs beyond the 480,000 scheduled for the end of this year. Perhaps significantly, one of McNamara's first questions was: How can more results be got with the 464,000 American soldiers now in Viet Nam?

Part of the reluctance to give Westmoreland more men stems from a growing feeling in Washington, particularly among members of Congress, that somehow the U.S. should be accomplishing more with the men it now has in Viet Nam. Even if Westmoreland were to be given the 600,000 troops he wants, some Congressmen and Administration officials have begun to doubt whether they would be sufficient to achieve U.S. aims in Viet Nam. Those aims are to provide security for the people of South Viet Nam as they try to build a nation, and to try to bring enough pressure and pain to bear on the Communists to force them to come to the negotiating table--or quietly de-escalate the war. All of these aims require a continuing U.S. momentum of success on the battlefields, and of late that momentum unfortunately has flagged. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker frankly told McNamara: "The enemy offensive has been blunted but not halted. Hanoi seems determined to continue the war in anticipation that we will get tired of the heavy burdens we are carrying."

Worst Loss. In the past six months, the burdens in terms of U.S. casualties have become notably heavier, particularly in the U.S. Marines' war along the "Demilitarized" Zone between North and South Viet Nam. The action there last week provided grim illustration of the war's bloody turn. Spotting a small force of North Vietnamese grouping for what looked like an attack on the Marine post of Con Thien, two Marine companies moved up Route 161 to do battle. They ran right into an ambush. Two battalions of Hanoi's 324B Division, supported massively by mortars and aided by Red artillery firing over the DMZ from North Viet Nam, hit the 300 Marines, killing 83 and wounding 170. It was the worst U.S. loss in a single battle this year.

Those Marines who survived had to do what Marines hate most: retreat, leaving their dead behind. Waiting until reinforcements arrived, the Marines went back for their dead three days later. Within 600 ft. of the first ambush, the North Vietnamese attacked again, killing 15 Marines and wounding 22. But this time U.S. air and artillery forced the Communists to withdraw, and the dead were at last brought out, many piled atop tanks.

A Conventional Front. By late 1967 or even midyear, Allied commanders had expected that big-unit war would have become too costly for the enemy, and that the war of regiments and battalions would be substantially over. Far from fading, however, the big-unit war has grown fiercer in recent months. Moreover, big-unit victories and massive Allied search-and-destroy sweeps have not so far advanced the vital pacification program, partly because South Vietnamese troops have been slow to take to their new village-security tasks. No matter how many North Vietnamese regulars are killed along the DMZ or in the Central Highlands, it is not much aid or comfort to the peasants in a Viet Cong-ridden village down in the Delta, where a third of the country's people live.

Most of the recent big-unit fighting is centered along the DMZ. There, alone in Viet Nam, the U.S. has built something resembling a conventional-war "front," complete with no man's land, artillery duels, bunkered lines of defenses faced off against one another. Since the first of the year, the Marines have suffered some 1,000 dead and 7,000 wounded at the DMZ alone. The U.S. and the Marines chose to precipitate this kind of battle in an effort to block the enemy infiltration lines leading due south across the DMZ. To do so, they had to establish a major line of outposts in terrain and a location where logistics favor the enemy. It is an offensive stance in a place where the Communists have short, efficient supply lines and also a sanctuary into which they can retreat, their own homeland, where the Marines cannot pursue them. Above all, Red soldiers can operate covered by their own artillery and rockets, dug in deep inside North Viet Nam's border and difficult to uproot from the air.

As a consequence, the Marines have positioned themselves in the one arena where Hanoi at times can offset the overwhelming U.S. superiority in air-power and firepower that makes the difference in any other battle farther south. It is still hideously expensive for the Communists in terms of their own dead, but from Hanoi's point of view it is also a war of attrition against the Marines. "It isn't great sport any more," says a Marine veteran. "You know--a 7-to-l ratio of Communist casualties to the U.S.'s. It is now about 3 to 1, and in some places 2 to 1, and even occasionally 1 to 1."

Still as Numerous. Part of the new unease about the state of the war stems from the fact that, for all the hard fighting over the past year, Communist forces in South Viet Nam are as strong as they were a year ago, if not stronger. Their numbers are put at a record 296,000 despite an estimated 46,500 killed this year alone. Fewer than half are North Vietnamese troops or Viet Cong main-force fighters, but these "regulars" are at least as numerous as a year ago. Their weaponry has markedly improved in variety and quality of late, from new AK 47 automatic rifles to rockets to the Soviet RPG-7 anti tank gun, which last week knocked out a Marine tank for the first time in the war. Last week, also for the first time, the North Vietnamese zeroed in on the Marines with Russia's family of massive 152-mm. howitzers and long guns: one round hit the Con Thien command post, killing nine Marines and wounding 21. Red shelling of the chief Marine forward base along the DMZ of Dong Ha has become, in fact, so heavy and accurate that the post may soon be abandoned.

The U.S., of course, has the resources in firepower and men to defeat any Communist force anywhere in Viet Nam that is willing to stand and fight for any length of time. But, true to Mao's manual of guerrilla warfare, the enemy is fighting for the most part only when he chooses and with a willingness to take heavy losses to undermine U.S. patience in the war. (One North Vietnamese defector along the DMZ claimed that his job was to dig graves for a third of his unit before it went into battle against the Marines.)

Equation of Agony. Weeks sometimes go by when as many as 16 major U.S. operations are under way--and no major contact is made anywhere because the enemy is ducking battle. Unless more U.S. combat troops are thrown into the hunt, or a different strategy of utilizing their present strength is found, the gains from the undeniable American and South Vietnamese progress of the past 18 months may flag. That might dim the hopes for a spreading pacification effort and the fledgling process of nation building, which could, if all goes well, get a powerful stimulus from the coming September presidential elections. The agony of the Viet Nam equation is that for the enemy, simply not to lose is, in a measure, to win; for South Vietnam and the U.S., not to lose is simply not enough.

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