South Viet Nam: Province in Trouble

All last week giant C-130 transports roared in to land on the Chu Lai airstrip, sandblasting with their exhausts the watching U.S. Marines whose exclusive domain Chu Lai base had been for nearly two years. In the largest reinforcement within Viet Nam since the war began. Army infantrymen streamed out of the planes at the rate of over 1,000 per day. By the end of the week, the entire 196th Light Infantry Brigade, some 4,000 strong and fresh from the jungles of Tay Ninh near Saigon, was in Chu Lai; more G.I.s were on their way. Their mission: to take over the security of Chu Lai and its environs while the Marines of Lieut. General Lewis Walt, who commands Viet Nam's five northernmost provinces, move northward to protect what has become one of the Viet Nam war's most contested areas.

The I Corps (called "eye" corps) is the most nettlesome of South Viet Nam's four tactical combat zones. The closest to North Viet Nam, it has always been easiest for Hanoi to infiltrate, keep supplied—and influence. Its citizens are chiefly Annamese; they once ruled Viet Nam from Hue, were among the earliest supporters of the Viet Minh against the French and make a fetish of xenophobia. The Imperial City of Hué is Viet Nam's capital of discontent. Despite the efforts of Walt's 73,000 Marines, much of I Corps remains pro-Viet Cong, and in recent months the situation has markedly deteriorated.

Defensive Perimeter. Nowhere has it worsened more than in Quang Tri province, which abuts on the Demilitarized Zone. Hanoi has put three divisions of North Vietnamese regulars (some 35,000 men) into Quang Tri. Together with the local Viet Cong, in the last six months they have made nearly all the roads of the province too dangerous for travel. A Shau, in Western Quang Tri, the Special Forces camp that the Communists overran last March, is being transformed with bulldozers into a major Red base. Only last summer, 10,000 Marines had to be rushed to Quang Tri to fend off a threatened invasion directly across the DMZ.

In the last two weeks. Hanoi has given every indication of attempting another major offensive. Coolly giving radio warning in advance to the citizens of Quang Tri city (pop. 20,000), some 1,500 Communist troops swept into the city under cover of darkness, occupying parts of it for several hours. They destroyed equipment, from trucks to light planes, killed an estimated 300 South Vietnamese troops and ten Americans, and freed 250 Viet Cong prisoners from the provincial jailhouse. No major U.S. units were defending the city, but last week a battalion of U.S. Marines, supported by two batteries of Army 105mm. howitzers, moved in to set up a defensive perimeter around frightened Quang Tri.

House to House. The Communists have never managed to take over a provincial capital, and their success in Quang Tri would be a heavy psychological blow that would reverberate throughout South Viet Nam. The presence of the civilian population would preclude the use of U.S. air and artillery, making the city's recapture a difficult and probably bloody operation of house-to-house fighting more akin to World War II than to the Viet Nam conflict. In a series of attacks last week, the Communists acted very much as if Quang Tri's isolation, if not its capture, was their goal.