Not Yet Peace

Five U.S. Army veterans of Viet Nam stood before their Commander in Chief in the White House last week to receive the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor. Lyndon Johnson chose the occasion to caution that "other bitter days and other battles still lie ahead." He added: "I cannot emphasize strongly enough that we have not attained peace--only the possibility of peace."

That possibility continued throughout last week to be stymied by the unwillingness of South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to agree to send a delegation to Paris and sit at the same negotiating table with the National Liberation Front of the Viet Cong. There were reports and rumors that he was about to change his mind. But the delay brought to nearly a month the elapsed time since the bombing halt. Meanwhile, the war on the ground in South Viet Nam sputtered on.

Quiet in the Delta. The level of fighting, to be sure, did not nearly approach the intensity of battle that had prevailed earlier in the year. Whatever tacit understanding to lower the level of violence that had been reached be tween the U.S. and the North Vietnamese seemed to be working, at least in part. Nonetheless, almost 500 Americans and more than 450 South Vietnamese have died in action since Nov. 1. The weekly average of 144 U.S. battle deaths since then is admittedly considerably lower than the average of 293 for the year prior to the halt. But it is still a high toll for a time when there is talk of peace.

For the most part, the Communists have been avoiding big-unit encounters, a fact that U.S. commanders, wary though they should now be of optimistic evaluations, translate into the belief that the war is going in the allies' favor. The middle part of the country, II Corps, is quiet. Communist forces have either gone into hiding, drifted further south or slipped across the Cambodian and Laotian borders. Except for a massive, six-battalion attempt by the South Vietnamese last week in Chau Doc province to take a vital Viet Cong stronghold, the fertile and populous Delta area of IV Corps is equally calm.

U.S. commanders see the main Communist threat now aimed at III Corps, the region comprising the ten important provinces around Saigon. Earlier this month, the highly mobile First Air Cavalry Division with its complement of more than 400 helicopters was shifted from northernmost I Corps into the Cambodian border fringe north and northwest of the capital, to strengthen allied defensive screens there. The U.S. command estimates that the jungles along the sievelike frontier harbor as many as four Communist divisions, some sheltered in newly built base areas. Throughout III Corps, the Communist order of battle has risen from 60 main and local-force battalions last summer to about 70 this month.

Tactical or Political? Another area of concern is the region around Danang, the country's second-largest city and the hub of I Corps. Three times in six days last week, Communist gunners raked allied base complexes in Danang with rocket and mortar fire. The South Vietnamese 51st Regiment tangled with a North Vietnamese unit twelve miles south of the city and reported killing 253. In Danang itself, a rash of terrorist grenadings resulted in a one-day, 24-hour curfew. Yet the remainder of I Corps, not long ago the main theater of fighting, appears unaffected. Allied intelligence estimates that the Communists have only one regiment in or around the Demilitarized Zone and barely two in the two northernmost provinces of Quang Tri and Thua Thien, where 15 of their regiments roamed last February. Altogether, the Communists are believed to have, pulled a quarter to a third of their 120,000 main-force troops out of South Viet Nam into North Viet Nam and the Cambodian and Laotian sanctuaries. It is still not clear whether that withdrawal decision was tactical, to refit and regroup --as most U.S. military men believe -- or whether it was political, to encourage and maintain the bombing halt.

Communist losses have undoubtedly been heavy. Since the beginning of the year, the allies claim to have killed more than 165,000 men; the figure is probably inflated, but it is impossible to gauge by how much. "We took a good hunk out of the Communists," says one U.S. military analyst, "but not that much."

Raising the Flag. While Communist main forces lie low, the allies are pushing the war as hard as possible. Bombing of supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos has increased since the bombing halt over North Viet Nam. Hundreds of ground patrols stab out daily to find and fix Communist forces and bring them to battle. The allied pacification effort has been accelerated, with the aim of hoisting as many yellow-and-red South Vietnamese flags as possible before any cease-fire might freeze territorial claims. Saigon wants to add no fewer than 1,000 hamlets to its control by early 1969: it now claims some measure of control in 5,100 of the country's 12,800 hamlets. The Viet Cong apparently operate on similar assumptions: since last summer, they have held revolutionary council elections in about 1,200 of their hamlets, presumably in an attempt to ready quasi-governmental structures for the day of a ceasefire.

Many South Vietnamese commanders feel it is much too early for any thought of ceasefire. They would like more time to consolidate Saigon's hold on the countryside, and they are convinced that Hanoi will not stick to its de-escalation understanding with the U.S. Last week the South Vietnamese commander of I Corps, Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam, charged that the North Vietnamese were moving through the DMZ in company-sized units. Despite 21 significant confirmed violations of the buffer zone, U.S. officers saw no pattern of abuse there and could locate no major military threat. At the same time, Saigon claimed that, despite the understanding that cities should not be hit, the Communists had shelled 98 civilian areas in the first two weeks since the halt--five times as heavy a bombardment as in the fortnight preceding it. Such statistics would clearly be useful to Thieu if he wanted further justification for boycotting the talks.

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