In the midst of his speech on the Berlin crisis, President John F. Kennedy took time to remind his listeners that the West faced an equally dangerous Communist challenge 5,000 miles away on the other side of the world—in Southeast Asia, where, said the President, "the borders are less guarded, the enemy harder to find, and the dangers of Communism less apparent to those who have so little."
Every night furtive little bands of Communist guerrillas, dressed in black peasant pajamas or faded khakis, splash through the marshes of the Mekong Delta or dart silently along jungle paths of South Viet Nam, pursuing their intent, murderous missions. On the road from Banmethuot last week, one band melted into the shadows as two members of the National Assembly approached in their Jeep. Then, at a signal from their leader, they raised their ancient rifles, clubs and swords and pounced with bloodcurdling cries. Seconds later, the two assemblymen lay dead, and the grim struggle to keep the Communists from winning South Viet Nam had claimed two more victims.
Booby Traps & Bridges. It is an ugly, elusive war, fought with all the clever stunts in the guerrilla's handbook, not all of them deadly. Gangs disguised as official mosquito-spray teams walk into villages to confiscate farm equipment in the name of the government; sometimes they tear up peasants' identity cards to disrupt local administration; the Communists even managed to sabotage the national census by substituting falsified lists in some areas. The Viet Cong, which is what the Communist Vietnamese are called, are everywhere: tossing grenades into isolated villages in the rice fields in the south, sowing unrest among the border tribesmen in the thickly wooded Annamese highlands to the north. By day Saigon, a city of 2,000,000, is safe enough. But no one willingly sets his foot outside town after dark.
Fueled by Communist North Viet Nam with supplies and men smuggled through Laos over the clandestine Ho Chi Minh Trail, this wasting war has been going on for seven years. Its object is the destruction of South Viet Nam's stubby, stubborn President Ngo Dinh Diem, 60, who runs the war, the government, and everything else in South Viet Nam from a massive desk in his yellow stucco Freedom Palace in Saigon. President Diem had fought the Communists in his country long before World War II. At war's end, he was arrested by them; his brother was shot by them. He has stood in their way ever since.
As he is acutely aware, the current guerrilla war might get worse before it gets better. Unlike Berlin, where the crisis so far has been only words, South Viet Nam is the arena of East-West confrontation where men are dying in large numbers. The struggle is savage. Just since January the dead on both sides total 2,500—roughly triple the total casualties of all eleven months of fighting in Laos.