Settling In for the Third Indochina War

AT first, Hanoi's offensive was viewed by many in Saigon and Washington as a desperate move, designed to score a few quick "spectaculars" and win some easy headlines. Last week,jas the Communist drive entered its second month, that early optimism had all but vanished. In Saigon, the U.S. command grimly foresaw "an all-out effort" that could run through the monsoon season that usually begins later this month --possibly on a reduced scale--and then be stepped up well before the U.S. elections and continue on into the new year. Certainly there was no letup in the Communist attacks, which by now were taking on a grimly familiar pattern. Each time the thinly spread South Vietnamese forces shifted troops from one location to bolster defenses in another, a weak spot was exposed--and the North Vietnamese pounced.

Thus, while only half of the twelve North Vietnamese divisions in South Viet Nam had yet been committed to battle, Saigon's forces were desperately defending three perilous fronts:

AROUND SAIGON. As Communist artillery continued to pound the besieged city of An Loc north of Saigon, other enemy forces edged closer to the capital itself. Fighting broke out near Cu Chi, an ARVN headquarters astride the "Saigon corridor" between Cambodia and the capital, and enemy troops briefly occupied the nearby village of Trung Lap, only 20 miles from Saigon. At week's end, rocket teams were reported to have slipped into positions north and south of the tense capital.

THE NORTH. The Communists resumed with a vengeance their offensive just below the Demilitarized Zone, where South Vietnamese troops had stopped the initial invasion four weeks ago. Charging at night and under clouds that held U.S. and South Vietnamese air attacks to a minimum last week, enemy armor and infantry overran Dong Ha and encircled Quang Tri city. Farther south, battered ARVN troops were driven from long-besieged Firebase Bastogne, opening the way for an enemy drive on Hue, the ancient imperial capital. A drive on Hue, in turn, could pose a direct threat to U.S. troops guarding an American base at Phu Bai.

THE MIDDLE. A drive in the Central Highlands had been forecast as long ago as last December. But when North Vietnamese troops and upwards of 50 tanks finally struck in force last week, they met shockingly weak resistance from the poorly led ARVN troops, who abandoned a string of 14 firebases northwest of Kontum in what Saigon euphemistically called a "tactical withdrawal." At week's end U.S. advisers remaining with the slender garrison at Kontum were ordering supplies for a two-day siege --two days because, as one adviser said, "You're never going to get enough ammunition into this place to give you automatic weapons fire for much longer." With some 20,000 Communist troops tearing up Binh Dinh province on the coast, it seemed likely that the Communists might try to accomplish one "spectacular" that narrowly eluded them in 1965: slicing the country in two.

Many ARVN units have fought well, as have the surprisingly spirited militia. But after four weeks of fighting on just two fronts, the South Vietnamese force had been badly bloodied. Last week Saigon announced that its army had suffered 1,148 dead in the previous week--the highest weekly South Vietnamese casualties since the beginning of the offensive. Of South Viet Nam's 34 infantry regiments, 12 were temporarily out of action at week's end, meaning that more than half of their troops were dead, wounded or missing.

ARVN casualties were certain to increase still more with the opening of a third front in the Central Highlands. There, the Communists had waited until Saigon pulled a seasoned airborne brigade out of the Kontum area and dispatched it to the hard-pressed provinces near the capital. That left a U-shaped string of firebases on the ridges overlooking the eerily quiet approaches to Kontum and along the Poko River Valley largely in the hands of one of ARVN'S weaker divisions, the 22nd.

The Poko Valley's peace was shattered by a 30,000-man North Vietnamese force that included the 320th Division, a veteran outfit that had fought at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. One by one, the ARVN bases fell to the North Vietnamese; the losses included a string of seven artillery positions on aptly named Rocket Ridge, which looks down on Kontum 25 miles away. None of the terror-stricken ARVN units put up much of a struggle, but few faded as ignobly as the 1,200-man garrison at Tan Canh, the forward headquarters of the troubled 22nd. As one of the U.S. advisers who survived the debacle told TIME'S David DeVoss: "The only Vietnamization that was successful at Tan Canh was North Vietnamization."

Tan Canh's ordeal began with a two-day artillery barrage. At one point, the Communist fire was coming from 16 different locations, many of them abandoned firebases where the North Vietnamese had captured ARVN'S 105-mm howitzers intact. By night, Tan Canh's terrified defenders gaped at an extraordinary sight across the valley, as Communist tanks advanced, along with supply trucks that boldly kept their lights turned on. "For a while," said one adviser, Lieut. Charles Vasquez, "it looked like a Los Angeles freeway. All across the ridge line I could see a glow from the trucks' headlights." A new Soviet wire-guided missile, never before used in Viet Nam, knocked out several ARVN tanks at Tan Canh. One missile penetrated the heavily sandbagged tactical operations center through the air-conditioner port, wrecking the communications gear inside. Immobilized by fear, the South Vietnamese hunkered down in their bunkers, refusing even to man their 24 artillery pieces.

Then, out of the early morning fog came the ground assault. Headlights ablaze, 14 huge T-54 tanks growled through one gate, and eight more rolled through another. When the North Vietnamese infantrymen followed five minutes later, the South Vietnamese were already in full flight. One group ran straight through their own minefield. Others grabbed at the skids of a helicopter that came to pick up the U.S. advisers; the overloaded chopper staggered to nearby Dak To, where it was forced to set down. (Six of the advisers and four crewmen died when another chopper that had come to pick them up at Dak To was shot down shortly after taking off.) In all, some 600 ARVN troops were dead or missing after the collapse. Said Captain Richard Cassidy, one of five advisers who survived the disaster: "Tan Canh fell because ARVN never got off its ass and fought." The word out of Saigon was that the regional commander, flamboyant Lieut. General Ngo Dzu, had suffered a "heart flutter," which seemed to indicate that he would be relieved shortly.

In the long term, the campaign is less likely to be significant for its battlefield successes or failures than for the fact that it has returned an important North Vietnamese presence to South Viet Nam for the first time in more than two years. Radio Hanoi was openly urging its forces on. Said one florid broadcast last week: "From the fatherland's heart, blood keeps pouring south. Like a huge army, the entire nation is going south through the mountains and the jungles to the front."

The Communists obviously meant to rebuild the broken Viet Cong, shat ter Saigon's pacification program and destroy confidence in ARVN--in short, to end the relative peace that the regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu has enjoyed ever since U.S. and ARVN troops broke up the Cambodian sanctuaries in 1970. Thus, in Saigon the offensive is not considered to be the "final battle" that Richard Nixon called it last week. Rather, it is beginning to be called the start of the Third Indochina War, succeeding the first war waged against the French in the 1940s and 50s and the second, waged for so many years against the U.S.

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