TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/60s/60viet.2

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<<                                      ╚Vietnam:1966-1969


[By the end of 1965, 200,000 American fighting men were in
Vietnam and had begun to win big on the battlefield; a huge
action in the Iadrang Valley of the Central Highlands, for
example, had frustrated a Communist push to cut the country in
two and had resulted in a favorable "kill ratio": 300 Americans
to 2,000 Viet Cong. Such sweeps seemed to vindicate--at lest at
first--General Westmoreland's "search and destroy" strategies.

  To appease critics at home and abroad, Johnson declared a halt
in the bombing over the Christmas holidays of 1965.]

(January 14, 1966)

  It was a flying fortnight, the likes of which the world had
never seen, mingling mystery and flamboyance, discretion and
display in an unorthodox diplomatic maneuver unmistakably
stamped L.B.J. On orders from the White House, for the first
time in nearly a year, North Vietnam's skies were free of
American fighter-bombers. Instead, jets winged to the four
corners of the earth carrying presidential emissaries
prospecting for peace in Vietnam.

  Everywhere the U.S. missionaries went, they presented a
14-point itemization of what the U.S. considered the essential
elements in any peace settlement in Vietnam. Penciled by Dean
Rusk, they were, in effect, the U.S. conditions to Hanoi and
Peking for ending the bloody war before it escalated
further--and a rationale for the rest of the world.

  The first order of business of any talks: a cease-fire.
America is prepared to withdraw its forces from South Vietnam,
and wants no continuing military bases there--provided that the
day comes when the nation "is in a position to determine its own
future without external interference."

  Hanoi's answer, though it might not be the final one, was not
long in coming. In a lengthy statement from Ho's foreign
ministry, "the new "peace proposals'" were denounced as a
"trick, merely the repetition of old themes." Once again, the
sticking point for the Communists was U.S. refusal to
countenance negotiations with the Viet Cong in South Vietnam
directly--or, give them a share in any postwar government of
South Vietnam. To do so, Washington adjudges with reason, would
be to hand over at the conference table what the Communists are
trying to win on the battlefield.


  [The North Vietnamese seemed little more interested than the
U.S. in meaningful talks. In fact they, like the Americans, were
reluctant to negotiate seriously until they had achieved a more
decisive position on the battlefield. In any case, the peace
hopes foundered and Johnson resumed the bombing after 37 days.]

(July 8, 1966)

  Even before the POL raids, said the Secretary, the U.S. in its
16 months of sustained air offensive against the North had
accomplished three major objectives: 1) shoring up South
Vietnamese morale, 2) "substantially" increasing the cost of
infiltration for the Communists, forcing them to divert an
estimated 200,000 workers to road-repair gangs, and 3)
demonstrating to the aggressors that "as long as they continued
their attempts to subvert and destroy the political institutions
of the South, they would pay a high price not only in the South
but in the North."

  Nonetheless, reported McNamara, round-the-clock surveillance
of the Ho Chi Minh trail has not checked the relentlessly
increasing infiltration from the North--"the foundation" of
Hanoi's aggression. The Communists have feverishly built and
camouflaged new roads to the South, imported an estimated 15,000
trucks from their allies and made increasing use of motorized
barges to haul war materiel down the country's maze of
waterways.

  During the first five months of this year, southbound enemy
truck traffic has doubled over that during the same 1965 period,
while delivery of Red supplies south of the 17th parallel has
jumped 150% and of troops 120%, to an estimated 4,500 men a
month.


  [Through 1966, the military situation remained deadlocked even
as troop levels and casualties rose on both sides (the U.S.
suffered 6,000 battle deaths that year) and the tide of dissent
against the war continued to rise at home. The cost of the war
was also rising, to $27 billion in the fiscal year ending in
June 1967, while the "guns and butter" budget deficit rose to
$10 billion in FY 1967 (a large sum for that time) and trebled
the following year.

  Even though it was becoming clear, at least to nonmilitary
observers, that the bombing of the North was accomplishing none
of the aims set for it--disrupting the economy, preventing
infiltration and resupply of the South and damaging civilian and
leadership morale--Johnson continued to escalate, permitting
more and more of the country to be targeted, including thickly
populated areas. The inevitable civilian casualties brought out
the worst in the North Vietnamese and further increased dissent
in the U.S.]

