IN its swift swings between lull and violence, hope and despair, the Viet Nam War has often had a manic character to it. Never more so than in the latest extraordinary episode in which, within the space of 40 days, the world moved from a sense of peace at last at hand, to the most brutal U.S. bombing of the war, to Washington's declaration late last week that the secret Paris peace talks would begin again on Jan. 8. Through Deputy Press Secretary Gerald Warren, President Nixon announced that he was halting the massive aerial punishment of North Viet Nam as suddenly—and with as little public explanation—as he had started it two weeks before. His spokesman said only that Nixon was acting because "it was clear that serious negotiations could be resumed."
Rarely if ever before had a major power so openly used overwhelming force to extract concessions at the conference table, or moved so swiftly from diplomacy to war and back; the episode almost evoked the end of the Thirty Years' War, when fighting and negotiating accompanied each other in a dizzying blur. The news of the bombing halt was as puzzling as it was welcome. Nixon had broken off the peace talks in anger at what he regarded as Hanoi's intransigence. He had sent the bombers north on a scale greater than any in the long war to force the North Vietnamese to bargain on his terms, and apparently it had worked—else why resume talking? Yet it was difficult to imagine Hanoi so obviously knuckling under to the U.S. spasm of bombardment, and a North Vietnamese spokesman in Paris put a different face on the event, saying: "Our position has always been that if the U.S. wished to solve the problem through serious negotiations, it should cease the acts of escalation and renounce the threat of force."
Those acts of escalation, embodied in daily waves of U.S. bombers aimed at Hanoi's heartland over a period of two weeks, had left the capital of North Viet Nam a stricken city, rapidly emptying of people, without electricity and in some places water, many of its streets and even whole quarters smashed and cratered by the ferocity of daily U.S. bombing raids. Once neat one-story houses lay flattened or lurched at odd angles, roofless and windowless. On one street, a young worker in a red helmet stared numbly into a pit that was once his home. In it lay children's shattered copybooks, a dead black hen, and a mosquito net still hanging on one end from an upright beam. On another street, relief crews tugged at the corpse of a dead nurse, buried under her blasted dispensary. An old man stood amid the ruins of his home, mechanically putting on his coat and taking it off as though the simple ritual might restore his past.
Children searched among the debris looking for parents, parents for children. At the Bach Mai hospital, patients were trundled piggyback from the smoldering rubble as the director ran frantically from one victim to another. The Bach Thai hospital for tuberculous patients was razed. The railroad station had been destroyed, the Gia Lam airport runways pocked. Stacks of coffins lay at street corners. Here and there on a wall, someone scrawled, "Nixon, you will pay this blood debt" and "We will avenge our compatriots massacred by the Americans."