Friday, Jun. 21, 1968

Saigon Under Fire

Whether or not the North Vietnamese have come to Paris to make peace ultimately, it is clear that for the time being they are relentlessly determined to raise the level of fighting in South Viet Nam. More North Vietnamese men and materiel are flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail to the southern battlefields than at any time since the war began--perhaps as many as 30,000 a month v. 6,000 monthly a year ago. With a ruthless disregard for civilian lives, the Communists, in almost daily rocket attacks and periodic, suicidal infantry thrusts, have brought the fighting to Saigon, turning the city into a nightmare of fear, destruction and random death. The war, which used to be something remote that took place in rice fields and jungles, has come to stay in the capital ever since the first shock of the massive Communist Tet offensive last February. And life is now far grimmer for Saigon's 2,500,000 residents than it was at the worst of Tet.

Early one morning last week, as the capital was stirring to life, Communist gunners cut loose a savage rocket barrage aimed at the heart of the capital. Firing from positions six miles east of downtown Saigon, they launched 26 Soviet-made 122-mm. missiles, whose only warning is a high-pitched whistle. Two missiles smashed into two houses in Gia Long Street and killed eight civilians. Another landed within 200 ft. of the Rex, originally an apartment building and now a U.S. billet. American officers there abandoned their breakfast and threw themselves under tables while Vietnamese waitresses screamed in terror. A fourth round smacked into a bookshop on Tu Do Street, killing two Vietnamese maids; one fell, decapitated, next to the fresh bread she had just bought. The barrage threw Continental Palace Hotel guests out of their beds, cut telecommunications, dug a huge crater only a few feet from the statue of the Madonna of Peace in John F. Kennedy Square. The final toll for the raid's ten grim minutes: 26 Vietnamese civilians killed and 116 injured.

Sandbag Shelters. The attack marked the 25th time in 38 days that rocket or mortar clusters had hit Saigon, and there are no longer any safe areas in the city. Each rocketing and each allied effort to dig out attacking Communist ground units cause fresh destruction and new refugees who stagger from the shattered homes, clutching meager possessions, dragging or carrying tearful, terrified children. Hospitals are packed--some 4,800 civilians have been treated for wounds since early May and refugee centers overflow under the tide of the more than 160,000 people made homeless in the past six weeks. Schools have been closed for weeks. Many youngsters wear metal identification tags or bracelets, in case they are lost or found dead or wounded. Barbed wire coils around some homes, sandbag prices and sales have shot up, and the My Duyen Construction Co. offers to build a simple sandbag shelter for $100 and a deluxe model, complete with electric lights, for $250.

At night, Saigon turns into a honeycomb of private prison cells, the result of a dreary curfew; people withdraw into their houses, or hovels, in nervous anticipation of the next attack. The lights often dim and fade out, air conditioners collapse with a rattling whisper, and the streets outside lie dark and silent. Hundreds of wealthy South Vietnamese have forsaken the city for the seaside resort of Vung Tau. The Japanese government has ordered all its citizens who are not indispensable to leave the country. Many American civilians have taken to spending their nights at the heavily guarded, although frequently rocketed, Tan Son Nhut Airbase. The Vietnamese who remain behind in an atmosphere of fear, bewilderment and anger have begun to call this rainy season "heaven weeping on our misfortunes."

Changed Tactics. The strategist behind the siege is Colonel Tran Dinh Xu, the Communist commander for the capital district. At night, his rocketeers slip to within range of the city, often using, for the sake of speed, crude earthworks and bamboo racks rather than unwieldy launcher tubes to aim their whispering death on Saigon. Easily broken down into sections--a 2-lb. fuse, a 41-lb. warhead and a 59-lb. motor section--the rockets can be carried by porters, are quickly assembled and fired by a crew of only three men. The missiles are not notably precise--at a maximum range of about seven miles, gunners are lucky if they hit within 400 yards of their target--but the lack of accuracy, if anything, enhances their terrorist effect. Despite allied ground and air patrols and radar-guided counterbattery fire, the Communists have thrown almost 400 rocket and mortar rounds at the capital since early May. The gunners have rarely been caught; last week, when 12,000 U.S. and Vietnamese troops fanned out to sterilize the rocket belt, they found little besides scarred firing positions and a few unlaunched missiles, some ingeniously cached in submerged sampans.

Colonel Xu's infantry tactics reflect the lessons he learned during the Tet offensive when he threw whole battalions into the city only to see them badly battered. Now he slips small, squad-size units--ten infantrymen and two or three women who handle the cooking--past South Vietnamese defense perimeters and the cordons formed by the U.S. 9th and 25th Divisions. Once inside the city, the team deploys in three sections--one to fight, a second to dig a maze of underground tunnels for quick movement and escape, a third to rest. On a rotation basis, the system allows round-the-clock fighting. If the squad discovers a sizable hole in the defenses, Xu can easily infiltrate a company or even a battalion to join the fray. His troops have played that game all too successfully in recent weeks, moving in and out of the capital, keeping allied defense units on the go, and forcing them to use heavy firepower in densely populated sections of the city.

The Communist tactics confront the allies with a major dilemma. There are simply not enough troops to prevent small-scale infiltration and rocketing. Allied officers estimate that more or less permanent deployment of forces along the rocket ring would tie down as many as eight divisions or, counting support troops, some 100,000 men. Even then, they concede, the enemy could still get through the capital's defenses with sporadic rocket rounds and small ground incursions.

Serious Consequences. At the eighth session of the U.S.-North Vietnamese negotiations in Paris last week, Ambassador Averell Harriman delivered a blistering condemnation of the Communists' strikes on Saigon. The assaults, he charged, had been planned by North Vietnamese generals, had so far taken a toll of over 100 civilians killed, and could not have been intended to do military damage. "I want to be sure you understand that this is a situation that could have the most serious consequences for these talks," he told Xuan Thuy and Le Due Tho, Hanoi's negotiators. Harriman got his reply--not in Paris but in South Viet Nam. The Viet Cong's Liberation Radio warned Saigon residents to abandon the capital or prepare for a 100-round-per-day rocket barrage that would last for 100 days. If the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong are able to carry out their threat, the attacks might very well serve to stiffen both U.S. and South Vietnamese determination to resist. And that would be precisely the opposite of what Hanoi has set out to achieve.

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