Butterflies and Spiders in I Corps

Khe Sank. The Rock Pile. Hamburger Hill. Con Thien. The faint echoes of these and other bloody battles of the Indochina war rumble across I Corps,* the northernmost military region of South Viet Nam. During last year's Easter offensive, the Communists captured most of the area; today it is the scene of a curious military standoff. Recently TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Gavin Scott visited I Corps--officially known as Military Region I--and cabled this report:

The young Vietnamese pilot skillfully eased the helicopter down into what the U.S. 101st Airborne Division used to call Firebase Veghel, named after a Dutch town into which units of the division jumped during the second World War. It is now called Ta Lung, and its guns form part of the forward defense perimeter of Hue. Fixed enemy positions are less than five miles to the west. Considering its front-line position, Ta Lung seemed remarkably bucolic.

To be sure, if enemy guns shell the area, Ta Lung's guns respond to silence them.

For the most part, however, the 20 infantrymen who hold the firebase simply sit, wait, and gaze up the valley, polishing their weapons and drinking cans of Budweiser beer from the seemingly inexhaustible stock the G.I.s left behind.

Colonel Vo Toan, the district commander, described what he calls the "spider-web" tactics employed at Ta Lung: "We make sure the enemy doesn't venture too far. He is the butterfly and we are the spider. If he enters our web, we close in behind him.

Then he has no supplies, no food, no medicine, and that is not good for him.

But mostly we just try to shoo him away, using our loudspeaker [a makeshift bit of equipment fashioned from old Pepsi-Cola cans] to shout at him, 'Hey, you better get out! You are breaking the cease-fire!' And usually he does."

A strange sort of camaraderie prevails at Ta Lung. "In the mornings," says Colonel Toan, "the enemy likes to taunt us. 'Time to get up!' the Communist political officer shouts at us.

Once I told them that we were eating duck. Because they have so little food they didn't believe me. So I held up a duck by its neck so they could see that we really did have some."

Booby Traps. Today the Communists' six divisions hold two-thirds of I Corps' land but control only about 15,000 of its 3.4 million people. Arrayed against the North Vietnamese are five South Vietnamese divisions. Contacts with the Communists in I Corps' two most battered provinces, Quang Tri and Thua Thien, have dropped sharply in recent months--from 1,200 in February to below 300 in May.

Such fighting as there is consists largely of mortar attacks on South Vietnamese positions, mining roads, placing booby traps and occasional kidnapings of village and hamlet chiefs. While the North Vietnamese army has moved in additional men and materiel, it does not seem interested in launching a major offensive soon. Rather, it appears to be restoring what it expended during the 1972 spring fighting and hardening its grip on what it won.

The North Vietnamese have lengthened the old U.S. Marine airstrip at Khe Sanh from 4,000 ft. to 5,250 ft.--long enough to accommodate MIG-19 jets.

They are also improving airstrips at eight other sites, as well as widening and modernizing the old network of French-built roads. While the military value of the roads is obvious, they can also form the backbone of a social infrastructure.

As one American official puts it: "With roads, the North Vietnamese can bring in the stuff of life--the paper clips for a bureaucracy, the beginnings of a postal system, school supplies, the works."

Saigon is also concentrating on solidifying its position. Early last month the South Vietnamese reopened the old French railroad from Danang to Hue.

Twice daily, passenger trains--with heavily armed troops riding shotgun --puff along in each direction. In Danang, about 3,000 of the city's refugees and unemployed have been hired by the government at 650 per day to help rebuild the city. Identified by their powder blue vests, they lay new sidewalks, clean drains, and will plant some 300,000 trees along the beaches.

Of the more than 500,000 refugees generated in I Corps by last year's offensive, 365,000 remain in 79 squalid camps, most on the site of former U.S.

barracks. By the end of the year the Saigon government hopes to resettle all the refugees. Recently, the first 24,000 moved into new wood-and-tin huts at seven villages near Hai Lang in Quang Tri province. With their teeming marketplaces, the new communities are virtually indistinguishable from villages elsewhere in Viet Nam. Yet U.S. officials wonder how these people will fare on the poor soil after their government supply of rice runs out in six months.

One city that will not be resettled is Quang Tri, which was completely destroyed in the seesaw battles that followed the Easter offensive. It is a modern-day Dresden, with not a single building intact, nor a yelping dog, nor a piece of washing on the line. No one lives there, apart from some members of the International Commission of Control and Supervision and a small South Vietnamese army contingent.

Across the river from the dead city, the Viet Cong recently erected a huge green flagpole; their banner flutters merrily as ARVN and NVA loudspeakers hurl epithets at each other.

Surveying the scene, a South Vietnamese general simply shrugged. "I suppose we ought to turn Quang Tri into a tourist attraction. Maybe we could sell bricks from the citadel at $2 apiece."

* Pronounced "Eye Corps." The U.S. military command divided South Viet Nam into four military regions, which were designated by Roman numerals. In G.I. jargon, the I came to be pronounced as the ninth letter of the alphabet.

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