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<text> <title> (1960s) Vietnam:1966-1969 </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1960s Highlights </history> <link 11487> <link 11908> <link 11912> <link 15358><link 15361><link 15362><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Vietnam:1966-1969 </hdr> <body> [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 week's end, with initial damage and casualties light, it was still unclear whether the 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 antiwar protesters could never have done. </body> </article> </text>