After the War Ended: Blood on the Highway

A few hours before the cease-fire began, more than 400 South Vietnamese marines seized a beachhead on the Cua Viet River, the last natural barrier south of the DMZ. The following night, and again the night after, the North Vietnamese counterattacked, killing at least 150 of the marines.

That was the bloodiest area of battle as the hour passed in which all shooting in Viet Nam was supposed to stop. Both sides fought viciously to seize and hold tiny bits of territory, sometimes of strategic, but often only of symbolic value, before the truce supervisory bodies would arrive to validate the claims of defacto control. These battles for the "leopard spots" of South Viet Nam took a heavy toll. By week's end the South Vietnamese claimed to have killed 3,513 Communist soldiers after the cease-fire deadline, and they admitted the loss of 563 of their own troops--an unusually high concession.

While both sides violated the ceasefire on a broad scale, Saigon officials reported that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces were trying to seize 220 rural population centers and were repulsed or chased out in 192 cases. The Communists provided no such statistics but claimed that they were adhering "scrupulously" to the ceasefire.

Another Communist tactic was a concerted drive to interdict the main highways around Saigon, thus isolating the capital. They succeeded in cutting five main routes, but after often heavy fighting, ARVN counterattacks managed to reopen three of those five.

For the confused peasants, relieved by the announcement of a cease-fire but threatened by new attacks from both sides, the struggle turned into a flag-waving contest. In many areas, the yellow-and-red-striped banner of the Republic of South Viet Nam was flying within a hundred yards of the red-blue-and-yellow-starred flag of the Viet Cong. The flags often in fact became targets for the competing troops, and a villager's choice of which flag to fly was sometimes fatal.

TIME correspondents, fanning out from Saigon to check on the fighting along the main highways after the ceasefire, often found themselves hugging the ground to avoid Communist shells and rifle fire. Their reports:

ALL THE SAME

Marsh Clark: We drove down Highway 1 from Saigon. The sun was just coming up as we passed Long Binh Post, once the largest American military base in the world, standing virtually deserted save for the curly-tailed dogs nosing around in the discarded refuse of war.

Just ahead, a couple of Honda drivers were stopped, an ARVN unit was wearily piling out of its A.P.C.s and the road was devoid of traffic. "Beaucoup V.C., beaucoup V.C.," said one ARVN soldier, pointing down the road. Just then ARVN artillery behind us opened up. The 155-mm. howitzer shells descended over our heads with the sound of ripping cloth, landing just off the road at the edge of a tree line. Then from the distance we saw a single Jeep hurrying toward us, veering crazily from side to side. It screeched to a stop, and the driver, an ancient Buddhist priest who looked like Ho Chi Minh, said that fighting was taking place in the village of Trang Bom.

We followed the motorcycle cowboys, weaving in and out of junk on the road. Trang Bom was nearly deserted. It once had 8,000 residents, but since the cease-fire most had fled to nearby Bien Hoa. The village square was empty. A few small ducklings quacked weakly in the doorways. As we hurried down an empty lane, ARVN soldiers yelled down at us from rooftops that there was incoming artillery fire. We huddled with the ARVN in doorways, and when the cannonade was over a few people approached us and told us that a mortar barrage in the morning had killed or wounded 20 people.

Suddenly everyone started to shout, the drivers of vehicles leaped into their seats, and away we went back toward Long Binh. When we got to Ga Nai, there was a colossal traffic jam. Huge U.S. -made tanks were mixing with empty vegetable trucks, ambulances, Hondas and beer vans. One old man had got out of his truck, slung a hammock between the two bumpers, and was fast asleep in the cool of the shade. War, ceasefire, they're all the same. Rest while you can.

AMID THE MARIGOLDS Bill Stewart: The day began ominously as V.C. rockets slammed into Tan Son Nhut Air Base just before dawn on Sunday, less than two hours before the cease-fire was due to begin. The flames illuminated the darkness with a soft red glare. Unknown to most people in Saigon, intense fighting had raged throughout the night in many parts of South Viet Nam.

Route 4, Saigon's lifeline to the Delta, cuts through endless stretches of rice fields glistening luxuriantly in the early morning sun. The war, however, was not very far away. Just ten miles south of Saigon, the body of a dead Viet Cong lay alongside the road, eyes open, arms outstretched. He was not more than 20, and his side bore a gaping hole.

In Hamlet No. 5, part of Tan Tuc village, Major Huyen Van Hai explained that about 30 Viet Cong had tried to enter the village during the night to raise their flags. The ARVN fought back. The major called off his troops just 15 minutes before the ceasefire, and the V.C. stopped shooting too. For the hamlet, the war appeared to have ended, and there were smiles every where. There was at least one V.C. casualty, however, and his body was brought along the main path of the hamlet. Few seemed to notice. An old woman and her grandson sat in front of their house plucking a newly killed duck. It was for the ceasefire, she said.

The unknown V.C. was laid to rest in a fallow field beside beds of marigolds. "WE CAN'T GET THROUGH" Gavin Scott: Just south of an elegant stand of rubber trees 28 miles east of Saigon on Highway 15, traffic piled up behind a police roadblock. "We've been coming here every day since Sunday, when the road closed," reported an elderly man clambering off a bus.

"Every day it is the same. We can't get through to Vung Tau."

Helicopter gunships circled over head, and the boom of outgoing 105-mm. artillery rent the still, muggy air. A truck carrying empty shell casings roared past the barbed wire. White clouds of smoke from a bomb strike billowed over the cluttered highway.

"There are four ARVN soldiers dead on the road two klicks from here," said a security man. "There are V.C. about 200 meters on either side of the road. Until we get them, you can't pass." Nobody could, and as the morning wore on, the line of buses, trucks, Lambrettas and Hondas lengthened to more than a mile.

Some disgusted travelers simply turned around and returned to Saigon to wait for another day.

THINKING OF TET Barry Hillenbrand: As I went through the tiny village of Som Soui astride Highway 13, the people were returning to rebuild their houses. Government troops had blasted the village to drive out the Communists. On the road were the bodies of 14 dead Communists, one with a barbed-wire noose around his neck. The cease-fire has been unlucky for Som Soui. One villager told me that prior to the cease-fire talk in October the village had never been fired upon.

In Tay Ninh city, a collection of villages, a nervous man twisted bailing wire in his hard hands as he explained how the cease-fire had destroyed his home. The V.C. planted flags along the front of his house, and in the battle that followed, the house lost all its walls.

Only scattered red tiles and brown posts were left. He did not understand any thing about the ceasefire, nor could he focus on the coming Tet holiday. "How can I think about Tet?" he asked. "I have no house now to have a celebration in. What's left for me?"

At week's end the fighting seemed to be dropping off, and U.S. officials in Washington, privately surprised at how long and intensely the warfare had gone on after the ceasefire, cautiously predicted that it would decline further as the supervisory teams began to function. They expect scattered, small-scale fighting, including assassinations and other terror tactics, to continue, how ever, as both sides pursue their conflicting goals. Even more privately, high U.S. officials, while professing outward optimism, fear that once the U.S. has completely pulled out of Viet Nam, open warfare on a larger scale might erupt once again.

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