A Half Step Toward Home

EVEN as the fighting in Viet Nam suddenly flared, the U.S. was completing its third—and largest—troop reduction since President Nixon took office 15 months ago. By next week some 115,500 fewer U.S. soldiers will be serving in Viet Nam than during the high point of the American commitment in early 1969, when the troop count reached 543,400. Like so much else about the Viet Nam War, the U.S. withdrawal is complex and at times confusing. On Pentagon recommendations, the military is cutting back on replacements rather than literally "bringing the boys home." Thus, to the Americans most interested in withdrawal—G.I.s already serving in Viet Nam—the whole process seems little more than a numbers game.

The special nature of the U.S. scale-down was evident last week at Di An, 11 miles northeast of Saigon. There, as a bugler sounded taps, an honor guard struck the colors of the U.S. Army's First Infantry Division, the famed "Big Red One." It had been the first full Army division to arrive in Viet Nam in 1965 and now, as part of the third-phase reduction, it was being shipped back to headquarters in Fort Riley, Kans. That did not mean, however, that its troops were going home. Only the 340-man honor guard, carrying the colors, left Viet Nam as First Infantry members. The large majority of the division's 17,000 men have been reassigned to vacancies in other outfits to complete their one-year stint in Viet Nam. The transfer process is more efficient than filling such vacancies from Stateside, of course, but it does not please the individual G.I.s. "Man, Nixon's just foolin' the people," said one disappointed trooper. "The division's goin' home, but all of us are stayin' right here, still humpin' it."

Disastrous Curve. As the Big Red One prepared to disband, TIME Correspondent Burton Pines observed the process. His report:

During the last few weeks, Division Commander Major General Albert E. Milloy, determined to carry out his primary mission of fighting until the last possible moment, ordered banners flown at every base urging his men to "Make Every Day Count." The troops had their own slogan: "Count Every Day."

The division's battlefield responsibilities, centered over an 880-sq.-mi. area north of Saigon in III Corps, were assumed largely by South Viet Nam's Fifth Division. Much of the Big Red One's equipment, including 27,000 weapons, 4,500 Jeeps and trucks and 500 artillery pieces, was handed over to the South Vietnamese and other U.S. units. As the pull-out date neared, nonessential supplies all but disappeared. The base PX ran out of everything but men's swim trunks. Two "massage" parlors and the Crossroads Bar just outside the main base, foreseeing a disastrous curve in the local business cycle, closed down.