(April 14, 1967)

  The walk-on took only four minutes, but its Orwellian impact
unsettled even hard-boiled Communist newsmen. Through a
curtained doorway in Hanoi marched a husky American prisoner of
war clad in purple and cream striped pajamas. He looked healthy
enough, except for his eyes; as the strobe lights winked, they
remained as fixed and flat as blazer buttons. Then, at a word
from his captors, the American bowed deeply from the waist like
a Manchurian candidate, repeating the abject gesture in all
directions about a dozen times. At another command, he turned
on his sandaled heel and marched stiffly from the room.

  The prisoner was Lieut. Commander Richard A. Stratton, 35, a
U.S. Navy fighter pilot from the U.S.S. Ticonderoga who was
downed over the North last Jan. 5. His Pavlovian performance in
Hanoi raised fears that the Communists were once again resorting
to the inhuman brainwashing techniques whose widespread use
during the Korean War horrified the world.

  There are presently 150 to 200 Americans held prisoner in
North Vietnam, and from them the Communists claim to have
extracted more than 20 "confessions." Ho Chi Minh still believes
that he will win the war by default, and the apparent aim of his
prisoners' confessions is to convince the world that U.S.
fighting men are sick of the war and guilt-racked over their
"criminal" behavior in bombing North Viet Nam.


(April 21, 1967)

  At opposite ends of the American continent last weeks,
dissenters were on the march. In New York, they turned up
125,000 strong, from points as disparate as Detroit, Mich., and
Dedham, Mass.--most of them young, many of them carrying
posters, all of them out for a spring housecleaning of their
passions. In San Francisco, 55,000 gathered from points as
distant as Coronado, Calif., and Coos Bay, Ore. The avowed aim
of the "Spring Mobilization to the End the War in Viet Nam" was
to demonstrate to President Johnson and the world the depth of
feeling in the U.S. against the conflict. The end result--aside
from probably delighting Hanoi's Ho Chi Minh--was to demonstrate
that Americans in the springtime like to have fun.

  As the demonstration began, a confluence of contrasting
groups flowed into the muddy Sheep Meadow of Manhattan's Central
Park, anarchists under black flags; boys wearing beads and old
Army jackets; girls in ponchos and serapes, some with babies on
their shoulders; Columbia University scholars in caps and gowns.
There were Vietniks and Peaceniks, Trotskyites and potskyites,
a contingent of 24 Sioux Indians from South Dakota and a band
of Iroquois led by one Mad Bear Anderson. Members of some 125
antiwar groups--from the moderate Women Strike for Peace to the
"New Left" Students for a Democratic Society and the "Maoist"
Progressive Labor Party--distributed literature and sold
buttons. "Draft beer, not boys," exclaimed one button in wavy
script; "Peace with Beatlespower, Funlove for life," proclaimed
a poster that owed more to Lennon than Lenin.


(July 14, 1967)

  "North Vietnam is paying a tremendous price with nothing to
show for it in return. The war is not a stalemate. We are
winning, slowly but steadily." So said General William
Westmoreland last week in Saigon as he briefed Robert McNamara
at the outset of the Defense Secretary's ninth visit to Vietnam.
If his tone was uncharacteristically defensive, that was
understandable. In recent months, it has become apparent that
the war in Vietnam is not going entirely according to the U.S.
scenario for 1967. McNamara's trip will help to determine
whether Westmoreland gets some or all of the additional 100,000
fighting men he now says he needs beyond the 480,000 scheduled
for the end of this year.

  In the past six months, the burdens in terms of U.S.
casualties have become notably heavier, particularly in the U.S.
Marines' war along the "Demilitarized" Zone between North and
South Vietnam. The action there last week provided grim
illustration of the war's bloody turn. Spotting a small force
of North Vietnamese grouping for what looked like an attack on
the Marine post of Con Thien, two Marine companies moved up
Route 161 to do battle. They ran right into an ambush. Tow
battalions of Hanoi's 324B Division, supported massively by
mortars and aided by Red artillery firing over the DMZ from
North Vietnam, hit the 300 Marines, killing 83 and wounding 170.
It was the worst U.S. loss in a single battle this year. Those
who survived had to do what Marines hate most; retreat, leaving
their dead behind.

