THE NEW, UNDERGROUND OPTIMISM

EXCEPT for the Communists, America's worst enemy in Viet Nam has been American official optimism. Years of miserable stalemate have been accompanied by overblown pronouncements from Saigon and Washington about how well the war was going. Credibility gapped in the Johnson Administration, when cant phrases like "turning the corner in Viet Nam" and "light at the end of the tunnel" became bitter jokes. In recent months, however, U.S. officials--backed by scattered reports from perennially skeptical journalists --have cautiously begun to spread word that the situation on the ground in Viet Nam looks better than it has at any time since the U.S. buildup began in 1965.

Among themselves, the officials are not always even cautious. "We are winning going away," one field-grade officer in Viet Nam wrote to a Pentagon colleague last week. Not long ago a presidential aide mused: "The reports from the field are so incredibly good that we don't talk about them. We don't dare." Thus the optimistic talk is muffled. "Nobody around here is going into a dream world," an Administration expert insists. "Washington has been through this many times before." The American generals in Viet Nam, from U.S. Commander Creighton Abrams on down, sedulously forgo the kind of broad statements that Abrams' predecessor, General William Westmoreland, was wont to make--and still occasionally utters (see TIME Essay, page 26). Westmoreland seriously underestimated the adverse effect of the 1968 Tet offensive, which he called a triumph for the U.S., upon public opinion at home. And there are more substantive reasons for their caution. The progress that they see--in the lowered level of the violence, in pacification of the countryside, in turning over the fighting to the South Vietnamese army --does not mean that the enemy has been routed from the field. A conventional military victory is as remote now as it was two years ago.

Rather, explains TIME Saigon Bureau Chief Marsh Clark, "the enemy is increasingly unable to achieve his own aims, which are military victory and overthrow of the Thieu government. The chance of success for the often repeated U.S. object in Viet Nam--to guarantee the South Vietnamese the right of self-determination, free from outside aggression--has vastly improved during the past year, because gradually an environment has been created in which the South Vietnamese can fend for themselves."

High-ranking U.S. officers in Saigon point out that main-force enemy units have been driven away from population centers. No major city in South Viet Nam has undergone an important attack this year. The strongest enemy divisions are now clustered along the Laotian and Cambodian borders. Local guerrillas and sappers still manage daily forays inland, but American officials argue that at the moment the enemy capacity for full-scale offensives appears drastically reduced.

A Trend. More roads are opened monthly; highway drives that would have been considered suicidal two years ago can now be made as a matter of course. Sir Robert Thompson, who led the victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya and is now a Rand Corp. consultant, recently returned to Viet Nam to sound out the situation for President Nixon. He told the President last week, says a White House official, "that things felt much better and smelled much better over there."

By most of the familiar statistical indications, there is evidence of improvement for the U.S.

PACIFICATION. As of the end of October, this year, 92% of South Viet Nam's 17,424,900 people live in "relatively secure" areas v. 42% in January 1968; at the same time, the proportion of hamlets under Viet Cong control has dropped from 30% to 3.2% . The 92% figure includes "A" hamlets, where the V.C. apparatus has been eliminated; "B" hamlets, where the V.C. threat has been largely neutralized; and "C" hamlets, which are subject only to infrequent V.C. harassment. Some students of the war have long questioned the accuracy and significance of pacification statistics. "You may not believe the 92%," a U.S. mission official concedes, "but the basis on which it is reported is exactly the same on which we reported far lower figures earlier in the game." Thus even if the numbers are off, they nonetheless reflect a trend.

DEFECTIONS. Since the Chieu Hoi (open arms) program was begun in 1963, the number of defectors to the Saigon government has risen from 11,248 that year to 43,599 so far this year. Much of the big jump in 1969 comes from a sharp increase in the Mekong Delta, where ARVN troops have made new, deeper sweeps. The countrywide total for October was 5,615, the largest ever in a single month.

INFILTRATION. In 1968, the annual rate was about 140,000, and so far this year it is running about the same. On the allied side, while the South Vietnamese forces are rising in numbers, equipment and training levels, desertions continue to plague ARVN; paradoxically, some of the highest desertion rates turn up in the best South Vietnamese divisions--perhaps because they are doing the most fighting.

VIETNAMIZAT10N. That the South Vietnamese are taking a bigger part of the combat load shows up in the fact that they are now taking consistently more than 80% of allied casualties. For the last week in November, U.S. deaths were down to 70, the lowest since the beginning of October. However, the enemy has been relatively quiescent in recent months; the effectiveness of Vietnamization so far has still to be seriously tested.

The big unknown factor is the enemy's motivation. Are the North Vietnamese really exhausted? Or are they simply conserving their manpower, certain that the U.S. is pulling out anyway? Could they press harder if they wanted to? No one knows for sure. Their supply lines are in good order, al though some people in Saigon argue that U.S. probing has kept the Communists from building up the supply bases within South Viet Nam that they would need for full-scale attacks. The enemy is no less numerous than he was a year ago. Viet Cong forces still number more than 100,000. The North Vietnamese troop levels in South Viet Nam are estimated to be between 100,000 and 110,000. That is 40,000 less than at the end of 1968 --but 40,000 enemy soldiers are reported clustered just over the border in Laos and Cambodia, poised for a possible offensive.

Untested Progress. The annual pattern of post-monsoon enemy infiltration and regrouping is already repeating itself, pointing again to the chance of another major push around the time of Tet in early February. "If he wants to," an officer at General Abrams' Saigon headquarters admits, "the enemy can disrupt all our plans. We've made gains. Progress has definitely been made. But will it hold up if it is threatened by the enemy? That is the question we're all asking ourselves, and there is really no way to find out without putting it to the test of an all-out offensive." If the U.S. and the South Vietnamese manage to turn back such an offensive when it comes--or if the enemy holds off such an attack--President Nixon will have gained more time to try to work the U.S. out of Viet Nam on his terms.

While the President would like to announce a further troop withdrawal by the end of the year--perhaps 40,000 to 50,000 men, which would put the total number tagged in 1969 for pullout at or just over 100,000--it became evident last week that the American command now wants him to hold the next withdrawal to around 35,000 men. What Nixon finally decides to do may depend on the conclusions of the independent survey team that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger recently dispatched to Viet Nam to assess just how solid all the good news from there really is.

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