WANTED: MORE MEN IN VIET

THROUGHOUT the course of the U.S. buildup in Viet Nam that now totals 350,000 men, there has been remarkably little disagreement between the American command in Saigon and Commander in Chief Lyndon Johnson and his officials in Washington. One excellent reason for this is that all along Johnson has promised General William Westmoreland that whatever manpower reinforcements the general needed in the field, he would get. So far, the promise has been fulfilled: some 200,000 men will have disembarked in South Viet Nam in 1966 alone, bringing the year-end total of American troop strength in the field to 385,000.

But beyond that point, divergence looms between the generals, on the one hand, and Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on the other. Last week McNamara disclosed a planned "slowdown in our rate of troop deployments" in Viet Nam, "a statement," explained the Defense Department the day after Election Day, "that does not necessarily rule out a figure as high as 500,000 for the end of 1967." To the men running the war in Saigon and many of their colleagues in the Pentagon, half a million men falls considerably short of what is needed. Marine Commandant Wallace Greene has plugged for the total with which most privately concur: 750,000 men.

They argue that for all the Allied success in search-and-kill forays against the Communists, victories over the enemy's main-force military units are like pushing water up the side of a bowl. The moment the mailed fist of U.S. power is withdrawn to search out the enemy elsewhere, the water, meaning the Red control of the countryside, runs back. Pacification efforts have largely failed in rural areas because there are not enough Allied troops to leave behind to provide a permanent shield behind which civilian teams can reclaim the peasants for the government. Even should negotiations take place, most U.S. officers in Viet Nam think the U.S. will need to be around for a long time in force to ensure that all the local Viet Cong, from village cops to schoolteachers, are identified by the Vietnamese and rooted out.

Those in Washington now arguing against a buildup to the 750,000 level do not fault Saigon's reasoning. Rather they insist that the fragile South Vietnamese economy, already inflation-plagued, cannot absorb so massive an additional infusion of Americans. "It would be like putting 2,000,000 men in West Germany," says one Defense Department official. What is more, and far more disturbing, is that without calling up the reserves or increasing draft levels, the U.S. military simply does not have that many men available for Viet Nam duty. And there, for the moment, rests the debate, which might well affect the outcome of the war in which 5,800 U.S. lives have already been invested.

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