Battle for the Hills

Like some ponderous snake, the long convoy labored up the steep switchbacks on Route 19. Guards nervously rode rifle atop every truck. Three hours out of coastal Qui Nhon, the vehicles pulled into Mang Yang pass--favorite ambush point for the Viet Cong on the 100-mile highway to Pleiku. Along the edge of the narrow road were massive craters. To clear the V.C. from the pass, high-flying B-52s from Guam had blasted Mang Yang with bombs the night before. Once past the pass, the guards relaxed, and the convoy--the first since the end of May--rolled on into the beleaguered town of Pleiku with vitally needed food, ammunition, fuel and steel airstrip planking for South Viet Nam's tense and threatened central plateau.

For six months the Viet Cong and troops from North Viet Nam have been massing on the plateau, and except for a handful of strongly fortified district villages, and the province towns of Pleiku, Kontum and Ban Me Thuot, they still range at will through the mountainous countryside. Since the Viet Cong blew out three of Route 19's bridges some six weeks ago, the highlands' vital western tier of towns was accessible only by air. Despite an airlift that brought hundreds of tons a week into Pleiku, supplies were growing critically short when Saigon decided that Route 19 had to be reopened at any price.

Isolated Shards. The price came high: some 7,000 South Vietnamese troops deployed in the largest military operation mounted by Saigon since the war began, requiring an airlift that tied up virtually every transport plane in South Viet Nam for days. Though the effort succeeded, and by week's end supplies were rolling daily from Qui Nhon to Pleiku, the magnitude of the effort underscored how thoroughly the Viet Cong have chopped South Viet Nam into isolated shards. Only a fraction of the nation's 4,000 paved miles of road are freely passable; of more than 600 miles of railroad trackage, a mere 100 remain usable.

Though Pleiku was open for the moment, the peril in the highlands was hardly diminished. The next likely pressure point in the Viet Cong's plateau push is Kontum, once a pleasant mountain village of open-air cafes with circus awnings and a population of 14,000. Though only 30 miles from Pleiku, Kontum is surrounded by some 6,000 guerrillas backed up by an estimated 10,000 North Vietnamese regulars, and is still accessible only by airlift, as is nearby Ban Me Thuot. If the Viet Cong attack, as seems almost certain, Kontum's fate and the fate of its 1,000-man garrison, including 150 Americans, may well be decided by the weather--which in the monsoon season determines whether planes can bring relief troops, massive fire power and bombing to bear on the Red attackers.

Horde of Locusts. Kontum is not waiting idly. Each night the garrison's 105-mm. howitzers pound the surrounding hills, shellbursts alternating with flares dropped by patrolling C-123s, which illuminate the jungle fronds. When guerrillas probe the perimeter wire, alarm gongs bang, trumpets sound and tin cans tied to the endless concentric coils of barbed wire rattle. By day life goes on. In the French seminary, 50 sandal-clad Vietnamese and French priests keep to their prayer schedules. Sixteen American Protestant scholars continue compiling alphabets and grammars for some 48 Montagnard tribal languages.

Ironically, the plateau's predominantly Catholic, anti-Communist Montagnard people might overrun Kontum before the Viet Cong do: an estimated 16,000 Montagnard refugees, desperately hungry, were being driven ahead of the Viet Cong toward Kontum. They could arrive in the next week, and, as one U.S. officer put it, "If they do, they'll devour it like a horde of locusts."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.