The World: Indochina: A Cavalryman's Way Out

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SUDDENLY, the Vietnamese ground war came back to life.

For three years, the northwest corner of South Viet Nam had been a misty, mountainous no man's land. Khe Sanh, where 6,000 Marines had endured a bloody 77-day siege in 1968, was a moonscape of shell craters flecked by twisted steel runway sheets and discarded shell casings. A few miles to the south, the Rockpile was overrun by weeds. On a bluff overlooking the Laotian border, the hulks of battered Soviet tanks still lay rusting at the Lang Vei Special Forces camp, where ten Americans and 225 South Vietnamese died in a single night of hand-to-hand combat.

Last week the forbidding ruins, relics of an earlier and rougher stage in the war, were abruptly jolted from their silence. From jumping-off points 50 miles away, long columns of tanks, trucks and armored personnel carriers ground into the rugged western reaches of Quang Tri province, raising towering columns of dust. Overhead, gunships darted around in search of enemy troops. Giant Chinook helicopters flapped into long-abandoned bases, depositing men and massive earth-moving machines. At Lang Vei, a halftrack pulled up loaded with expectant-looking G.I.s. One soldier had a single word painted on his helmet: "Laos?"

Good question. All week, rumors of an invasion coursed through the world's major capitals, and frenzied speculation focused on what the U.S. was up to. By keeping everyone guessing—including the Communists—the Administration infuriated more than a few Congressmen, diplomats and newsmen. But it also pulled off a kind of psychological-warfare coup.

Ten months ago, Richard Nixon took the world by surprise when, pointer in hand, he went on nationwide TV to disclose, in too apocalyptic terms, the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Last week he said nothing at all about the vast operation under way in Military Region I, South Viet Nam's northernmost war area. When a six-day "embargo" on news from the area was lifted, more than 50,000 U.S. and South Vietnamese troops were involved in strikes that not only spanned the length of South Viet Nam but vitally affected its neighbors as well. Was the main object to sever the famed Ho Chi Minh Trail? Was it a feint to throw the Communists off balance? Was an invasion scheduled and then delayed because Nixon developed a case of cold feet—as some sources suggested but the Administration denied? Whatever the case, the operation suggested that in the process of retreating from South Viet Nam, the U.S. was churning up all of Indochina even more thoroughly than it did when the big American buildup began half a decade ago.

Pulling Up Short

By week's end, three separate operations had unfolded. In the coastal provinces on the Gulf of Siam, ARVN (for Army of the Republic of Viet Nam) troops prepared to slice into new infiltration routes that the Communists had been trying to extend from the Cambodian seaport of Kep into the southern part of South Viet Nam. Northwest of Saigon in Tay Ninh province, 18,000 ARVN armored cavalrymen surged over the border into the Parrot's Beak and the Fishhook. Both sanctuaries were cleared out last spring, but now Communist troops were beginning to drift back.