  By late 1967 or even mid-year, Allied commanders had expected
that big-unit war would have become too costly for the enemy,
and that the war of regiments and battalions would be
substantially over. Far from fading, however, the big-unit war
has grown fiercer in recent months. Moreover, big-unit victories
and massive Allied search-and-destroy sweeps have not so far
advanced the vital pacification program, partly because South
Vietnamese troops have been slow to take to their new
village-security tasks. No matter how many North Vietnamese
regulars are killed along the DMZ or in the Central Highlands,
it is not much aid or comfort to the peasants in a Viet
Cong-ridden village down in the Delta, where a third of the
country's people live.

  Most of the recent big-unit fighting has centered along the
DMZ. There, alone in Vietnam, the U.S. has built something
resembling a conventional-war "front," complete with no man's
land, artillery duels, bunkered lines of defenses faced off
against one another. Since the first of the year, the Marines
have suffered some 1,000 dead and 7,000 wounded at the DMZ
alone. The U.S. and the Marines chose to precipitate this kind
of battle in an effort to block the enemy infiltration lines
leading due south across the DMZ. To do so, they had to
establish a major line of outposts in terrain and a location
where logistics favor the enemy.

  Part of the new unease about the state of the war stems from
the fact that, for all the hard fighting over the past year,
Communist forces in South Vietnam are as strong as they were a
year ago, if not stronger. Their numbers are put at a record
296,000 despite an estimated 46,500 killed this year alone.
Fewer than half are North Vietnamese troops or Viet Cong
main-force fighters, but these "regulars" are at least as
numerous as a year ago.


(September 8, 1967)

  Between Independence Day and Labor Day, a profound malaise
overcame the American people. A kind of psychological Asian flu,
it has as its overt symptoms bewilderment about U.S. aims in
Vietnam, impatience with the pace of the war and, increasingly,
an unmistakable if still inchoate tide of opposition to the
entire U.S. involvement in that costly, ugly, not so far-off
conflict.

  During the past two months, according to a Louis Harris poll,
support for the war has dropped from 72% to 61%, with the
sharpest drop occurring among Americans who previously backed
the President's policy of "fighting to get a negotiated peace."
Harris concludes that "the growing public disenchantment stems
directly from the now dominant view that the war is not going
better military."


(October 27, 1967)

  The Pentagon is the most formidable redoubt in official
Washington. Squat and solid as a feudal fortress, it hunkers in
a remote reclaimed Virginia swamp that used to be called Hell's
Bottom, across the Potomac River from the spires, colonnades and
domes of the federal city. Against that physically and
functionally immovable object last week surged a self-proclaimed
irresistible force of 35,000 ranting, chanting protesters who
are immutably opposed to the U.S. commitment in Vietnam.

  The demonstration began under a crystalline noonday sky at
the Lincoln Memorial. It took on special impact by climaxing a
week of antiwar protest across the nation. Beneath the marbled
gaze of Lincoln's statue, red and blue Viet Cong flags mingled
with signs affirming that "Che Guevara Lives," posters
proclaiming "Dump Johnson" and asking "Where Is Oswald When We
Need Him?" Aroused by acrimony and acid-rock, the crowd moved
exuberantly out across the Arlington Memorial Bridge toward the
Pentagon.

  An assault squad wielding clubs and ax handles probed the
rope barriers in front of the Pentagon entrances, taunting and
testing white-hatted federal marshals who stood in close ranks
along the line. After 90-odd minutes of steadily rising
invective and roiling around in the north parking lot of the
Pentagon, flying wedges of demonstrators surged toward the less
heavily defended press entrance.

  A barrage of pop bottles, clubs and tomatoes failed to budge
the outer ring of marshals, and military police were summoned
from the bowels of the bastion to form a brace of backup rings.
A final desperate charge actually breached the security lines,
and carried a handful of demonstrators whirling into the rifle
butts and truncheons of the rearmost guards at the Pentagon
gate. At least ten invaders managed to penetrate the building
before they were hurled out--ahead of a counterattacking wave
of soldiers vigorously wielding their weapons from port-arms.
Handcuffs clicked as marshals corralled their captives, left
behind in the abortive assault on the doors. Bloodstains clotted
in rusty trails into the Pentagon, where prisoners had been
dragged.

  Thus, on a crisp fall weekend when most Americans were
watching football, raking leaves or touring the countryside, the
biggest "peace" demonstration in the history of the nation's
capital unfolded. By the time the demonstration had ended, more
than 200 irresistible had been arrested, 13 more had been
injured, and the Pentagon had remained immobile.


