The Unfinished Business

For Premier Ky, victory in Danang was a significant strike toward stability but hardly the end of his troubles. "Certainly the Ky government is stronger today than it was two weeks ago," said one Saigon expert, "but two weeks from now? It is a rash, rash man who would try to predict." For one thing, Buddhist Political Leader Thich Tri Quang was still in Hue, South Viet Nam's capital of discontent, which was in rebel hands.

In backing Ky, the U.S. in effect was opposing Tri Quang, whose influence in I Corps is paramount. Tri Quang openly accused the U.S. of supplying guns and tanks to Ky to destroy the Buddhists, and last week his mobs responded by burning the USIS library in Hue to the ground. Police and firemen calmly stood by watching. Later, rebel troops were dispatched to guard U.S. installations in Hue--a move hardly calculated to inspire American confidence. At week's end nearly all U.S. civilians were evacuated.

The big question that remained was whether Ky would decide to attack Hue as he had Danang. The U.S. hoped he would not and arranged at week's end a meeting between Ky and General Nguyen Chanh Thi, whose ouster as I Corps commander last March started South Viet Nam's latest political crisis. Though Buddhist marches and riots raged through Saigon all last week, Tri Quang so far had failed to arouse any widespread popular resentment against Ky and his government. The muscle of rebellion has been provided by I Corps Vietnamese soldiers who have remained loyal to Thi despite his ouster. If Thi and Ky can come to terms, the Buddhists will be shorn of their main allies.

In the fighting against the Communists, new figures for the week ending May 21 showed the highest casualties for U.S. servicemen of any week in the war: 146 American dead, 820 wounded. Communist dead for the same period totaled 1,235. The two sets of statistics indicated the far-ranging, grinding intensity of the U.S.'s continuing campaign against an enemy doing his best to avoid battle. Last week U.S. units were out hunting in force along the length and breadth of South Viet Nam--most notably the marines, who launched a major multi-battalion assault near Quang Ngai on a suspected enemy concentration.

There was another heartening assault on the troubled nation's problems as well. Last week the first class, 4,532 strong, of South Viet Nam's new Revolutionary Development Cadre scattered in 59-man teams to all of the nation's 43 provinces to begin fulfilling the promise of last February's Honolulu conference to bring a social revolution and a sense of nationhood to the rural people.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.