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It was clear that ARVN was finding the going tough. Newsmen saw enough truckloads of ARVN corpses returning from Laos for them to discount official totals of 31 killed and 113 wounded in the first six days. One American Cobra gunship pilot at Khe Sanh said flatly of the South Vietnamese: "They're getting their asses kicked!" That also seemed to apply to South Vietnamese and American flyers, who were encountering some of the most savage antiaircraft fire of the war (see box).
Reporters also saw some American bodies being brought back from Laos. Was somebody fudging on the congressional curbs on the use of ground troops outside South Viet Nam? White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler insisted that the reports probably involved
Special Forces intelligence teams that have operated in Laos for years. Still, the impression remained that some American advisers had crossed the border.
The early returns from Lam Son seemed favorable enough. By week's end, Saigon was claiming a total of 269 Communists killed, as against only 36 dead and 239 wounded on the allied side. Far to the south in Cambodia, where some 18,000 troops have been digging out new enemy sanctuaries for two weeks, the South Vietnamese claimed to have killed 491 Communists (v. 74 ARVN and Cambodian government dead) in a series of battles that included sharp fighting amid the rubber trees of the Chup Plantation, 35 miles inside Cambodian territory.
The Administration refuses to gauge Lam Son's success by the yardstick of captured enemy supplies. "We won't be able to show rice and bullets in this operation," says a White House adviser. "You'll have to judge it by what doesn't happen." What the White House is eager to prevent is: 1) a 1971 offensive aimed at upsetting Thieu's chances in October's presidential elections, and 2) a Tet-style explosion in 1972, when the Saigon government will not be able to call on U.S. ground-combat forces and Richard Nixon will be facing an election of his own.
How will the Communists respond? U.S. analysts see five possibilities:
INFILTRATE small guerrilla units that could create havoc behind the ARVN advance. Last week an ARVN Marine contingent was pulled back from the Route 9 advance and reassigned to security duty along the wide-open border.
SIT BACK AND WAIT for weak points to develop. Some of the Communist troops on the trail seemed to be drawing back from Route 9 with just that in mind.
CROSS THE DMZ into South Viet Nam. To discourage the three North Vietnamese divisions above the demilitarized zone from trying a counterinvasion, a U.S. Naval task force carrying 1,500 Marines was dispatched to the waters off the DMZ, and two ARVN divisions were rushed to Dong Ha.
HARASS CAMBODIA to create a diversion. The Communists never followed up their raid on Phnom-Penh's airport, however, which suggests that they may be short of supplies. Though hard-working Premier Lon Nol suffered a mild stroke last week and was flown to Hawaii for what may be a long recuperation, his idealistic "government of salvation" has achieved a strong following.