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Lumbering low over Stone Age villages and thick jungles, troop-carrying helicopters swarmed across the wild central highlands of Viet Nam last week. On the ground, 10,000 South Vietnamese infantrymen and marines spread out over a vast, inhospitable sector south of Tamky where no government troops had set foot since 1938. In one of the biggest drives against the Communist Viet Cong since the guerrilla war broke out in 1959, South Viet Nam's government hoped to flush six Red battalions and a headquarters company from its longtime stronghold in the mountains. Main object of the month-long operation was to destroy Viet Cong food caches and cut the Reds' main supply line, the 400-mile Ho Chi Minh trail to North Viet Nam through neutral Laos. The Reds had plainly evacuated the area in advance, but Vietnamese officials explained that they did not aim to kill Viet Cong guerrillas, only to isolate them. If successful, said one, the sweep "wall solve 50% of our military problems in the central highlands." Not so, retorted some of the U.S. officers who were taking part. "It would take a whole U.S. Army division to block that trail," said one. The clash of opinion extends to virtually every aspect of the frustrating, wearisome war in South Viet Nam—and reflects its shadowy, hide-and-seek nature. It is a war with no front lines and no decisive battles; a war of containment, not of conquest; a war of Lilliputian pinpricks and Brobdingnagian stakes. It is a day war and a night war, in which the government controls most highways and waterways by daylight (though a U.S. lieutenant and two Vietnamese soldiers were killed in a daylight roadside ambush last week), and the Viet Cong slip in from jungles and swamps to take charge after dark. In the rugged north, it is a mountain war, in which the Reds are short of food, medicine, weapons, and largely on the defensive; in the south, it is a battle for the nation's rice granary, where the guerrillas have cunningly foiled every government attempt to clean them out. Turning the Corner. How is the war actually going? Measured against the desperate situation that faced General Maxwell Taylor on a fact-finding mission for the President 19 months ago, there is room for qualified optimism. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara returned from a conference with service chiefs in Pearl Harbor last week, the Pentagon said "the corner has definitely been turned toward victory." No one was setting any timetable, but U.S. military chiefs and South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem say that the war should be won "within three years." There are many soldiers in South Viet Nam who consider this wildly optimistic; some believe that the war may never be won. But almost everyone agrees that things have improved. Today there is little danger that the Viet Cong will take over any of South Viet Nam's cities. Captured Red documents indicate that they have given up hope of a swift conquest, now aim merely, as the guerrillas' North Vietnamese Boss Ho Chi Minh said recently, "to wait out the Americans." The South Vietnamese government and its 14,000 U.S. military "advisers" pin their hopes on an integrated, long-term plan that aims at isolating and driving out the Viet Cong. Basic element of the government's battle plan is to resettle almost the entire rural population in some 12,000 "strategic hamlets,"