The War: Thunder from a Distant Hill

THE WAR

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Crawling out of his sandbagged bunker, the helmeted Marine blinks in the afternoon light, cocks his head for a moment, listening intently, and then starts jogtrotting down the hill. With frayed trousers flapping and a cumbersome flak jacket jiggling against his bare chest, he makes his way through the debris of cartridge boxes and C-ration cans. Deep, viscous red mud sucks at his boots and oozes up to his knees as he struggles down the slope. Suddenly, from high above, comes a familiar, chilling whine. "Incoming!" someone yells, and the leatherneck flattens himself in the mud. The artillery shell bursts 50 yards from him, gouging out a small crater through the slime. A breeze wafts away the cloud of smoke and detritus, the rifleman listens for a moment and then stands up. "Man!" he exclaims, scraping mud from his caked body. "This just must be the worst place in the world."

It is Con Thien, South Viet Nam, in the autumn of 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 Viet Nams, 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.

Dangerous Detonations. In the U.S., 10,000 miles away, Con Thien dramatized all the cumulative frustrations of the painful war. A long-rising surge of doubt about Viet Nam was intensified for Americans as the bloody, muddy ordeal of Con Thien flickered across the TV screen. With total U.S. casualties nearing 100,000 since 1961, with the war's cost running at $24 billion a year and with rumors circulating on Capitol Hill that Lyndon Johnson may need $4 billion more before the end of 1967, there was a measurable increase in American unease and impatience.

Most pressing reasons for disquiet:

> Rightly or wrongly, most Americans believe that the bombing of the North, which has drawn pungent worldwide criticism, has fallen far short of its objectives, whether to crimp the Communist war effort or to bring Hanoi to the negotiating table.

> The Administration's preoccupation with the war has seriously distracted its attention from crucial domestic issues, chilled relations with many of its allies, and diminished the prospects for any realistic rapprochement with Russia.

> While the war is hardly beyond the means of the world's wealthiest nation, many Americans are beginning to begrudge such vast expenditures as disproportionate to the results.

> Though geographically remote and relatively small, the Viet Nam conflict has divided and disconcerted the nation more than any other single issue since the pre-Pearl Harbor debate over U.S.