  [By the end of the year, the U.S. had almost half a million
men in Vietnam and had suffered 9,000 more battle deaths, but
General Westmoreland said he needed 100,000 or even 200,000 more
troops to get the war off dead center. Starting in the autumn,
meanwhile, U.S. troops fought a series of large-scale battles
in remote areas of Vietnam.]

(October 6, 1967)

  In Vietnamese, the name means approximately "place of angels."
To the 1,200 U.S. Marines guarding it and to Americans watching
their ordeal, Con Thien has come to mean something more akin to
hell. Since Sept. 1, the outpost, less than two miles from the
southern edge of the six-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone that
separates the two Vietnams, has been under relentless
bombardment from Communist guns. In one barrage last week, the
Communists sent 903 artillery, mortar, rocket and
recoilless-rifle shells whistling into the perimeter around Con
Thien's three barren, red clay hills--probably the greatest
single Red bombardment of the war. In August, the leathernecks
took 388 casualties along the northern defense line that
stretches from the South China Sea to Khe Sanh in the
mountainous borderlands near Laos; in September, more than 2,200
Marines were killed and wounded.

  The artillery bombardments have left the three red hills of
Con Thien a crater-pocked moonscape. Monsoon rains, a month
ahead of their normal mid-October arrival, have churned the
outpost into a quagmire reminiscent of Ypres in World War I.
Everything must be brought into the outpost by helicopter to a
landing zone grimly known as "Death Valley," or over the unpaved
road from Cam Lo. Everything rots or mildews. The Marines at Con
Thien live on C rations. Because water is scarce, they shave
only every other day and can seldom wash.

  They live in crude, sandbagged underground bunkers where often
the only light comes from an improvised candle with a rag as a
wick. There are no connecting trenches: the leathernecks, some
of them raw teen-agers, must move at a run from bunker to
bunker. Where once a crude French fortress stood, not a single
building or even a tent breaks the bleak horizon. Often the only
signs of life are a horde of bold rats and a few cats. "The men
think they keep the rats down," grumbled one officer. "I suspect
they share the garbage."


(January 26, 1968)

  Khe Sanh has been dug out of the red clay of a plateau that
is ringed by high hills thick with trees and bamboo. Some 15
miles south of the DMZ and only ten miles east of the Laotian
border, the Marine base lies directly athwart the easiest
infiltration routes into South Vietnam. To eliminate the
roadblock, the North Vietnamese have ranged an estimated 20,000
men directly around Khe Sanh, have at least another 20,000 in
reserve in Laos and immediately north of the DMZ, all located
within 20 miles of the post. Together, they constitute the
largest and best-equipped military force that North Vietnam has
ever concentrated on a single battleground.

  Khe Sanh bears some topographical resemblance to Dienbienphu,
sitting at the bottom of its bowl of hills, vulnerable to
artillery and machine-gun fire from the heights both at the camp
and its 4,000-ft. airstrip. Some of the hills are controlled by
Marines. But others, like Hill 881 North, which the Marines took
with such blood last May, were abandoned during the quiet months
since and have been repossessed by the North Vietnamese. One
Communist-held hill, numbered 950 (all are named after their
height in meters), run parallel to Khe Sanh's runway only three
miles away and commands a view of the entire camp. The North
Vietnamese have dug anti-aircraft and machine guns into it and
have already succeeded in shooting down three U.S.
fighter-bombers and three helicopters over the airstrip.


  [The remote locations of those battles turned out to be no
coincidence. The Communists had deliberately drawn as many U.S.
and South Vietnamese troops as possible away from urban areas
while they prepared for an even larger-scale offensive over the
Tet holiday.]

(February 9, 1968)

  Though ominous harbingers of trouble had been in the air for
days, most of South Vietnam lazed in an uneasy truce, savoring
the happiest and holiest holiday of the Vietnamese year. All but
a few American retired to their compounds to leave the feast of
Tet to the Vietnamese celebrators.

