Bloody Peace

Not since January 1973, when the Paris Accords supposedly brought peace, had the fighting in Indochina been so bloody. Following up their capture of Phuoc Long province earlier this month (TIME, Jan. 20), Communist forces last week kept relentless pressure on the Saigon government with small-unit action throughout the country. Saigon claimed that in the nine days following the fall of Phuoc Binh, capital of Phuoc Long, 3,066 Communist soldiers were killed while 484 government troops died and 1,661 were wounded.

The heaviest main-force fighting took place in the provinces of Thua Thien and Binh Dinh, several hundred miles northeast of Saigon, where government troops tried to block Communist efforts to push into rice-rich coastal regions. Viet Cong shells fell intermittently on several towns like Bien Hoa near Saigon while south of the capital, in the economically crucial Mekong Delta, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in small-unit action disrupted river and road communications and raided small government outposts in an effort to push Saigon's men back into provincial capitals and district towns. Saigon's response was to take to the air with more than 100 sorties daily against Communist antiaircraft positions and supply convoys. In one bombing attack northwest of Kontum City, Saigon claimed that it destroyed 203 Soviet-built Molotova trucks carrying ammunition, food and fuel for Communist soldiers.

The Communists probably will avoid opening up a full-scale frontal offensive--in part to avoid provoking the U.S. Congress into increasing military aid to South Viet Nam. What they are apparently trying to do, instead, is encourage the urban-centered non-Communist opposition in South Viet Nam to force the resignation of President Nguyen Van Thieu. Evidently the North Vietnamese and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (P.R.G.) believe that with Thieu out of power, they could eventually dominate a coalition government.

Unlike the scattered fighting in South Viet Nam, the war in neighboring Cambodia was concentrated in one area: the key Mekong River city of Neak Luong, the last major government-held area on the river from a point 15 miles south of Phnom-Penh all the way to the Vietnamese border 71 miles distant. While 1,000 government troops were being helicoptered into the city--joining some 20,000 civilian refugees from the surrounding countryside--Communist forces on the opposite bank of the river kept up a terrifyingly random shelling that killed or maimed hundreds of civilians as well as soldiers.

By week's end, though government forces seemed strong enough to hold the city, there was little rice or medicine available even for people with money to buy it. In a gruesome reminder that the Cambodian war was getting not only hotter but more savage, the insurgent Khmer Rouge last week wantonly slaughtered 50 villagers in Prek Phneou ten miles northwest of Phnom-Penh; newsmen arriving on the scene only hours after the atrocity discovered that all had died from stab wounds, not, as is more usual, from being caught accidentally in a crossfire.

While the battle for Neak Luong went on, the Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh, which normally gets 80% of its supplies from the Mekong, was cut off from its thrice-weekly convoys from South Viet Nam. Yet, even with fighting taking place on the city's outskirts, most people seemed almost unconcerned. TIME Correspondent Peter Range reported last week from Phnom-Penh:

"Daytime tennis at the Cercle Sportif Cambodge is accompanied by the very audible chatter of 20-mm. machine guns. Bars serving Westerners function well beyond the 9 o'clock curfew when the streets become completely empty. It is hard to believe that just 15 miles down the Mekong, the war in Cambodia smolders on, an ever more bloody stalemate with no end yet in sight."

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