The Wan Edge of an Abyss

NO, no, South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu emphatically insisted. The Laotian invasion, Lam Son 719, had not ended in "defeat, disorder, disaster." Sitting on some ammunition boxes among the pine trees of the cemetery at Dong Ha, an ARVN base seven miles south of the Demilitarized Zone, Thieu told newsmen and South Vietnamese troops that Laos was, in fact, "the biggest victory ever."

Even as Thieu spoke, 45 American helicopters were flapping into Laos for what he called a "new-type operation": a quick raid by ARVN Hac Bao (Black Panther) commandos about five miles across the border into the Communist depot known as Base Area 611. During their 24 hours on the ground, the Panthers killed just one North Vietnamese and found little in the way of enemy supplies. Their main mission seemed to be to let Hanoi know that its Laotian supply lines would never again be safe and to support Thieu's claim that Lam Son was "still going on."

Despite Thieu's optimism, it was increasingly clear that the allies had suffered serious losses during the 45-day operation. U.S. intelligence men in Saigon privately confirmed recent reports that the 22,000 ARVN troops committed to Lam Son had suffered close to 50% casualties. Hanoi's forces had been hit hard, too, in terms of supplies that never made it down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as casualties. The official, and probably inflated, Saigon estimate stands at 13,863 dead. White House officials maintain that the North Vietnamese are "at the edge of an abyss." To many of Asia's non-Communist capitals, however, it looks as if they are at the edge only because they just pushed somebody else over. Lam Son, concluded Singapore's tough Premier Lee Kuan Yew, "was asking more than the South Vietnamese army was ready to give or able to give." Berita Yudha, Indonesia's army-controlled newspaper, decided that the whole exercise merely "gave an opportunity for North Viet Nam to demonstrate its victory in battle."

The North Vietnamese went all put last week to make that impression stick. In a series of chest-beating radio broadcasts, Hanoi urged the Communist forces in South Viet Nam to "take advantage of our victory in Laos" by mounting "any action, large or small." Mortar, artillery and rocket fire continued to pepper Khe Sanh, Vandergrift and other bases near the DMZ, while bloody ground assaults disturbed the long peace in some supposedly "secure" areas. Deep in the somnolent Mekong Delta, nearly 150 Viet Cong ripped into the hamlet of Cang Long, killing 16 children, five women, six national policemen and the hamlet chief. Farther north, in the Central Highlands, the seasoned North Vietnamese 28th Regiment temporarily overran Fire Base Six, capturing four U.S. advisers and killing or wounding some 200 ARVN troops.

The Worst Attack. In still more brutal assaults, the enemy battered two other locations in the long-troublesome highlands. The first target, an Americal Division outpost named Mary Ann, became the scene of the most destructive attack of the war on a single American position (see box). Two days later, elements of a North Vietnamese regiment hammered a hamlet near the Duc Duc district headquarters 25 miles southwest of Danang. After attacking the headquarters compound, about 150 sappers slipped away and withdrew into a nearby cluster of shacks. When Duc Duc's Popular Force defenders followed the Communists into the hamlet, enemy mortars outside opened up--and the holocaust began. Fires raced through as many as 400 of the hamlet's 600 homes, suffocating many of the Vietnamese men, women and children who had taken shelter in their bunkers. All told, 100 civilians were killed, 150 wounded and 1,800 left homeless; 91 Popular Force troops were killed or wounded. The hamlet, said an American pilot, looked like "a big ashtray."

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