(10 of 10)
Hit him the Airborne did. In five days of bloody battle, U.S. fighter-bombers flew hundreds of sorties on the North Vietnamese L-shaped bunkers and tunnels dug into a hill covered with bamboo thicket. B-52 bombers hit the Red supply areas ten miles behind their redoubt, and the Airborne's artillery and mortars laid a curtain of steel down the hillside. Some U.S. units were hit hard by Giap's "human wave" mass attack: Company Commander William Carpenter (see THE NATION) heroically called down napalm strikes on his own position when Communist troops overran it. But at week's end the Airborne and Vietnamese forces had killed an estimated 700 North Vietnamese.
They may well have killed more than men, breaking up the rehearsal for one of the Red Napoleon's coveted set-piece strikes. If so, as is happening with increasing regularity to Giap's best-laid plans, another timetable must be destroyed, and all the meticulous, delicate structure of insurgency tactics be reassembled. It is General Vo Nguyen Giap's own aphorism that he may only attack when success is certain. Even more than his rice and his bullets, that certitude is in scarce supply in the new war the men from the North must endure in South Viet Nam.