The Invasion Ends

The crisply uniformed U.S. Army lieutenant colonel was briefing a group of foreign military attaches in Saigon. "As of today no ARVN elements remain in Laos," he began. "Enemy forces are now chasing them toward the border--wait, I don't mean to use that word. They are following them to the border."

Not even the usually polished briefers could put a completely bright face on Lam Son 719's clouded conclusion. Only hours after the latest Washington assurances that all was continuing "according to plan," the South Vietnamese began streaming back--on foot, aboard armored columns repeatedly raked by enemy fire, and by helicopter from shell-scarred hilltop fire bases deep in Laos. The last group out, the 2,000-man 1st Marine Brigade, barely made it. After clinging to positions on fire bases Delta and Hotel until they could no longer hold off the waves of North Vietnamese attackers, the Marines abandoned their artillery and their dead and headed for the border six miles away. When they crossed into South Viet Nam 48 hours later, only 1,000 were left.

Taking It Apart. Operation Lam Son 719 was suddenly over, 45 days after it had begun. But the withdrawal--and the Communist pursuit--had a momentum of its own. North Vietnamese tankers drove to within half a mile of the border, not only in their own Sovietbuilt machines but in some of the 30 or more American-made M41 tanks abandoned by ARVN in Laos. East of the border at Khe Sanh, the former U.S. Marine outpost from which most of Lam Son's 600 helicopters operated, enemy rocket and artillery fire thudded in round the clock; one night last week 40 Communist sappers slipped past the perimeter wire and destroyed or damaged five choppers. At week's end G.I.s were dismantling everything that they had put together at the start of the operation, right down to the aluminum planked runway.

North of Khe Sanh, some 20,000 Communist troops were poised above the Demilitarized Zone, while inside the DMZ the Communists massed a formidable array of tanks, mortar batteries, rockets, antiaircraft guns and heavy 152-mm. howitzers with an elevenmile range. The buildup--biggest in the DMZ since the 1968 bombing halt--might have been a reaction to allied hints that an invasion of North Viet Nam might be attempted if Lam Son were to turn sour. But some U.S. officers, fearful that it foreshadowed a period of relentless Communist shelling and possibly a fullblown invasion, rushed 7,000 additional American troops to the area. At week's end there were 20,000 ARVN and 15,000 U.S. troops just below the DMZ.

Numbing Losses. Only three days before the final pullout from Laos began, Secretary of State William Rogers told reporters that Lam Son would continue well into April, and perhaps until the start of the rainy season around May 1. After the assault on Tchepone, it was expected that Lam Son's troops would exercise an "option" to drive to a key junction ten miles to the southeast. There they were to have sliced up Route 914, an important and still intact trail route; disrupted Base Area 611, a key enemy supply depot; and swept home via the A Shau Valley, a longtime Communist strongpoint. What happened?

When the North Vietnamese pounced on ARVN troops at Lolo and Brown, two fire bases near Tchepone, South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu balked. Already 1,000 Marines had been sent in to beef up the bloodied Lam Son forces. General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker drove to the presidential palace to urge that several thousand troops already waiting at helicopter pads on the border be sent in to keep the operation going for a few more weeks. Thieu, who was openly jeered at a Saigon military funeral last week, refused.

"As a general," one Washington official said last week, "Thieu saw that his troops, with reinforcements readied, could have held their own. As a politician, he was concerned about the effect back home of the possible high casualties." The losses were numbingly high. Officially, Saigon admits to 25% casualties: 1,147 killed, 246 missing, 4,237 wounded. Unofficially, U.S. and South Vietnamese sources put the toll at closer to 50% of the original 22,000-man force--with 3,000 dead or missing, 7,000 wounded. The official (and probably inflated) estimate of North Vietnamese killed is 13,688. The U.S. toll included helicopter pilots and crewmen: 66 dead, 28 missing, 83 wounded, 94 helicopters destroyed.

Defensive Look. Unquestionably, Communist activity in Cambodia trailed off after Lam Son began, and the operation may well have bollixed future enemy plans for South Viet Nam. But Washington "experts" were still divided over the basic question: What plans? At a White House post-mortem called by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the military intelligence men hewed to the original line--that Hanoi had been pumping troops and supplies down the trail for use in a major offensive either in 1971 or 1972. But their civilian counterparts hotly disagreed, maintaining that the vaunted buildup on the trail was aimed precisely at an allied invasion. One high civilian "spook" said that North Vietnamese intelligence "was a lot better than ours. They knew what was coming and they were ready."

In any case, there was no denying that the allies came out looking decidedly on the defensive, and the recriminations have already begun in Washington and Saigon. And even though Lam Son ended more in a hasty retreat than a disorderly rout, last week's banner headlines declaring COMPLETE VICTORY were in Hanoi's newspapers, not Saigon's.

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