A TIME OF TESTING IN VIET NAM

ATTER many months of relative calm in Viet Nam, the Communists had put the fight back into their "fight and negotiate" formula. All week, Communist rockets and mortars rained down, hitting more than 200 cities, towns and military installations from the Demilitarized Zone to the Delta. Yet Hanoi's post-Tet 1969 offensive was initially hardly comparable to last year's campaign in scope, scale and success. This time the allies knew that an attack was coming almost to the hour, and were prepared.

The Communists, at least in the opening phase last week, refused to challenge allied forces in any massive ground engagements, though these could come later. Far less damage was done this time in terms of civilian casualties, houses destroyed, and the disruption of allied programs. But military losses--more than 300 U.S. and 700 South Vietnamese dead--were running near the weekly levels of Tet 1968.

Exactly what point the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were trying to make with their attacks was unclear, but they did have one immediate effect. While President Nixon was trying to demonstrate to Europeans that Viet Nam was no longer Washington's paramount preoccupation, the Communists pushed Viet Nam front and center into the headlines and posed some awkward questions of policy--and history--for the new Administration.

Secret Contacts. How should the U.S. react to the offensive? South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky had a ready response: resume the bombing of Hanoi. There were many South Vietnamese and some Americans who felt the same way. The long period of Communist passivity on the battlefield had generally been interpreted as part of a Hanoi "deal" with the Johnson Administration last October that led to the U.S. halt in the bombing of North Viet Nam. If Hanoi, by rocketing the cities of South Viet Nam, was reneging on that agreement, it could be argued that the U.S. should reply in kind.

On the other hand, resumption of even partial bombing of the North could jeopardize the Paris peace talks and perhaps permanently re-elevate the level of violence in the South. Some Government officials also believe that the Communists were only reacting to the intense allied military pressure and accelerated pacification efforts of the past few months.

Weighing all the arguments and keeping in constant touch with the events in Viet Nam as he traveled through Europe, Richard Nixon's initial response was cautious and controlled. In secret contacts with the North Vietnamese in Paris, U.S. negotiators delivered a sharply worded protest to Hanoi. It contained no outright threats to resume the bombing or cancel the peace talks, but it clearly implied both possibilities! At the regular weekly session of the peace talks, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge was only slightly less pointed when he warned that "the consequences of these attacks are your responsibility." The U.S. hoped that the warnings would suffice to slow the intensity of the Communist offensive, and, as the week progressed, it seemed that they might be having that effect. Over the week, the countrywide rocketings and ground probes diminished, though there were also ominous intelligence reports--and an upsurge in shelling--that suggested a second, more massive series of Communist attacks might be in preparation. By week's end it had not come.

Nixon's Legacy. Nixon and his advisers were relieved, not least because the President has not yet fully formulated his Viet Nam policy. To be forced into resumption of the bombing of North Viet Nam at this juncture would severely limit his options for now and bring all of L.BJ.'s antiwar critics out in full cry anew--including a substantial number in the countries that Nixon visited last week.

Moreover, Lawyer Nixon's legacy from Lyndon Johnson on the bomb halt is by no means a contract. There was no formal agreement reached between the two sides last October. U.S. Negotiators Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance merely outlined to the Communists the "circumstances" under which Johnson would feel able to stop the bombers in good conscience. Those circumstances included limiting the shelling of South Viet Nam's major cities and a reduction of violations of the DMZ. All that the Communist negotiators indicated at the time was that they "understood" what the Americans were saying.

Since both shellings and violations did greatly diminish, Johnson had a de facto, although not a de jure justification for halting the bombing. Thus, when the Communists struck last week, President Nixon was confronted not so much with the violation of an agreement as with a seeming change in the mutually convenient status quo. He would have had to make a major policy decision in his own right to retaliate, and that is what he does not yet seem ready or willing to do.

The Communists' inability or unwillingness to mount a larger series of assaults than they did last week made the President's indecision a little easier. Unlike Tet last year, the attacks caused no real upset of the balance of power in South Viet Nam. Allied forces were not forced to redeploy, nor did any important defenses budge. The Communists completely bypassed recently pacified and highly vulnerable allied pacification areas in the countryside, concentrating largely on military installations. "We expect our indicators will wiggle a little," said U.S. Pacification Chief William E. Colby, "but so far the effect of the new offensive has been slight."

Yet at least four regular and so far uncommitted Communist divisions--most of the week's ground probes were carried out by local forces and guerrillas--were reported on the move in III Corps, the vital eleven provinces that surround Saigon. An attempt at the capital itself was not ruled out, and the allies responded by tightening defensive cordons around the city, by now a veritable fortress.

Only Desk Soldiers. There was good reason for staying alert. Where the Communists had elected to do battle, they fought fiercely, even suicidally. Communist attackers threw themselves against a brigade headquarters of the U.S. 25th Division at Dau Tieng, an abandoned rubber plantation 40 miles northwest of Saigon, damaging six helicopters and shooting down two others that attempted to get off the ground. At Long Binh, the sprawling U.S. Army Viet Nam headquarters northeast of Saigon, a guerrilla force led by a few regulars was beaten back at the wire with the loss of 132 men. A prisoner taken in the assault told his captors later that his unit had been assured that it would attack under heavy artillery protection and would, in any case, face only desk soldiers not used to fighting.

Just south of the Demilitarized Zone, assault troops hit a U.S. Marine fire base under cover of an intense mortar barrage. The attackers were led by sappers carrying explosives on their backs, the detonator cords wrapped around their chests. In vicious hand-to-hand fighting, in which more than two-thirds of the defenders became casualties, one Marine killed five attackers with his knife; another bludgeoned a Communist infantryman to death with a grenade. Some of the enemy sappers blew themselves up with the explosives they were carrying.

A similar suicidal attack penetrated the defense perimeter of the 25th U.S. Division headquarters at Cu Chi, northwest of Saigon. In that charge about 50 sappers managed to sneak through ten defensive rings of wire, then sprinted down a flight line and destroyed nine helicopters with satchel charges. Only a few of the attackers carried rifles; the survivors later explained that they had left their valuable weapons behind before going into the assault--in the knowledge that they would not survive the mission.

Little Church. By far the most sustained ground fighting erupted in midweek within a few thousand feet of Bien Hoa, a huge and vital airbase northeast of Saigon. The Communists took up positions in a string of hamlets near the busy base and, in the bloody fighting that ensued, a battered little church changed hands several times. The battle did not turn until fighter-bombers and helicopter gunships, taking off little more than a mile away, saturated the Communist positions with rockets and napalm. A few Viet Cong staggered out of the inferno, bleeding and holding their weapons over their heads in surrender, but more than 200 of their comrades lost their lives in the ruins of the hamlets.

If such fighting was merely meant as a reminder by the Communists that they were still in the contest after months of quiescence, it was a costly one--even if the estimate of 6,500 Communist dead proves exaggerated. The question remained as to whether Hanoi had finished making its point--and testing Nixon's resolve--or whether it was just beginning an even bloodier trial than the all-encompassing Tet offensive of a year ago. No one, in Washington or in Saigon, disputes the fact that the Communists have the strength to launch such a drive--if they are willing to accept the losses in manpower that it would surely entail.

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