Belfries & Red Berets

Punctuated by an unquiet, 24-hour interlude of truce to celebrate the birth day of Buddha, the ground war in Viet Nam quickly made up for lost time with more of the ferociousness and high casualties that have marked it in recent weeks. The Marines ended their sweep through the Demilitarized Zone on the eve of the truce, but quickly thrust back into it when a battalion of Marines to the south was hit by fire from Hill 117 inside the DMZ. The battalion was joined by a second, and the two counterattacked. After a fierce battle in which 41 North Vietnamese and 17 Marines were killed, they drove the enemy off the hill and pulled back below the DMZ again.

Operation Hickory's sweep into the DMZ has proved a success by any measure. The Allies killed an estimated 1,500 North Vietnamese and seized a rich cache of enemy supplies, from gas masks and mortar shells to a new So viet 82-mm. recoilless rifle. The thrust also served to isolate enemy forces operating to the south in Quang Tri province, cutting them off from their supply routes and their ammunition caches. But Hickory's cost was high: it contributed heavily to a new record of 337 U.S. deaths for the week ending May 20, plus a record 2,282 U.S. fighting men wounded. The total of Communist dead was 2,454, with probably twice that number wounded.

Buzzing Swarms. Those totals are bound to rise. In the western part of the Central Highlands, a 150-man company of the U.S. 4th Division was slogging up a hill commanding a Communist infiltration route from Cambodia last week when its men stopped to rest. Suddenly, the jungle erupted in mortar explosions and gunfire as the company ran into an ambush set by a North Vietnamese battalion. Rising to a half-crouch to direct the defense, the company commander took a bullet under his left eye and fell dead. Within minutes, all the company's officers had been either killed or wounded, many by snipers lashed in tall trees to steady their aim. Though nearly half the U.S. force was killed or wounded in the three-hour battle, they held off charge after charge by the larger enemy force, who were gaudily capped in red berets. When the battle was over, 92 enemy dead were found. To the east, U.S. Marines launched Operation Union City II south of Danang and killed 172 Red soldiers in the first day's fighting, while a South Vietnamese force swept the environs of Hue, the ancient imperial city.

The birthday truce itself proved a bloody affair, honored by the Communists in the gun breech from almost its first moments. Saigon, to be sure, blossomed with festooned streets and parades of floats escorted by buzzing swarms of teen-agers on motorbikes. But on the battlefields, bullets and mortars pounded in 73 enemy violations of the truce period recorded by Saigon. Some 30 of them were judged "significant," including a long firefight in southern Quang Ngai province in which 45 North Vietnamese and eight American soldiers died early on the birthday of Buddha, who enjoined reverence for life.

War has never been a respecter of any religion, of course. In Viet Nam, as in Europe in World War II, Christian churches are often the focal point of village battles, providing in many cases the highest vantage point and sturdiest walls against shelling of any structure in town. Two weeks ago, during Operation Hickory, the An Hoa Roman Catholic church gave vital refuge to besieged Marines and their wounded. Last week came a report from a Marine adviser in Quang Tri province of a less humane use of a church in the village of Ngo Xa Dong. The North Vietnamese seized it and tied two sol diers in the bell tower as blood hos tages against Allied shelling. When South Vietnamese forces finally recaptured the sanctuary, they also found inside the mutilated bodies of two U.S. military advisers. One had been shot through the head with his hands tied behind his back. The other, his throat cut, was found with a large hole in each palm, as though he had been crucified with bamboo nails.

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