  Through the streets of Saigon, and in the dark approaches to
dozens of towns and military installations throughout South
Vietnam, other Vietnamese made their furtive way, intent on
celebrating only death--and on launching the Year of the Monkey
on its malign way before it was many hours old. After the
merrymakers had retired and the last firecrackers had sputtered
out on the ground, they struck with a fierceness and bloody
destructiveness that Vietnam has not seen even in three decades
of nearly continuous warfare. Up and down the narrow length of
South Vietnam, more than 36,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
soldiers joined in a widespread, general offensive against air-
fields and military bases, government buildings, population
centers and just plain civilians.

  The Communists hit in a hundred places, from Quang Tri near
the DMZ in the north all the way to Duong Dong on the tiny
island of Phu Quoc off the Delta coast some 500 miles to the
south. No target was too big or too impossible, including Saigon
itself and General William Westmoreland's MACV headquarters. In
peasant pajamas or plenty insigniaed NVA uniforms, by stealth
or attacks marshaled by bullhorn, the raiders struck at nearly
40 major cities and towns.

  They attacked 28 of South Vietnam's 44 provincial capitals
and occupied some, destroyed or damaged beyond repair more than
100 allied planes and helicopters. South Vietnam's capital,
which even in the worst days of the Indo-China war had never
been hit so hard, was turned into a city besieged and sundered
by house-to-house fighting. In Hue, the ancient imperial city
of Vietnam and the architectural and spiritual repository of
Vietnamese history, the Communists seized large parts of the
city--and only grudgingly yielded them block by block under
heavy allied counterattacks at week's end.

  Some psychological success could hardly be denied the
attackers. In the raid on the poorly defended U.S. embassy in
Saigon, they embarrassed and discomfited the U.S. They succeeded
in demonstrating that, despite nearly three years of steady
allied progress in the war, Communist commandos can still strike
at will virtually anywhere in the country.


(February 16, 1968)

  Ever since the U.S. came in force to Vietnam, General
Westmoreland's oft-reiterated strategy has been built on denying
the Communists a major victory and assuring the South Vietnamese
that the Communists could not hope to occupy even a district
capital for more than a few hours. In their assault on the
cities, the Communists did better than that, and nearly two
weeks after the initial attack, the Viet Cong flag still flew
over portions of Hue, with all it symbolic significance as the
country's ancient capital.

  In his blitzkrieg, (North Vietnamese Defense Minister Vo
Nguyen) Giap showed that not even American power could protect
urban Vietnamese from Viet Cong guns. The demonstration equally
undermined the South Vietnamese government's stature in the
minds of many South Vietnamese. Whatever the harsh military
facts of the campaign's outcome, the attacks enhanced the
mystique of the Viet Cong as a stealthy, dedicated foe,
unmindful of death.

  The problem likely to plague South Vietnam the longest is the
widespread destruction of its cities, its towns, its homes. It
was the Viet Cong's decision to bring the war into the midst of
the cities, and the initial damage was wrought by Communist guns
and mortars. But the bulk of the actual destruction occurred
during the allied counterattacks to oust the Viet Cong. For
allied commanders, these posed a grim dilemma that was summed
up bluntly--and injudiciously--by a U.S. major involved in the
battle for Ben Tre. "It became necessary to destroy the town to
save it."


  [The Tet offensive and the American reaction to it finally
forced Johnson to reconsider his Vietnam policy and de-escalate
the war. His decision not to seek another term as President
underlined his change of heart.]

(April 5, 1968)

  Lyndon Johnson's decision to retire from office, coming as a
surprise climax to a surprise speech on Vietnam, gave his newly
stated conditions for ending the war the kind of impact that his
own intended departure from the White House had.

  In a dramatic and unexpected turnabout, he announced what he
called "a unilateral step toward de-escalation." Its major
feature, he said, would be a halt in all U.S. aerial and naval
bombardment of North Viet Nam. Only that portion adjacent to the
Demilitarized Zone would be exempted from the order.

  Johnson said the bombing pause will affect 90% of the North's
population and even more of its real estate. How long it lasts
depends on Hanoi.

  Before Johnson spoke, rumors had swirled around the capital
that he would announce the dispatch of roughly 30,000 more U.S.
troops to Viet Nam--in addition to the 525,000 already
authorized. Instead, he announced that only 13,500 more men
would be sent in the next five months.


(April 12, 1968)

  After three years of ever more furious combat, after dozens
of feints and one-sided gestures toward conciliation, the U.S.
and North Vietnam finally moved in the same direction at the
same time. The first half step, when it occurred, was just as
swift as it was unforeseen.

