South Viet Nam: Disappearing Act

After a fortnight's heavy fighting in the jungles of Tay Ninh 65 miles northwest of Saigon, the enemy last week pulled his oft-employed disappearing act and was virtually nowhere to be found. The 16,000 men of Operation Attleboro, largest of the war, continued the hunt, aided by daily strikes at suspected base camps and depots by Guam-based B-52 bombers and fighter-bomber sorties that passed the 1,000 level. Attleboro continued to turn up Red rice in huge quantities, by last week had garnered a record 2,366 tons, could claim over 1,000 soldiers of the Viet Cong 9th Division and the North Vietnamese 101st Regiment killed in the intensive month-long campaign.

Outgunned in open combat, the Viet Cong reverted to type, mortaring a number of isolated outposts and headquarters. For the second time in three weeks, guerrillas hit the Long Binh ammunition dump 13 miles north of Saigon. Under cover of mortar fire, Viet Cong penetrated the depot's perimeter, detonated a satchel charge against one ammunition pad, setting it afire. What makes Long Binh easy to attack—and difficult to damage seriously—is that each revetted pad is separated widely from all the others to prevent a chain reaction of explosions if one goes up. Red terrorists also set off a bomb in a utility shed only 200 yards from the Danang beach bungalow of Marine Commander Lieut. General Lewis W. Walt. The general was unharmed.

For six weeks, some 11,000 of Walt's Marines, together with two battalions of South Vietnamese soldiers, have been keeping watch on the Demilitarized Zone, where several North Vietnamese regiments were once readying to cross to the South. The North Vietnamese now seem to have lost all desire to face the Marines. But a Hanoi battalion caught an outnumbered company of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division in the rugged central highlands 18 miles from the Cambodian border and inflicted "heavy" casualties in a 90-minute fire fight.

Last week Saigon released battle figures for the previous week of heavy action. They indicated the Communists had lost 1,525 men, compared with U.S. deaths of 126 and South Vietnamese dead of 237. Heartening though the Allied performance was in relative terms, it brought to 5,949 the total number of American dead in the war —meaning that somewhere last week, in the pursuit of the elusive enemy, the 6,000th American fell in Viet Nam.