Dilemma in the Delta

In the wide delta of the Mekong River last week, the swirling brown floodwaters stretched for miles. Bridges had been swept away, cattle drowned, the rice crop destroyed, villages inundated and their surviving inhabitants left starving.

Still the civil war went on. Three hundred Communist Viet Cong guerrillas escaping the flooded south clashed in a bloody fight with government troops and civil guards. In the Mekong Delta region, a Communist band stormed the military outpost of Minh Duc, inflicting "heavy" losses on the defenders. Only 18 miles from President Ngo Dinh Diem's capital of Saigon, a U.S. military adviser on a training patrol with Vietnamese Rangers was wounded by a Viet Cong sniper. In the jungle north of the capital, a 500-man paratroop battalion was ambushed at the end of a three-hour forced march by 1,000 Communists armed with Soviet weapons. At a cost of 20 dead and "numerous" wounded, the paratroopers fought their way out of the trap, and claimed to have killed 100 of the attackers.

General Maxwell Taylor, just back from a fact-finding tour of South Viet Nam, conferred at the White House with President John Kennedy on what steps the U.S. should take to shore up President Diem's government. Kennedy still opposes sending U.S. combat troops, but may agree to the dispatch of 1) U.S. Army engineers to repair the flood damage, 2) logistics experts to improve the inefficient supply system, 3) more anti-guerrilla trainers, and 4) helicopters to give government troops greater mobility in the nightmare terrain.

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