(See Cover)
Strike to win, strike only when success is certain;
if it is not, then don't strike.
—General Vo Nguyen Giap
The tangled jungle scrub of Cu Chi lies only 20 miles northwest of Saigon. For nearly two decades it has been the impregnable preserve of the Viet Cong —until one bright sunny morning when unexpected guests arrive. They are some 80 Armored Personnel Carriers of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division. Crashing through thickets, the APCs weave and crisscross, stitching the jungle with lethal, preplotted patterns of .50-cal. and M60 machine-gun fire. Grudgingly the Viet Cong give way, firing back carefully to conserve their slender hoard of ammunition.
The American attackers know no such frugality of fire. The APCs grind to a halt; there is a rumble from the rear; and volley after volley of 105-mm. shells whispers overhead to crash down among the enemy in an endless, earthshaking, invisible whiplash of steel. Then the U.S. warplanes arrive, diving just ahead of the APCs to rend the forest with their 20-mm. cannon and 2.75 rockets. The APCs move forward into the smoke, are stopped again by a pocket of fire. The U.S. commander barks into his radio. In response, five miles away a battery of huge 175-mm. guns elevates slowly, and systematically begins to destroy the remnant of resistance.
The APCs churn forward once more. In their wake comes a line of bulldozers. They level anything still standing. What was once a good-size jungle becomes a desert piled with brush. Occasionally, there is an enormous explosion as "the tunnel rats," having excavated a Viet Cong burrow, blow it up. When it is all over, only the stench of cordite mingling with Cu Chi's grey dust and the drifting blue smoke of bombs lingers over the desolation. Cu Chi will not soon harbor Viet Cong again, at least by day.
The Big Rear. Operation Kahuku, which cleared Cu Chi, was but one of some 60 major Allied search-and-destroy missions in the last 100 days. While the headlines were filled with South Viet Nam's Buddhist-fueled political crisis, the Allies, running an average of 15 battalion-size-or-larger operations each week, have been methodically hunting down the enemy. From north of Hue to south of Saigon, from the Cambodian border in the Central Highlands to Binh Dinh on the South China Sea, spearheaded by the armor and artillery and airpower of the U.S., the Allies have been hitting the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese reinforcements where they live (see map), seizing enemy stockpiles of rice and salt and weapons. Even in the enemy redoubts where ground forces have not yet penetrated, the threat of the bombs from high-flying Guam-based B-52s, falling like rain from a silent sky, haunts the Communists' sleep, keeps them on the move.