Keeping Them Guessing

It was like beginning a burglary by deliberately knocking over the garbage cans. As a formidable force of South Vietnamese Rangers, armored, infantry and artillery units assembled at a base in Tay Ninh province northwest of Saigon, Lieut. General Nguyen Van Minh's command post issued almost daily bulletins about what targets the ARVN force would hit across the border in Cambodia. Communist staging areas near the town of Snuol were mentioned, as were the Mimot plantation near Krek, the vast Chup plantation, the town of Suong and the enemy-infested banks of the Chhlong River.

In case anybody still had not guessed that the South Vietnamese were coming, helicopters loaded with airborne commando teams clattered noisily into points north of Chup, and American B-52s made basso-profundo bombing runs.

Last week Total Victory VI, as the big operation was named, finally got under way. Riding trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers, roughly 20,000 ARVN troops rolled across the border and into the Fishhook area of Cambodia along Route 7. An ARVN airborne brigade choppered ahead and occupied Chrum, a small town northwest of Krek, the initial objective. After three days, there was no sign of the 5th, 7th and 9th North Vietnamese army divisions, which had been operating in the area. By week's end, after what was described as "light contact," the South Vietnamese claimed 43 enemy dead, two ARVN wounded.

With Care. Minh claims that the idea behind all the pre-invasion publicity was "to keep the enemy guessing and on the defensive." Only cynics, of course, would suggest that it might also have been designed to give the enemy plenty of time to get away in case he wanted to avoid anything so unseemly as a battle.

Actually, as the new dry season begins, both sides have reason to handle themselves with care. Last summer Minh's troops took a mauling at the hands of the North Vietnamese at Snuol: they left behind ten tanks, 50 trucks and 14 armored personnel carriers. But the Communists have even more reason to be battle shy. In September and October, Minh's troops in Tay Ninh badly battered units of the 5th North Vietnamese Division, which had slipped across the border from Cambodia to try to disrupt the South Vietnamese presidential election.

The massive ARVN move into Cambodia was doubtless prompted by a sudden increase in the flow of enemy supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where the seasonal surge in Communist truck traffic has come much earlier than usual. By hitting the Communist staging areas in Cambodia in the coming weeks. ARVN forces hope to spoil enemy plans to regroup and resupply for an offensive in South Viet Nam early next year.

Hoarding Food. Another objective of Minh's noisy operation is to counter a Communist campaign against Cambodia's capital. For a month, enemy rockets have repeatedly slammed into Phnom-Penh and nearby Pochentong airport. One theory is that the Communists are trying to force the Cambodians to pull back for the defense of the capital the troops that are harassing them in northern and eastern Cambodia. Phnom-Penh's residents are so worried that a Communist invasion is imminent that they have begun to hoard food. Obviously, Minh is not the only one who knows how to keep everybody guessing.

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