"The Futility... the Unspeakable Inhumanity"

In a reflective moment in a hectic week, TIME'S Saigon Bureau Chief Stanley Cloud filed this personal assessment of the war:

TOLSTOY noted that war is a profoundly unmanageable human enterprise. Generals, journalists and politicians continue to assume it is a science, a matter of vectors and the measurement of force. The irrational must be made rational before men can feel themselves in control of events. Perhaps that is also why war is so often portrayed as a game or sporting event, the battlefield as an extension of the playing fields of Eton. Nixon the poker player is seen raising the stakes; General Vo Nguyen Giap, the Communists' superquarterback, is seen fading back for a last-second touchdown pass.

One suspects, however, that Tolstoy was right. War is irrational, and it is this aspect of the war that is so often lacking in the accounts written from and about the battlefields. Viet Nam has been at blazing war for 27 years. There is hardly a person anywhere in Indochina who has not been touched directly, in one way or another, by the fighting. Mothers have lost sons and daughters. Sons have lost fathers and mothers. Farms, homes, towns, cities have been destroyed. The draft touches every young man between 18 and 35 --except those who can bribe their way out. And the war, of course, touches everyone in subtle ways that erode the soul. Wives have lost husbands, brothers have lost brothers, lovers have lost lovers.

Yet it does not end, and does not even show signs of ending. A map of Indochina in 1954, with shaded areas marking Communist control, is so remarkably similar to a map of Indo china today that one is overwhelmed by the futility of it, the unspeakable inhumanity of it on both sides--or rather on all sides, since so many different factions and forces are at work here. North Viet Nam will not give up, Nixon will not give up, Thieu will not give up, the Russians will not give up. Everyone presses on--even the pitiable people of Viet Nam, except, of course, those whose twisted, bloated, blown bodies litter the roads and fields, the stench of their death carried on the wind.

Such tragedy is part of all wars, of course. But this conflict has lasted so long and Viet Nam is, after all, such a tiny place, such an insignificant place in any grand scale of things. Its people do not understand what they have done to deserve their fate, but they assume that it must have been something truly despicable--perhaps their ancestors' brutal subjugation long ago of the Kingdom of the Chams.

The Vietnamese are Asians, and they accept their fate. They go off to war and they fight, often bravely, always unquestioningly. But Westerners are wrong if they think that the South Vietnamese (one doesn't know much about their relatives in the North) want the war to continue or that they care much about the issues that get so much attention in the West. They want the war to end--now. They think it would if the powers, great and small, who keep pushing them into it, would at long, long last just let them be.

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