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By early last week, when he visited the embattled city, TIME Photographer Dirck Halstead found little left to fight over. "Virtually every building was in ruins," Halstead reported later. "Blackened bodies of North Vietnamese soldiers littered the streets, where heavy house-to-house fighting had obviously taken place not long before. Except for the troops, the town was empty of its 38,000 people." The ARVN fought hard and well at Xuan Loc. But by the time Halstead and other journalists got back to their helicopter they found it surrounded and overrun, not only by frightened civilians but by soldiers who were understandably trying to bug out.
In the approaching Battle of Saigon, the odds against the ARVN are growing. The three divisions defending the Mekong Delta are comparatively well trained and disciplined. As for the rest, says a veteran military observer in Saigon, "ARVN has probably the worst morale of any army since the collapse of the French in World War II. In three weeks they have been put through general retreats, separated from their own units and officers, walked and fought their way down half the country, survived mass panic and mutinies, and now they are being asked to fight again to save their capital city from total defeat."
Static Positions. In numbers alone, the relative strength of the two sides has changed drastically since the signing of the Paris accords in January 1973. At that time the North Vietnamese had 148,000 combat troops in South Viet Nam; today they have an estimated 237,000. Two years ago ARVN had 250,000 combat troops; today, in the wake of the great retreat, it has only 104,000. Out of 150,000 troops formerly based in Military Regions I and II, no more than 60,000 are left; the rest were killed, wounded, or simply ran away. As a result, the ARVN has only seven remaining divisions, while the North Vietnamese have as many as 21.
What is more, much of the South Vietnamese force is committed to static defense positions—bridges, key highways, airfields—limiting its mobility and ruling out probing operations. "We are tied down everywhere," complained a South Vietnamese general last week. "The Communists' tactics are to draw us out everywhere they can and then hit us where we are weakest."
In the view of some Saigon observers, many of ARVN's current problems stem directly from the Paris accords and the withdrawal of U.S. forces two years ago. The Americans had helped South Viet Nam create an army that the Vietnamese could not maintain without considerable advisory assistance and steady, sizable infusions of equipment. When U.S. support was removed, it was not long before many ARVN soldiers simply forgot what they had learned under American tutelage. "Our G.I.s were always telling us not to bunch up, not to bunch up," laughed a South Vietnamese soldier near Xuan Loc last week. "That's all I remember—'don't bunch up.'" Moreover, the Paris accords gave the North Vietnamese an important tactical advantage by not acknowledging their presence in the South, thereby tacitly allowing them to stay—in force.