  It came last week when President Johnson dramatically
restricted the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam without demanding
any reciprocal restraint by the Communists. North Vietnam, in
turn, agreed to the first significant face-to-face diplomatic
contact with the U.S. since embassy-level talks in Moscow 14
months ago, although its insistence upon an end to all attacks
on its territory had not been met. Washington accepted, even
though Hanoi limited the initial agenda to the question of a
full cessation of U.S. attacks.


(May 24, 1968)

  Just as the long-awaited negotiations on the war in Vietnam
were getting under way, U.S. headquarters in Saigon announced
that American casualties during the previous week were the
highest yet: 562 killed in action. At the same time, the
Communists launched their latest bloody round of countrywide
attacks in South Vietnam. Often suicidal, almost invariably
foiled, the attacks nonetheless offered proof that Ho Chi Minh
was determined and able to go on fighting while talking. It
meant that, as in Korea, many more men would have to face the
particularly bitter fate of dying while excruciatingly slow
negotiations are trying to find an end to war.

  Ten hours of formal negotiations plus countless hours of
press briefings and background sessions produced little more
than posturing and polemics, a kind of ritual, throat-clearing
preamble of insults and accusations. "We are now involved in a
major propaganda campaign," said Chief U.S. Negotiator Averell
Harriman. "But one day they will get tired and get down to
constructive discussions." Until that day comes--optimists give
it several weeks, skeptics several months--the delegates are
digging in for a long stay.


(November 15, 1968)

  When Lyndon Johnson announced the bombing halt to the
American people, he prudently cautioned that the U.S. could be
seriously disappointed in its efforts to find peace in Vietnam.
At first, his admonition seemed unwarranted. From most of the
world's capitals, including Moscow, came only praise for the
President's action. More important, as a silent signal of
Hanoi's acceptance of the U.S. offer, the battlefields of South
Vietnam, which have been relatively quiet for the past month,
became almost totally still. Then, to Washington's dismay, the
U.S. peace initiative foundered on the obduracy of its principal
allies, the South Vietnamese. As a result, last week's scheduled
session in Paris, when the broadened peace talks were to have
begun, was canceled. The impasse thus raised a serious question
about just when the expanded negotiations would get under way.

  The man who dashed the diplomatic hopes was South Vietnam's
President Nguyen Van Thieu. Until two days before the
announcement of the bombing pause, Thieu seemed to go along with
the U.S. plan. Then he hardened his stand, bluntly barring South
Vietnam's participation in the Paris talks. His defiance made
him a hero at home.

  The expressions of new-found loyalty for Thieu were a measure
of South Vietnamese anger over the arrangements in Paris. The
sticking point is the participation of the National Liberation
Front, which is the political arm of the Viet Cong. As Saigon
sees it, the participation of the N.L.F. as an equal member of
any peace talks is tantamount to recognizing that the Communists
represent a portion of the population of South Vietnam. Such an
admission would be a serious loss of face for Thieu's regime and
might force the Saigon government into the position of having
no alternative to the acceptance of Communists in a coalition
government.


  [On the anniversary of the Tet offensive, the Communists
struck again.]

(February 28, 1969)

  It was 2 a.m. in the dark of the night. All across the
war-weary country, South Vietnamese were sleeping off the
revelry of Tet, Viet Nam's longest and happiest holiday. This
three-day Tet had passed peacefully, unlike the nightmare of the
year before, when more than 36,000 of the Communists' finest
assault troops smashed into South Vietnam's cities and towns.
Then suddenly, in a whoosh of rockets and thud of mortars, the
nightmare seemed about to begin again. Barely 19 hours after
they had ended a self-imposed, week-long Tet truce, Communist
gunners launched coordinated rocket and mortar attacks on more
than 100 cities, towns and military installations throughout
South Vietnam, including the capital of Saigon.

  At weekthe countrywide attacks were the signal for a major
ground offensive or merely a macabre salute to commemorate last
year's bloody campaign, which had so stunned the allied war
machine and shattered optimistic predictions that the Communists
were on the run. Perhaps Hanoi simply felt that a show of force
would strengthen its position at the Paris peace talks as
Richard Nixon's negotiators took over. Whatever the Communists'
motivation, the attacks--and their timing--served as a reminder
that the war in Vietnam goes on in ways all too familiar for
comfort.


