The War: One-Way Traffic on a Two-Way Street

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Long-Term Confrontation. Few military men expect Hanoi to launch a full-scale invasion across the DMZ—though Sharp says: "I just hope they do. Then we can use our firepower." But most experts foresee a bitter, long-term confrontation in I Corps, where the Communists' supply lines and infiltration routes are shortest. For that reason, the U.S. has airlifted nearly a full Army division into the area, while the South Vietnamese have rushed in three elite battalions to augment the thinly stretched forces on the spot—Lieut. General Lewis Walt's 75,000 U.S. Marines, two understrength South Vietnamese army divisions and three Korean battalions.

As a result, American strength is being thinned out elsewhere and some top-echelon planners believe that a total of 600,000 Americans will now be needed in Viet Nam instead of the 475,000 planned for the end of 1967. This week General William Westmoreland and his top Saigon manpower experts are to discuss in Washington the subject of ground reinforcements.

Mini-Maginot. To prepare for a major Communist offensive in I Corps, Allied engineers last week were bulldozing a 220-yd.-wide "death zone" across the Quang Tri plain, some two miles south of the DMZ. The project, brainchild of South Vietnamese Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, is reminiscent of the two 20-ft.-high walls built just north of the 17th parallel by the Nguyen dynasty in the 1630s in a vain effort to discourage invaders from the north.

Ultimately "the Obstacle," as military men call it, will stretch from the foothills of the Annamese Cordillera, the spiny range that bisects I Corns, to the South China Sea—a twelve-mile corrdor bristling with barbed wire, minefields, sensing devices, pillboxes and watchtowers. Its function will be to provide a wide field of fire in case of attack, but U.S. officers privately scorn it as a kind of mini-Maginot Line that will cost far more than it is worth. For one thing, V.C. mortars are zeroed in on the zone and have already killed four men and wounded 62. For another, the corridor will stop before it reaches the mountains —which is precisely where the Communist infiltration routes begin.

To defuse the dangerous situation, Secretary of State Dean Rusk suggested that both sides pull back ten miles from the six-mile-wide DMZ, creating a 26-mile neutral belt that would be policed by an international commission. Rusk's sensitivity to charges of escalation may well have prompted the plan; with the U.S. strengthening its forces in the area, he wanted to be on record with an offer to start talking before the U.S. starts shooting. Predictably, Hanoi thumbed down the proposal as "a trick."

In the face of such intransigence, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization's Council of Ministers ended a three-day meeting in Washington last week with a demand for "reciprocity" from the North in exchange for any Allied reduction in the fighting. But the prospects that Hanoi will accept a mutual step-down are as remote as ever. "We can't get the other side even to whisper to us behind the hand," complained Rusk.