A War of Angry Cousins

Dong Dang. Lang Son. Blunt yet musical Vietnamese place names, redolent of history, blood and death. At the railhead city of Dong Dang, a 30-ft. yellow gate marks Japan's invasion of Indochina in 1940, which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt's perhaps apocryphal vow that "we will not go to war over any damn Ding Dong." At Lang Son, a crowded market town nine miles to the southeast, a nipple-crested mountain that colonial troops named the "baroness's breast" overlooks the ruins of a fort demolished even before the Viet Minh's war against the French.

Last week Dong Dang and Lang Son had been turned into tormented battlegrounds again. In an escalating war between angry Communist neighbors and cultures that have been antagonistic for 2,000 years, three divisions of invading Chinese troops descended on Dong Dang and on the Vietnamese coastal plain to the east in giant pincers aimed at Lang Son. Battalions of the Vietnamese regular army hauling heavy weapons rushed north to meet them head-on and force a confrontation that could be the first major battle of the week-long war. In preparation, China threw three fresh divisions against forward Vietnamese defenses. At week's end Vietnamese forces launched a counterattack in three border provinces.

Meanwhile Soviet freighters at Haiphong were unloading resupplies of sophisticated hardware, including missiles and radar equipment. Soviet reconnaissance kept watch on the battlefronts with high-altitude sorties over the Gulf of Tonkin. A flotilla of 13 Soviet ships cruised the South China Sea, awaiting the arrival of the flagship of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, the 16,000-ton cruiser Admiral Senyavin.

In Moscow, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov assailed China's "dangerous provocation" and accused Peking of trying to "plunge the world into a war." The U.N.'s Security Council prepared to meet in urgent session, at Washington's request, to deal with the Chinese invasion as well as the earlier Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

China's assault on Viet Nam was expected and well advertised. Tensions had been building up ever since Hanoi's forced expulsion of ethnic Chinese last spring, Viet Nam's lightning rout of Peking's client regime in Cambodia last month, and an intensifying series of incidents on the China-Viet Nam border. Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing repeatedly and publicly telegraphed the punch during his U.S. visit this month, railing against the "hegemonistic" ambitions of the Soviet "polar bear" and against Vietnamese "aggression" in Southeast Asia. Hanoi "has to be taught a necessary lesson," he warned. In Tokyo on his way home, Teng again pointedly talked of "punitive action" against "those Cubans of the Orient."