The Giant Spoiler

The largest American campaign of the Viet Nam war raged last week in the thick jungle of Tay Ninh province northwest of Saigon. Some 16,000 U.S. troops traded blows with an elusive Communist enemy that remained mostly hidden in his forest fastness, emerging occasionally to do vicious, bloody battle. So far, most of the blood was Red. In a week of fighting, more than 900 Viet Cong died.

As so often happens, the battle, code-named Operation Attleboro, got its start with a minor fire fight. A U.S. company on a routine rice hunt stumbled onto a Viet Cong platoon and traded blows for an hour. But that night the enemy struck back, mortaring two base camps --a tactic sometimes used by the Communists to divert the Allies from more serious business near by. Still not certain if something big was up, U.S. commanders dispatched six battalions of the 1st Infantry Division to the scene by plane and helicopter.

Eight Hours of Lead. Things became a lot more certain the next day. Major Guy S. Meloy was leading 400 of his riflemen through the Tay Ninh jungles when, as he put it, "all hell broke loose." An ambush of 1,500 Communist soldiers opened up with automatic rifles and machine guns on the Americans--and kept on firing and firing. "For eight hours it was nothing but solid lead," said Meloy later. "Where the V.C. got all the ammunition, I've got no earthly idea." Six times the Red soldiers launched human wave charges, yelling and screaming above the crackle of bullets. Meloy's men held them off until reinforcements arrived, permitting a U.S. withdrawal under pinpoint artillery cover, but three of his companies took heavy casualties in the encounter. But so did the enemy: in some 30 hours of intermittent battle, Meloy, his command eventually grown to eleven companies, accounted for some 200 Red dead.

Meloy's ordeal triggered the massive infusion of men into the battle. Operation Attleboro had begun as a routine operation a month ago, with elements of the U.S. 25th Division and 196th Light Infantry. Now more 1st Division units and the 173rd Airborne Brigade were brought up. Major General William E. DePuy, commander of the 1st Division, took charge of Attleboro and set up an operational headquarters at Dau Tieng. The once-sleepy village bordering a large rubber plantation soon resembled a World War II beachhead as lumbering C-1235 transports and darting helicopters brought in hundreds of tons of supplies from 175-mm. artillery shells to plastic bottles of mosquito repellent. DePuy soon concluded that Attleboro had caught the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese massing for an attack on the Special Forces camp of Suoi Da, perhaps as the opening of a major winter offensive. True or not, the Reds kept fighting as though it were; the biggest battle was still to come.

Red Gas. Thirty miles to the west of Meloy's encounter, Lieut. Colonel Jack Whitted, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Division's 28th Infantry, was awakened just before dawn by a flare on his command post's perimeter. He had scarcely rolled out of his black silk hammock, strung up beside a 4-ft. anthill, when a bugle sounded and some 100 Viet Cong charged. Three Claymore mines blunted that enemy attack. When a heavy machine gun kept ripping into the U.S. lines, Specialist 4 Kirk James, 26, of Brooklyn, crawled out 50 ft. until he was parallel with the enemy gunner, then took him out with a single blast from his 12-gauge shotgun. Within ten minutes, U.S. artillery had zeroed in on the attackers, and Air Force fighter-bombers were pounding them with 500-lb. bombs and napalm--one of nearly 700 support sorties flown by the Air Force and Vietnamese in the week of Tay Ninh battles. When the Viet Cong finally withdrew, they left 400 of their dead behind.

That was not all: the Viet Cong had been fighting to defend a central cache of arms and food. In nearby bunkers and tunnels, the U.S. infantrymen seized one of the richest hauls of the war: 2,000,000 lbs. of rice, 80 rocket launchers, 25 machine guns, 481 Claymore-type mines, large quantities of rifles, pistols, oil, clothing, even 116 bicycles. It was clearly the guts of any offensive notions that the enemy might have cherished, and it added Attleboro to the select list of major "spoiling" operations of the war. Also in the enemy stores were 23,000 Red Chinese grenades, over 1,000 of them teargas. Though Hanoi had loudly bewailed the U.S. use of tear gas, next day the Viet Cong employed it themselves for the first time in the war, tossing several gas grenades at a U.S. squad on night reconnaissance.

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