Foreign Relations: Bigger & Uglier

Asleep in a scramble tent at the south end of the 10,000-ft. Danang airbase runway, U.S. Air Force Major George V. Moore of McCook, Neb., was rudely awakened at 1:25 a.m. "Suddenly there were explosions going off all around me," he said later. "I was knocked out of my bed and against the side of the tent."

Near by, Pfc. Bruce Devert, 19, of Los Altos, Calif., one of 9,000 U.S. Marines assigned to guard the Danang airbase, which is the major staging center for the U.S. aerial bombardment of North Viet Nam, found himself "in a dark vacuum with the whole world made up of flashing noises and explosions."

This was the start of a Viet Cong raid against Danang last week. Under heavy-mortar-fire cover, the raiders stole out of a graveyard toward a sector of the base perimeter patrolled by South Vietnamese troops. The guerrillas snipped one barbed-wire fence, stepped through a dozen holes cut in another fence by defensive troops to facilitate their own movements, and let go with a barrage of grenades, satchel charges and recoilless rifle fire. The Reds ran into no outer guards, were on Danang's runway before they met their first challenger. Carrying coffee to a guard on duty down the line, a U.S. Air Force enlisted man spotted the raiders, emptied his pistol at them — and was cut down by a burst of sub machine gun fire. He was the only American killed.

Before they fled under a hail of Marine mortar and small-arms fire within minutes after they had come, the raiders destroyed one Delta Dagger jet and two four-engine C-130 Hercules transports and damaged two Delta Daggers and one Hercules. Estimated total cost: $5,000,000. The Viet Cong left behind them trails of blood indicating that several had been wounded. One was captured, turned out to be a North Vietnamese soldier named Do Xuan Hien, 29, who under questioning said that he had infiltrated into South Viet Nam three months ago with his entire battalion and had trained for the Danang raid for a month.

In the Danang raid, as in many other ways, that "ugly little war" in Viet Nam last week got uglier — and bigger.

>At Soctrang, 100 miles south of Saigon, Communists lobbed 17 mortar shells onto a U.S. helicopter base, damaging seven choppers.

>Near Chu Lai, 320 miles northeast of Saigon, four U.S. Marines were killed and four others wounded in a clash with the Viet Cong.

>In Kontum province in the monsoon-drenched central highlands, where a major Red offensive may be shaping up, the Communists took over the district capital of Tou Morong; heeding the advice of U.S. officers, who feared that rescue troops might fall into an ambush, the South Vietnamese government temporarily abandoned any attempt to recapture the town.

> In the Mekong Delta 35 miles south of Saigon, South Vietnamese troops overran the Communist-held village of Tan Hiep, surprised and killed seven Viet Cong provincial officials in the midst of a meeting; the dead included the Reds' Dinh Tuong province chief and the political commissar of the Viet Cong's 261st Battalion. Later in the same operation, air-supported South Vietnamese soldiers killed an estimated 255 Viet Cong, whose unit had been spotted along a canal.