FOR days, the biggest force assembled in South Viet Nam since Richard Nixon fell heir to the war was poised on the rugged Laotian frontier. When the signal came from Washington early last week, hundreds of American helicopters lifted into the dust-choked sky at Khe Sanh, then darted off to landing zones, where South Vietnamese troops awaited them. At the same time, South Vietnamese tanks and armored personnel carriers rumbled westward on Route 9 and thrust across the border into the jungles of Laos. A new and possibly perilous phase was beginning in the long struggle for Indochina.
The Laos invasion may have been widely advertised, but no effort was spared to give it a soft-sell atmosphere. The announcement came not from Washington but from South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. The American code name for the operation, Dewey Canyon II. was replaced by a Vietnamese name: Lam Son 719.* The switch was part of the coy effort to cast the invasion as an all-South Vietnamese effort, though it was initiated, planned and given the go-ahead in the White House, and was overseen by General Creighton W. Abrams. U.S. commander in South Viet Nam. The shift in code names also underscored the extent to which Indochina's long war has changed. As French Journalist and Guerrilla Historian Jean Larteguy (The Centurions) put it last week: "First you had Asians fighting the French. Then you had Asians fighting the Americans. Now you have Asians fighting Asians." That is increasingly the case, though there are still 335,000 Americans in South Viet Nam.
Lam Son's initial objective was Tchepone, a small town 25 miles inside Laos (see map, page 26). Tchepone sits astride Route 9. where the Communist infiltration routes from North Viet Nam converge before fanning out again into South Viet Nam and Cambodia. From Tchepone, a large ARVN force could be ferried out for attacks on surrounding Communist facilities such as Base Area 604.
The ARVN advance was almost glacial —slowed by twisting terrain, mud that sucked at tank treads, and fears of rushing headlong into what Vice Premier Nguyen Cao Ky described last week as "our Dien Bien Phu." Instead of a lightning strike, the ARVN invasion commander, Lieut. General Hoang Xuan Lam, employed a cautious leapfrogging technique designed to keep his troops within range of friendly artillery.
Getting Kicked. The ARVN troops had every reason to move carefully. In all, there are some 30,000 North Vietnamese troops in the southern Laotian panhandle—more than enough to make life unpleasant for 14,000 ARVN troops that have been sent in. TIME'S Saigon bureau chief, Jonathan Larsen, followed part of the advance in an ARVN helicopter. "Weaving this way and that to avoid possible enemy fire," Larsen reported, "we swept past American fire bases and ARVN armored units, whirring over a repaired Route 9 and the beautiful Pone River, which marks the border. After ten or 15 minutes in the air, we hovered down in the middle of an expanse of brushwood alongside Route 9. Several ARVN troopers were having their midday dish of rice under the shade of a tank. One of them gestured at the ground and smiled: 'Laos.' "