Indochina: The Soft-Sell Invasion

FOR days, the biggest force assembled in South Viet Nam since Richard Nixon fell heir to the war was poised on the rugged Laotian frontier. When the signal came from Washington early last week, hundreds of American helicopters lifted into the dust-choked sky at Khe Sanh, then darted off to landing zones, where South Vietnamese troops awaited them. At the same time, South Vietnamese tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled westward on Route 9 and thrust across the border into the jungles of Laos. A new and possibly perilous phase was beginning in the long struggle for Indochina.

The Laos invasion may have been widely advertised, but no effort was spared to give it a soft-sell atmosphere. The announcement came not from Washington but from South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. The American code name for the operation, Dewey Canyon II. was replaced by a Vietnamese name: Lam Son 719.* The switch was part of the coy effort to cast the invasion as an all-South Vietnamese effort, though it was initiated, planned and given the go-ahead in the White House, and was overseen by General Creighton W. Abrams. U.S. commander in South Viet Nam. The shift in code names also underscored the extent to which Indochina's long war has changed. As French Journalist and Guerrilla Historian Jean Larteguy (The Centurions) put it last week: "First you had Asians fighting the French. Then you had Asians fighting the Americans. Now you have Asians fighting Asians." That is increasingly the case, though there are still 335,000 Americans in South Viet Nam.

Lam Son's initial objective was Tchepone, a small town 25 miles inside Laos (see map, page 26). Tchepone sits astride Route 9. where the Communist infiltration routes from North Viet Nam converge before fanning out again into South Viet Nam and Cambodia. From Tchepone, a large ARVN force could be ferried out for attacks on surrounding Communist facilities such as Base Area 604.

The ARVN advance was almost glacial --slowed by twisting terrain, mud that sucked at tank treads, and fears of rushing headlong into what Vice Premier Nguyen Cao Ky described last week as "our Dien Bien Phu." Instead of a lightning strike, the ARVN invasion commander, Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam, employed a cautious leapfrogging technique designed to keep his troops within range of friendly artillery.

Getting Kicked. The ARVN troops had every reason to move carefully. In all, there are some 30,000 North Vietnamese troops in the southern Laotian panhandle--more than enough to make life unpleasant for 14,000 ARVN troops that have been sent in. TIME'S Saigon bureau chief, Jonathan Larsen, followed part of the advance in an ARVN helicopter. "Weaving this way and that to avoid possible enemy fire," Larsen reported, "we swept past American fire bases and ARVN armored units, whirring over a repaired Route 9 and the beautiful Pone River, which marks the border. After ten or 15 minutes in the air, we hovered down in the middle of an expanse of brushwood alongside Route 9. Several ARVN troopers were having their midday dish of rice under the shade of a tank. One of them gestured at the ground and smiled: 'Laos.' "

It was clear that ARVN was finding the going tough. Newsmen saw enough truckloads of ARVN corpses returning from Laos for them to discount official totals of 31 killed and 113 wounded in the first six days. One American Cobra gunship pilot at Khe Sanh said flatly of the South Vietnamese: "They're getting their asses kicked!" That also seemed to apply to South Vietnamese and American flyers, who were encountering some of the most savage antiaircraft fire of the war (see box).

Reporters also saw some American bodies being brought back from Laos. Was somebody fudging on the congressional curbs on the use of ground troops outside South Viet Nam? White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler insisted that the reports probably involved

Special Forces intelligence teams that have operated in Laos for years. Still, the impression remained that some American advisers had crossed the border.

The early returns from Lam Son seemed favorable enough. By week's end, Saigon was claiming a total of 269 Communists killed, as against only 36 dead and 239 wounded on the allied side. Far to the south in Cambodia, where some 18,000 troops have been digging out new enemy sanctuaries for two weeks, the South Vietnamese claimed to have killed 491 Communists (v. 74 ARVN and Cambodian government dead) in a series of battles that included sharp fighting amid the rubber trees of the Chup Plantation, 35 miles inside Cambodian territory.

The Administration refuses to gauge Lam Son's success by the yardstick of captured enemy supplies. "We won't be able to show rice and bullets in this operation," says a White House adviser. "You'll have to judge it by what doesn't happen." What the White House is eager to prevent is: 1) a 1971 offensive aimed at upsetting Thieu's chances in October's presidential elections, and 2) a Tet-style explosion in 1972, when the Saigon government will not be able to call on U.S. ground-combat forces and Richard Nixon will be facing an election of his own.

How will the Communists respond? U.S. analysts see five possibilities:

INFILTRATE small guerrilla units that could create havoc behind the ARVN advance. Last week an ARVN Marine contingent was pulled back from the Route 9 advance and reassigned to security duty along the wide-open border.