  [President Richard Nixon, always mindful of the large and
still growing minority of Americans who had come to oppose the
war, evolved a new Vietnam policy designed to bring about the
cherished goal of "peace and honor," i.e., bringing the troops
home without appearing to abandon the South Vietnamese.]

(June 20, 1969)

  Behind President Richard Nixon's decision to begin troop
withdrawals, there is a concept for disengaging the U.S. from
the war. It is more than a vision, but less than a blueprint.
It is flexible, ready to be modified with the shift of events.
What Nixon does next depends largely on the Communist response
to his announcement last week at Midway.

  Nixon's advisers had proposed that he announce withdrawal of
as many as 50,000 troops, but with characteristic caution Nixon
chose a minimum opening figure of 25,000. The number may
nonetheless reach 50,000 by the end of this year. Nixon was
careful to speak at Midway of their "replacement" buy South
Vietnamese forces. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird added to the
lexicon by christening the plan "Project Vietnamization." By
whatever name, Nixon's move was a guarded gamble for peace in
South Vietnam.

  But cutting back however slightly the number of Americans
fighting in Vietnam, Nixon sought to mollify the domestic
impatience with the war; that dissatisfaction had helped him win
election last November.

  By meeting with South Vietnam's President Nguyen and spelling
out the common ground between Washington and Saigon, he tried
to underline the solidarity of the two governments in the face
of Communist efforts to divide and conquer. In giving more
combat responsibility to the South Vietnamese, Nixon advertised
U.S. confidence--such as it is--in the combat readiness of
Saigon's forces. He aims to convince the Communists that they
must negotiate with Thieu and not hold out in the expression of
dealing with a more malleable successor. If Nixon can dull
dissent at home while maintaining pressure in the field, the
Communists may become more amenable to concluding a settlement
in Paris or at least to scaling down the level of fighting.


(October 24,1969)

  Their numbers were not overwhelming. Probably not many more
than 1,000,000 Americans took an active part in last week's
Moratorium Day demonstrations against the Vietnam War; that is
barely half of 1% of the U.S. population. Yet M-day 1969 was a
peaceful protest without precedent in American history because
of who the participants were and how they went about it. It was
a calm, measured and heavily middle-class statement of weariness
with the war that brought the generations together in kind of
sedate Woodstock Festival of peace.

  What M-day did raise was an unmistakable sign to Richard Nixon
that he must do more to end the war and do it faster. Unless the
pace of progress quickens, he will have great difficulty
maintaining domestic support for the two or three years that he
believes he needs to work the U.S. out of Vietnam with honor and
in a way that would safeguard U.S. interests and influence in
the world.

  It was a day of wrenching contrasts. Quiet seminars mulled
over the issues of the war while pickets shouted their dissent.
Some mass marches developed a football rally spirit; elsewhere
a funeral atmosphere dominated as church bells tolled and the
names of the war dead were read. New York's city hall wore the
black and purple bunting of mourning. Across the country--in
drenching San Francisco rain, in ankle deep Denver snow, in
crisp New York fall sunshine--Americans took part in a unique
national Happening.

  Down Commonwealth Avenue a crowd of 100,000 converged on the
Boston Common. They were mostly students, but mothers from
Newton and Wellesley walked among them, their children wearing
black M-day armbands or clutching helium-filled balloons.
Halfway across the nation in front of the Forest Park (Ill.)
Selective Service office, miniskirted girls from nearby Rosary
College were reciting the names of the Illinois war dead; two
elderly clerks inside went on with their work, paying little
attention. In the Detroit suburb of Birmingham, a Republican
enclave, more than 1,000 protested in Shain Park. 18 TODAY, DEAD
TOMORROW, read one poster. "I fought hard in World War II,"
said a physician, James Pingel, "but I'm against this one. It's
morally wrong. I've got two boys coming up."

  One student at Houston's University of St. Thomas broke down
and wept while reading a list of U.S. war dead; he had come to
the name of a close friend whose death he was unaware of. Four
Notre Dame students burned their draft cards shortly before a
"resistance Mass" celebrated for some 2,500 on the library lawn.
Yet the day was not entirely grim, especially since the almost
pathologically humorless Maoist factions boycotted it. Students
from Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College circled the city's
Federal Building blowing shofars in an effort to bring it down
like Jericho; they ran out of wind before completing the
Biblically prescribed seven circuits. Three long-hair types in
the candlelight procession to the White House carried a sign:
KEEP THE BOYS IN VIET NAM. THEY BRING US OUR GRASS. At Ohio's
Case Western Reserve University, a placard carried by a member
of the Cleveland Symphony said: BRAHMS, NOT BOMBS.


