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Supreme Confidence. Meanwhile, the mean, hard war went on. South Vietnamese casualties for last week were reported at 350, including 70 dead; the Viet Cong's at 400, including 300 dead. But for the fifth week, the Viet Cong captured more weapons than it lost.
One day last week a T-28 fighter-bomber flown by a U.S. Air Force captain and his Vietnamese crewman crashed on a dive-bombing run southwest of Danang, near the Laotian border. When two UH-34 Marine helicopters, carrying a search-and-rescue party, fluttered into the guerrilla-infested area, both choppers crashed. The craft lay 1,000 yds. apart, one in a river, the other across a ridge in the jungle; whether they were shot down was not clear. Braving heavy guerrilla fire that injured three more marines and killed another Vietnamese crewman, more rescuers reached the scene, found all twelve men aboard the helicopters dead, and recovered their bodies. The disaster brought to 118 the number of Americans killed in Viet Nam.
In his National Assembly address, Diem professed supreme confidence about the war. He claimed that of 11,864 projected strategic hamlets, 8,600 have already been built and 10.5 million peasants grouped in them. He implicitly conceded U.S. criticism that the hamlets may be being built too fast for best results, but he argued that there is no other way. In a warning to the U.S., which is trimming nonmilitary aid to Diem in an effort to pressure him into liberalizing his rule, Diem said that despite the Sino-Soviet split Red China is intensifying "its aggressive and expansionist policy in Asia."