With the enemy literally at the gates, Saigon last week seemed to be in a state of schizophrenia—and in both phases seemed equally mad. With their inbred fatalism and stoicism, the 3 million residents of the old French colonial capital fought, often in vain, against a rising sense of terror. The result, as TIME Correspondents Roy Rowan and William McWhirter cabled from Saigon, was a strange blend of serenity and fear in the aloof and careless city that had so largely been spared the shock of war.
At times the city's main thoroughfares looked...