INDOCHINA: The Invasion Ends

(2 of 2)

When the North Vietnamese pounced on ARVN troops at Lolo and Brown, two fire bases near Tchepone, South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu balked. Already 1,000 Marines had been sent in to beef up the bloodied Lam Son forces. General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker drove to the presidential palace to urge that several thousand troops already waiting at helicopter pads on the border be sent in to keep the operation going for a few more weeks. Thieu, who was openly jeered at a Saigon military funeral last week, refused.

"As a general," one Washington official said last week, "Thieu saw that his troops, with reinforcements readied, could have held their own. As a politician, he was concerned about the effect back home of the possible high casualties." The losses were numbingly high. Officially, Saigon admits to 25% casualties: 1,147 killed, 246 missing, 4,237 wounded. Unofficially, U.S. and South Vietnamese sources put the toll at closer to 50% of the original 22,000-man force—with 3,000 dead or missing, 7,000 wounded. The official (and probably inflated) estimate of North Vietnamese killed is 13,688. The U.S. toll included helicopter pilots and crewmen: 66 dead, 28 missing, 83 wounded, 94 helicopters destroyed.

Defensive Look. Unquestionably, Communist activity in Cambodia trailed off after Lam Son began, and the operation may well have bollixed future enemy plans for South Viet Nam. But Washington "experts" were still divided over the basic question: What plans? At a White House post-mortem called by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the military intelligence men hewed to the original line—that Hanoi had been pumping troops and supplies down the trail for use in a major offensive either in 1971 or 1972. But their civilian counterparts hotly disagreed, maintaining that the vaunted buildup on the trail was aimed precisely at an allied invasion. One high civilian "spook" said that North Vietnamese intelligence "was a lot better than ours. They knew what was coming and they were ready."

In any case, there was no denying that the allies came out looking decidedly on the defensive, and the recriminations have already begun in Washington and Saigon. And even though Lam Son ended more in a hasty retreat than a disorderly rout, last week's banner headlines declaring COMPLETE VICTORY were in Hanoi's newspapers, not Saigon's.