  [The decade ended, the prospects for winding down the war
seemed to be good. But an episode of horror from the past
emerged to cause outrage and recrimination in the present.]

(November 28, 1969)

  It passed without notice when it occurred in mid-March 1968,
at a time when the war news was still dominated by the siege of
Khe Sanh. Yet the brief action at My Lai, a hamlet in Viet
Cong-infested territory 335 miles northeast of Saigon, may yet
have an impact on the war. According to accounts that suddenly
appeared on TV and in the world press last week, a cam-company
of 60 or 70 U.S. infantrymen had entered My Lai early one
morning and destroyed its houses, its livestock and all the
inhabitants that they could find in a brutal operation that took
less than 20 minutes. When it was over, the Vietnamese dead
totaled at least 100 men, women and children, and perhaps many
more. Only 25 or so escaped, because they lay hidden under the
fallen bodies of relatives and neighbors.

  What put My Lai on the front pages after 20 months was the
conscience of Richard Ridenhour, 23, a former SP4 who is now a
student at Claremont Men's College in Claremont, Calif. A
Vietnam veteran, Ridenhour had known many of the men in the
outfit involved in My Lai. It was C Company of the American
Division's 11th Infantry Brigade. Ridenhour did not witness the
incident himself, but he kept hearing about it from friends who
were there. He was at first disbelieving, then deeply disturbed.
Last March--a year after the slaughter--he sent the information
he had pieced together in 30 letters, addressed them to the
President, several Congressmen and other Washington officials.

  Ridenhour's letter led to a new probe--and to formal charges
of murdering "approximately 100" civilians at My Lai were
preferred against one of C Company's platoon leaders, 1st Lieut.
William Laws Calley Jr., a 26-year-old Miamian now stationed at
Fort Benning, Ga.

  According to the survivors, who spoke to newsmen last week at
their shabby refugee camp at nearby Son My, the operation was
grimly efficient. The inhabitants, who had a long record of
sheltering Viet Cong, scrambled for cover around 6 a.m. when an
hour-long mortar and artillery barrage began. When it stopped,
helicopters swooped in, disgorging C Company's three platoons.
One platoon tore into the hamlet, while the other two threw a
cordon around the place. "My family was eating breakfast, when
the Americans came," said Do Chuc, a 48-year-old peasant who
claims to have lost a son and a daughter in the shooting that
followed. "Nothing was said to us," he said. "No explanation was
given."

  The first G.I.s to enter the hamlet were led by Lieut. Calley,
a slight, 5-ft. 3-in. dropout (with four Fs) from Palm Beach
Junior College who enlisted in the Army in 1966 and was
commissioned in 1967. Some of Calley's men raced from house to
house, setting the wooden ones ablaze and dynamiting the brick
structures. Others routed the inhabitants out of their bunkers
and herded them into groups.

  Few were spared. Stragglers were shot down as they fled from
their burning huts. One soldier fired his M-79 grenade launcher
into a clump of bodies in which some Vietnamese were still
alive. One chilling incident was observed by Ronald L. Haeberle,
28, the Army combat photographer who had been assigned to C
Company. He saw "two small children, maybe four or five years
old. A guy with an M-16 fired at the first boy, and the older
boy fell over to protect the smaller one. Then they fired six
more shots. It was done very businesslike."


(December 5, 1969)

  Only a shadow of a doubt now remains that the massacre at My
Lai was an atrocity, barbaric in execution. Yet almost as
chilling to the American mind is the character of the alleged
perpetrators. The deed was not performed by patently demented
men. Instead, according to the ample testimony of their friends
and relatives, the men of C Company who swept through My Lai
were for the most part almost depressingly normal. They were
Everymen, decent in their daily lives, who at home in Ohio or
Vermont would regard it as unthinkable to maliciously strike a
child, much less kill one. Yet men in American uniforms
slaughtered the civilians of My Lai, and in so doing humiliated
the U.S. and called in question the U.S. mission in Vietnam in
a way that all the anitwar protesters could never have done.