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The Gauntlet Taken. What happens next in the war in Viet Nam depends in part on the Communists. Having been halted in midstride, the Viet Cong can drop back to the small-unit actions and the sabotage of Phase 2 adding perhaps massive terrorism in Saigon to try to bring down the government. It is the kind of war they are best at, but "deconcentrating," as U.S. strategists call it, would be a political retreat that might well affect the morale of their troops and their hold on the peasants. Alternatively, they could go into Phase 3 anyway, perhaps even with a mass assault of divisional size on U S units in the hope of discrediting the U.S. presence by a major, one-shot victory. But that might well prove suicidal tor the Viet Cong have discovered that these days a mass assault all too easily turns into an avalanche of airborne bullets, napalm and bombs. Or they might simply fade away to lie low, Br'er Rabbit fashion, in the hope that sooner or later the U.S. would get weary of waiting and go back home.
That would be the unwisest course of all. For in deciding to stand in South Viet Nam, the U.S. means just that After all, we've kept 250,000 men in Western Europe for 20 years," observes a general. "We can wait too." The U.S. also means much more. It means to counter the Red revolution with a genuine revolution in health, education, welfare and self-sufficiency for the Vietnamese that the Communists can hardly be expected to understand. The Communists themselves chose South Viet Nam as their test case and springboard to the conquest of all Southeast Asia. There are signs that they are already beginning to regret it. The U.S. has picked up the gauntlet, and it is not only Vietnamese nationhood but all of free Asia that stands to be ultimately strengthened by the extraordinary—and still burgeoning—commitment of the lives and talent and treasure of America in Viet Nam.