World: SOUTH VIET NAM

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It is often impossible to tell who is winning, but there is no end in sight to a decade of fighting

Back to Saigon this week, for the second time in three months, goes U.S. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. His aim: to size up South Viet Nam's new regime, which was helped to power by the U.S. on the theory that it would fight the war more effectively than the murdered President Diem, but which, so far at least, has provided disappointing leadership. The war is still showing alarming drift, and the Communist guerrillas have shown signs of getting bolder. Last week TIME Correspondent Murray Gart, to get his own look at the war, flew on 26 helicopter missions in five days (three of his choppers were hit by gunfire), came away with the story of a plan for stepped-up aerial strikes against the Reds and some grim impressions of the fighting in general. Cart's report:

AT Saigon airport before dawn, a swarm of helicopters sputtered to life, their whirling blades churning up misty contrails in the cool, damp air. Soon a formation of 13 "Hueys" (UH-1Bs) was airborne and droning away at 2,000 ft. Below, the light of day broke over the Mekong Delta, turning rivers and canals into silvery ribbons among the green paddyfields. Inside the choppers, men long hardened to possible death carefully crushed out their after-breakfast cigarettes.

A mere fifteen minutes out of Saigon and directly south of the capital, the three lead Hueys, bristling with rockets and machine guns, buzzed the target area; they hedge-hopped lines of foliage, hovered over huts, scrutinized the paddyfields. "Negative contact," U.S. Pilot Captain Dennis Boyle radioed to the main force, meaning no ground fire. The rest of the fleet fluttered into the zone, and while armed craft circled protectively, five "skinned" (unarmed) Hueys alighted in a clearing and disgorged 70 Vietnamese troops.

The soldiers swept through a village, rounding up peasants suspected of being guerrillas; some of the men had been found crouching together, unable to explain why they were not out in the fields working. One offered a soldier 1,000 piasters ($13.60) to set him free; the soldier gladly accepted the payoff, then tagged the captive with a white scarf identifying him as a probable Viet Cong. Shirts were stripped from backs to check for the guerrilla's telltale marks of pack straps. Forty-five minutes later, the helicopters were headed back to Saigon with a haul of 14 prisoners.

Replacing Terror. The operation, called an "eagle strike," is a tactic by which the new government and its U.S. advisers hope to add speed and initiative to anti-guerrilla operations. Though such strikes have long been used in Viet Nam for missions big and small, the program now being launched aims to carry out small-scale, search-and-seize missions as never before, especially in the heavily infiltrated delta. For the first time the U.S. Utility Tactical Transport Company based at Saigon airport has been assigned "eagle strikes" as a permanent duty.

A U.S. major describes the operation as "a reconnaissance force always seeking out the enemy, striking only when contact is made or intelligence is good enough to make a landing worthwhile. Also, it is carried out by a small force, not one that requires the movement of dozens of craft and battalions of men."