A Record of Sheer Endurance

The South Vietnamese city of An Loc, a provincial capital only 60 miles north of Saigon, has been under siege almost since the North Vietnamese offensive began on March 30. Surrounded by three Communist divisions, An Loc has been shelled daily in the heaviest artillery barrage of the entire Indochina war. It has also endured repeated ground assaults by North Vietnamese troops and tanks and incessant air attacks by U.S. fighter-bombers, gunships and B-52s on the city and its outskirts. A South Vietnamese relief column has remained stalled for two months by enemy gunfire along Highway 13 to the south.

The siege of An Loc had not yet been broken at week's end, but airborne troops had managed to reach the city, which--through allied air power and the sheer endurance of its Vietnamese defenders--had held out even longer than Dien Bien Phu. TIME Correspondent Rudolph Rauch and Photographer Le Minh managed to enter the city last week by helicopter. Rauch was one of the first two American correspondents to reach An Loc since the siege began. He sent this report:

THERE are perhaps six buildings left in the town, none with a solid roof. There is no running water or electricity. Every street is shattered by artillery craters and littered with the detritus of a battle that saw a bit of every kind of war. Everywhere you walk you hear the crackle of shifting shell fragments when you put your foot down. There are not more than half a dozen vehicles left that still function, and when I arrived, only one of those, a Jeep, had all four tires. All the others move fast enough, given the condition of the streets, on their wheel rims, and it is a common sight to see seven or eight Vietnamese lurching through the town in a Jeep without tires.

There were 30,000 civilians in An Loc two months ago. Now there are 2,000. Except for an estimated 1,000 who were killed by the Communist shelling, all the others have left. Thousands of refugees have fled down Highway 13, braving enemy mortar fire. Those who remain are huddled under a ridge to the east of the city in a village called Phu Due. There are no gun positions in Phu Due, no targets of military significance. Yet since fighting died down in the city itself at the beginning of June, an increasing percentage of the artillery shells poured into the city have been aimed at Phu Due.

Fine Porcelain. The provincial hospital was evacuated May 8, after it was mortared, perhaps accidentally, and 30 civilians who had crowded into it for sanctuary were killed. Since then, wounded civilians have been cared for in a pagoda in Phu Due. There are no beds and few mats; most patients lie on the dirt floor or on bundles of rags. A child died of lockjaw because of a shortage of tetanus serum. Her body lies twisted like a snake under a shroud of rags. Two feet away an old woman is dying of malnutrition. She had stayed in her bunker for well over a month, switching from boiled rice to rice soup as her reserves dwindled, then to anything edible. She is the color of fine porcelain, and the flies are all over her face.

The province chief, Colonel Tran Van Nhut, has managed to set up a system of rice rationing. Bags of rice are handed across a wire fence to those who can come to get them. When a wizened man with a stump of a leg hobbles up, he cannot quite negotiate his crutch and his rice. He collapses in a heap, trying to figure out some way of fastening his ration to his loincloth.

The military casualties are, if possible, even more pitiful than the civilians. Their primary hospital is now a bunker. Some men have been there for as long as a month, with more lightly wounded comrades cooking for them over smoky wood fires on the bunker steps. There is no sterilization for instruments, and there is a shortage of catgut. Dr. Nguyen Van Quy, who performed 200 operations in two months, has taken to using thread from sandbags for sutures.

An Loc has withstood a battering given to no other city in this war. The worst day was May 11, when an estimated 7,000 rounds of artillery, mortar and rocket fire hit an area that can easily be walked across in ten minutes. Said one U.S. adviser: "Those were days when healthy men were taking antidiarrhea tablets to keep from having to go outside. Nature's calls seemed a lot easier to resist."

American and Vietnamese aircraft kept up a continuous bombardment throughout the three days I was in An Loc. Every sort of aerial weaponry was used: Catling guns, CBU attacks, conventional bombs and finally, two hours before sunset on Thursday, a B-52 strike 900 meters to the northwest against a Communist tank concentration. But the guns keep moving, and rounds keep coming in. Right now, the situation in An Loc is considered calm, despite the unnerving intrusion of an average of 200 rounds a day.

The Vietnamese airmen whose job it is to fly out the wounded are remarkably unwilling to come into the stretch of Highway 13 that now serves as a landing strip. To confuse enemy gunners who have the strip zeroed in, chopper pilots can land almost anywhere in a stretch of road two kilometers long. In theory, the landing zone for each mission should be selected so as to allow the wounded to be on hand near by. But that never happens. Instead, the Vietnamese choppers come streaking in low along the highway, and hover two or three feet above the ground while any soldiers aboard jump off; only the less seriously wounded have a chance to jump on. Time after time, litter patients who have waited for hours in a sun of close to 100DEG are hoisted to the shoulders of their buddies. But then the chopper will zoom down, hover for ten seconds, and take off again, leaving the wounded with a new layer of the red Binh Long dirt in their wounds and another two hours to wait.

Had it fallen, An Loc would have been an important victory for the North Vietnamese. That it did not fall is a tribute to American airpower and to the fierce determination of its Vietnamese defenders and their American advisers. It is no credit at all to the ARVN column that remained pinned down for two months on Highway 13 by vastly smaller enemy forces--or to the South Vietnamese units within the city that engaged in open firefights in order to capture airdropped rations from each other. The important fact is that the city held. "The only way to approach the battle of An Loc is to remember that the ARVN are there and the North Vietnamese aren't," says an American adviser. "To view it any other way is to do an injustice to the Vietnamese people."

But for the foreseeable future, An Loc is dead--as dead as the hundreds of North Vietnamese who were caught in the city's northern edge by U.S. bombing, and whose putrefaction makes breathing in An Loc so difficult when the afternoon breeze comes up. Perhaps the best that can be said is that the city died bravely, and that--in a year that included the fall of Quang Tri and Tan Canh--is no small achievement.

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