LONDON JOHNSON stated the major question of the day. "I would hope," he said at his press conference last week, "that the adversary would see the utter futility of continuing this confrontation and would agree to go from the battlefield to the conference room . . . They refuse to do that. Now I don't know why."
Many Western military and political observers wonder why the Vietnamese Communists are not getting ready to negotiate. They should realize by now that they cannot win the war, cannot drive out the U.S., and are bogged down in considerable trouble besides.
It was just a year ago that the Communist command resolved to test the newly landed U.S. troops. The result was the siege of Plei Me and the ensuing battle of la Drang Valley, which were resounding defeats for the Reds. Historian Bernard Fall suggested recently that these defeats may well be considered by future historians "the First Battle of the Marne of the Vietnamese War," recollecting that "the Battle of the Marne in September 1914 halted the seemingly irresistible onslaught of the Kaiser and thus foreclosed the possibility of an immediate end of the war through the collapse of the French."
Their Troubles
The Communists have never regained the momentum that they possessed before the U.S. arrived in force, nor is there any longer serious talk of South Viet Nam's once imminent political collapse. In the past year, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops have achieved not a single victory worth writing home to Hanoi about, while the Communist homeland absorbs an ever-increasing rain of American bombs. U.S. manpower and firepower poured into the conflict since the summer of 1965 have made the Allies largely master of the battlefield.
The enemy's plans for a major monsoon offensive in the Central Highlands last summer were aborted by such U.S. spoiling operations as Paul Revere and Hawthorne. Operation El Paso broke up an attempted Communist onslaught along the central coast. Most recently, Hanoi began massing for an invasion straight south across the demilitarized zone: some 8,800 U.S. Marines and four battalions of South Vietnamese troops are now in place to prevent it. Hanoi covets a victory over some isolated American unit for its psychological and propaganda value, but this hope has proved elusive. Already this year, the Communists have suffered 48,000 men killed in combat, probably twice that many wounded, some 8,000 captured and 10,000 defected.