Proportions of War

The killing on both sides--on all sides--has gone on for years. Last week, by U.S. estimate, the total count of the military dead in Viet Nam since 1961 passed 1,000,000--45,703 Americans, 159,839 South Vietnamese, 4,875 other allied troops and 810,757 Communists. Yet still the war does not end, does not even show signs of ending.

Last week, as U.S. bombers pounded the North again and the North Vietnamese pressed their invasion, there was an anguished moment of recognition: No matter what the President had promised three years before, no matter how many U.S. troops had been withdrawn, the war was as bloody as ever.

In the awful numerology of body counts, the lives the U.S. was now saving were being given up by South Vietnamese, whose army now bears the suffering of the fighting on the ground.

In the Senate, Minnesota's Walter Mondale said softly: "Coming into this chamber this morning to talk about the war in Indochina, I felt a deeply depressing sense of reliving all over again tragedies of the past which should be far behind us. We have been through so many springtimes of slaughter and folly and deception . . . Now in the spring of 1972, it is happening again."

War is of course always murderous.

The Administration has its rationale for sending the bombers north again in reply to Hanoi's invasion. "The North Vietnamese," said Secretary of State William Rogers, "are the culprits in this." Yes, but in a larger sense of proportion, any fit and rational relationship between the death and suffering inflicted and the gains to be made, seems irretrievably lost. Viet Nam has long since reached the point that no future --win, lose or stalemate--can redeem the present. As W.B. Yeats once asked: "What was left for massacre to save?"

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