And Now the Rains

It is not good for the Christian health,

To hustle the Asian brown;

For the Christian riles, and the Asian smiles,

And he weareth the Christian down.

And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,

With the name of the late deceased;

And the epitaph drear: "A fool lies here,

Who tried to hustle the East."

This version of a poem by Rudyard Kipling is much quoted in Viet Nam by Americans who are desperately trying to hustle Premier Nguyen Khanh's regime into stepped-up action against the ever more aggressive Red guerrillas. The latest factor that hampers U.S. efforts is that old Asian standby, the rainy season, which is now beginning over South Viet Nam's Mekong Delta. As usual, while the mud and discomfort would seem to be the same for both sides, they favor the enemy.

Creeping Crickets. Twice a day, usually in early afternoon and again at dusk, the warm monsoon rains patter down. The paddies of the delta are already flooded ankle-deep. Plodding patiently across them, in a tableau ancient as the land itself, peasants in conical hats and mud-caked pants thrust pale green rice shoots into the fertile soil beneath the water. And in the humid dusk, countless crickets sing out--or get themselves captured by small boys who sell them to gambling elders for cricket fights.

The Viet Cong guerrillas are almost as much at home in this setting as the crickets, while the government soldiers --many of them city boys, most of them encumbered with heavier equipment and moving in much larger units --are increasingly bogged down in unfamiliar terrain. In recent months U.S. advisers have pondered ways of improving mobility during the rainy season. One new tactic: a buildup in small boats to transport troops across paddyfields. But hustling the East in the rainy season promises to be even more frustrating than usual, though last week five government battalions were ambitiously attempting to flush the Reds from a stronghold in the northern mountains.

The Khanh regime is eagerly awaiting Washington's latest boost--an additional $125 million in economic and military aid recommended fortnight ago by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Of the total, $70 million will go toward bailing out the war-bankrupted Vietnamese economy, $55 million toward raising the pay of soldiers and civilian government employees engaged directly in Khanh's badly lagging "pacification" campaign.

Mounting Mayhem. U.S. money alone cannot strengthen the Vietnamese will to fight--or counteract the rising, deliberate Red policy to break that will through terror. For almost a month, the rate of Viet Cong terrorist "incidents" has been up from an average 300 to 400 per week to 500 to 700, with a higher-than-usual percentage consisting of seemingly senseless mayhem. The Reds have mined and fired on peasant-loaded buses, ambushed three-wheeled Lambretta motor scooters, which are a favorite peasant means of conveyance, and unmercifully harassed junk families on canals and rivers. Last month the Reds burned every building in one hamlet to the ground, including the local Buddhist temple. One night last week in Ba Xuyen province, while a crowd of farm families watched a roadside play, the Viet Cong fired into them, killed a father, mother and child.

In a small way, all this has backfired; there has been a slight increase in defections of Viet Cong supporters. But the Reds obviously feel that they can afford to pay this price in return for the fear they are spreading across the countryside--and in the capital as well. Twice last week Saigon tensed for Viet Cong attacks. One night rumors swept Saigon that the guerrillas planned a major assault on a U.S.-operated secret communications center south of the city's outskirts. The next night the Vietnamese army massed artillery amid reports that the Reds planned to charge Saigon airport. The attacks failed to materialize, but this did not dispel the suspicion that the Reds might have been capable of mounting them.

Nettling Neighbor. As if Saigon did not have enough on its hands with the Viet Cong, it faced the problem of a troublesome neighbor, Cambodia. South Viet Nam's Red guerrillas have long used Cambodia as a sanctuary, and though the rugged border is admittedly hard to police, Cambodia's neutralist Prince Sihanouk has done little to discourage his guests from next door. Their busiest crossing points are a stretch bordering Viet Nam's Tayninh province, the Plain of Reeds due west of Saigon, and an area south of the Cambodian village of Soairieng (see map, preceding page). The three sectors form the "duck's bill" portion of the frontier, which juts to within 40 miles of Saigon.

The Viet Cong roam freely, U.S. military men claim, for some 30 miles inside Cambodia, cache arms and supplies there, maintain small command posts. Conducting themselves as polite guests, the guerrillas rarely even chase Cambodian girls, use their haven chiefly for rest and regrouping. But because South Vietnamese troops sometimes pursue fleeing Viet Cong into their sanctuary--and, according to Cambodia, killed seven Cambodians earlier this month--Sihanouk's delegate charged before the U.N. Security Council last week that his country has been the victim of aggression.

The U.S.'s Adlai Stevenson denied that Americans had anything to do with the latest incidents, retorted that the Communists have used Cambodian territory "as a passageway, source of supply, and sanctuary from counterattack." He proposed some sort of U.N. supervision of the border, which would bring the U.N. into Indo-China for the first time in such a capacity. South Viet Nam's General Nguyen Khanh expressed approval, but it remained to be seen whether Sihanouk would go along.

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