Slow Counterattack

For once, the South Vietnamese seemed to be following the strategy, long since adopted by the North Vietnamese, that Mao Tse-tung described as "fight-fight, talk-talk." As secret negotiations between Henry Kissinger and North Viet Nam's Le Duc Tho resumed in Paris last week (see TIME ESSAY), Saigon's forces were pursuing not one but two counteroffensives. In the northern part of the country, 20,000 South Vietnamese marines and airborne troops were continuing their cautious advance on North Vietnamese troops in Quang Tri province and its capital, the most important city to fall to the Communists since their offensive began last March. Meanwhile another 10,000 ARVN troops and rangers opened up a second drive along the central coast, where the North Vietnamese at one point had threatened to cut the country in two.

Despite heavy air support, after three weeks the South Vietnamese troops had still not dislodged some 500 or 600 Communists inside the thick-walled 19th century citadel in the center of Quang Tri city. On the coast, ARVN troops were equally cautious --with reason. Their first objective was Bong Son, capital of one of three districts in Binh Dinh province to fall to the Communists. ARVN'S slow pace has been frustrating to President Nguyen Van Thieu, who had wanted Quang Tri city retaken before the Paris talks resumed on July 13. It is no more certain that Thieu will be able to make good on another promise: to reoccupy by mid-September all of the South Vietnamese terrain now held by the Communists.

Whether or not Thieu is successful, it is already plain that South Viet Nam's civilians have been the real losers since the Communist offensive began. TIME Correspondent Barry Hillenbrand, who accompanied airborne troops as they advanced into Quang Tri city last week, sent this report:

At one time Le Huan Street was a peaceful residential area close enough to the center of town so that the petits bourgeois who lived there could close up their downtown shops and come home for lunch and a nap. Now the street belongs to the dead and wounded. It looks like a vast denuded forest: dozens of steel corner posts mark the boundaries of burned-out houses. Sheets of rusted tin, the roofs of demolished houses, litter the ground.

Much of the battle for Quang Tri city is the boredom of fearful waiting: waiting for a 130-mm. shell to come crashing in, waiting for an airstrike to soften up a bunker position, waiting for new troops to arrive with more ammunition and supplies, waiting for headquarters to decide whether to attack or, well, to wait.

One morning we saw two dozen old men, women and children huddled in a house on the outskirts. Like many of the 10,000 refugees who passed through ARVN lines last week, they had come out of hiding in the city, where virtually all buildings have been destroyed, during the night. By day, when the hot, fierce, dry-season wind blows, about all that can be heard is the sound of rattling tin.

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