The War: Thunder from a Distant Hill

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Shock Value. Thus the Marines feel that they have already stood and taken practically the hardest punch that North Viet Nam can throw at them until the monsoon ends next April. All the same, military men express considerable doubt about the concept of static defense embodied in Con Thien. Some would prefer to see the Marines make more forays to spike any Communist guns below the North Viet Nam border—as the Israelis did with the Syrian artillery atop the Golan Heights. U.S. military doctrine holds that a force assumes a defensive position only when it is not strong enough to take the offensive, wants to use its main strength for an assault elsewhere, or is stalling for time. None of these arguments seems to apply to Con Thien. Still, a civilian specialist notes that the "setpiece assault" is causing the North "a tremendous effort, tying up a tremendous amount of manpower and transport at terrible cost." Why, then, do the Communists concentrate on Con Thien?

Their objective is political, says the specialist. It is to inflict "the maximum number of American casualties within the shortest time period. They are banking on the shock value to merge with uninformed opinion in the U.S. to put pressure on the Johnson Administration to get out of Viet Nam." In purely military terms, of course, Hanoi's objective is to pin down the greatest possible number of American troops in the defensive position most favorable to the North Vietnamese, thus markedly reducing U.S. pressure on the Communist forces operating in the rest of I Corps.

Out of the Shell. As yet, most Americans are not persuaded that the U.S. should simply write off this vast investment in Viet Nam. Many other Western nations are convinced that there is no other course. At the United Nations, Denmark, Sweden, Indonesia and, naturally, Charles de Gaulle's France called on Washington to unconditionally end its bombing of the North. Explicitly or implicitly, their ambassadors condemned the war in toto.

Secretary-General U Thant made no secret of his feeling that the U.S. was being unreasonable. To which Secretary of State Dean Rusk—as near to exasperation as he ever gets—retorted: "If we were to say that we would negotiate only if all of the violence in South Viet Nam were stopped while we continue to bomb the North, most people would say that we were crazy. When the other side makes exactly the same proposition in reverse, it is hard for me to understand why there are people who say, That sounds like a good proposition. Why don't you accept it?''

Rusk won some sympathy for his plight from Japan's Premier Eisaku Sato. During an Asian tour designed to bring his country a little farther out of the diplomatic tortoise shell into which it retreated after World War II, Sato declared: "If there is any suspension of the bombing, there should be a firm assurance that this would lead to an eventual settlement." In this, he echoed the privately held, if rarely voiced view held by practically every Asian leader.

"Tougher than I Am." Washington officials are convinced that Ho Chi Minh wants no negotiations with the U.S. until after the 1968 elections, hoping that with a change in administrations he might achieve victory. Johnson has warned that "my successor will be a lot