SIT BACK AND WAIT for weak points to develop. Some of the Communist troops on the trail seemed to be drawing back from Route 9 with just that in mind.

CROSS THE DMZ into South Viet Nam. To discourage the three North Vietnamese divisions above the demilitarized zone from trying a counterinvasion, a U.S. Naval task force carrying 1,500 Marines was dispatched to the waters off the DMZ, and two ARVN divisions were rushed to Dong Ha.

HARASS CAMBODIA to create a diversion. The Communists never followed up their raid on Phnom-Penh's airport, however, which suggests that they may be short of supplies. Though hard-working Premier Lon Nol suffered a mild stroke last week and was flown to Hawaii for what may be a long recuperation, his idealistic "government of salvation" has achieved a strong following.

SQUEEZE LAOS in its more populous western provinces. Communist forces mounted an offensive on the Plain of Jars more than two weeks ago, began to surround Luangprabang, the royal capital, and maintained pressure on Sam Thong and Long Cheng, headquarters of the CIA-backed army of Meo tribesmen.

There was very little that Laos' politically astute Premier, Prince Souvanna Phouma, could do about last week's events. Largely as a morale-boosting gesture, he declared a state of emergency. He also issued a pro-forma demand that all foreign troops be withdrawn from Laotian soil--while taking care to blame Hanoi for having pioneered the "illegal route of access and infiltration known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail" years ago. So as not to trigger a Communist stampede into western Laos--an event that would surely shatter Souvanna's already fragile relations with powerful Laotian rightists--the allies seemed ready to set some undeclared limits on Lam Son operations. There would be no strikes north of the 17th parallel, which forms the border between the two Viet Nams, or west of Route 23, which runs north-south halfway across the Laotian panhandle. It also seemed likely that the ARVN would be pulled out before the April monsoons.

In general, however, the great ARVN invasion was greeted with yawns in the war-weary capital of Vientiane. On assault day, the North Vietnamese embassy closed its gates at 5 p.m. as usual. When the Buddhist festival of Makhabovxa came up three days later, the entire city of 150,000 shut down--including Vientiane's three newspapers, none of which had yet got around to reporting news of the invasion.

New Yalu? Among Hanoi's backers, Lam Son stirred a predictable frenzy but no definite response. The operation also stirred grave fears on Souvanna Phouma's part. What if the invasion, like MacArthur's drive to the Yalu in Korea, alarmed Peking enough to send Chinese troops into the war? Last week Nixon sought to salve Peking by emphasizing that the Laotian thrust posed "no threat" to China.

In Saigon, however, Vice Premier Ky addressed a group of South Vietnamese pilots and suggested that ARVN might "have to cross to the other side of the Ben Hai River" and hit the North Vietnamese on their own ground. Ky's offhanded talk, one Washington official shrugged, "keeps the enemy worried, and that's what we want."

All along, Nixon had been far less concerned with foreign reaction to the Laos venture than with the response at home. Five days before the invasion, when the President and half a dozen top advisers met to discuss the go/no-go decision, the domestic impact was uppermost in Nixon's thoughts. The State Department was particularly concerned about rousing dormant peace groups.

At one point during his deliberations, the President said: "There are 18 reasons not to do it and two reasons to do it." But the two positive reasons were too compelling to ignore, he decided. "I might make the wrong decision for the right reasons, but I'll be damned if I'm going to make the wrong decision for the wrong reasons." All that mattered, Nixon continued, was the future of the war. He would simply have to take his chances with the home front.

Strident Protests. By and large, the Administration's public relations strategy proved a success. There were criticisms, to be sure. Averell Harriman, who negotiated the 1962 Geneva agreement providing for a neutral Laos, told a University of Chicago audience last week that "expanding the war to Cambodia and Laos with our unlimited air support is not the way to end the war." Though there is genuine room for debate on whether it is necessary to fight a war in two countries just to be able to pull out of a third, Harriman's point went all but unnoticed.

So did strident protests from Mme. Nguyen Thi Binh, head of the South Vietnamese Communist delegation at the Paris peace talks, who fired off telegrams to antiwar groups in the U.S. and elsewhere with the appeal: EARNESTLY CALL YOU MOBILIZE PEACE FORCES YOUR COUNTRY. CHECK U.S. DANGEROUS VENTURES INDOCHINA. The response was hardly electrifying, further proof of the shrewdness of the Administration's calculation that it is difficult, after all, to argue with a policy that is steadily reducing the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam.

* After a mountain range in what is now North Viet Nam where Emperor Nguyen Hue trounced a Chinese invasion force during Tet 1788.

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