Word: saigon
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...truth appears to be that the South Vietnamese disrupted the supply routes for as long as the North Vietnamese allowed them to do so, and no longer. Once the North Vietnamese counterattacks began in earnest this month, the Saigon troops were quickly forced to retreat to the relative safety of South Vietnam. Even Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird had to admit Wednesday that the South Vietnamese had been forced to cut short their invasion because of North Vietnamese resistance, which he curiously described as "vicious and violent...
Under Vietnamization, as I. F. Stone noted recently, the idea is that the little yellow fellows fight it out down on the ground while American bombers and helicopters fly overhead and guarantee victory for our side. The Saigon troops suffer all the casualties, American troops can keep dribbling home, and the U. S. antiwar movement is reduced to an handful of hardcore moralists, too weak to pose much of a threat to the Administration. Such a policy can theoretically be extended forever...
...everything depends on getting the Vietnamese to fight each other with the same enthusiasm that Americans once fought the Vietnamese. And the Laos campaign, which tested the very best troops that the Saigon regime could muster, has demonstrated that the Saigon troops just can't or won't fight effectively. Thus the whole Vietnamization strategy may be disintegrating. The U. S. Command in Saigon evidently thinks so: its revelation of yesterday's disastrous casualty figures appears to have been intended to created pressure on Nixon to slow the withdrawal of U. S. troops from Vietnam...
...administration is too deeply committed to continuing the withdrawals, and so other "solutions" will have to be found. As in the past, these solutions will probably add up to more bombing of North Vietnam. As the remnants of the Saigon invasion force retreated back to the border this week U. S. planes were already staging the heaviest air raids over North Vietnam since last November. And now that North Vietnamese long-range artillery is reportedly moving into position in the Demilitarized Zone near the U. S. base at Khe Sanh, Nixon has another pretext for resumed air raids...
...relocation campaign, called "Gathering the People" by Region II Commanding General Ngo Dzu, has been opposed from the start by some U. S. officials in Saigon and in the field who fear that concentrating thousands of Montagnards near main roads threatens the economic self-sufficiency of Montagnard communities...