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The Gadgetry. Also at work for the U.S. in Viet Nam is an array of ingenious gadgetry that smacks of baling wire—and of Buck Rogers. Puff the Magic Dragon is an old C-47 transport rigged with three 7.62 Gatling-type guns —each a fascine of six machine-gun barrels. In the time it takes to say "puff," the Dragon can spit 300 bullets at Viet Cong on the ground. "It's a solid bar of fire," explains a U.S. officer, "and the noise is a terrible roar." The Lightning Bug is a UH-1B helicopter fitted with seven brilliant landing lights. It goes sampan hunting at night along Viet Cong rivers or canals. Antipeople peepers include Tipsy 33, a ground-surveillance radar first used by the marines along their Danang perimeter. By the end of this year, a steel-mesh net platform that can be laid by helicopters across jungle treetops will be in use by choppers as a do-it-yourself landing pad; the disgorged troops shinny down through the branches on a metal and nylon ladder.
The single most expensive piece of equipment in use in Viet Nam is an Air Force C-130 loaded with $2,500,000 worth of communications equipment. Known as the ABCCC (Airborne Battle Control and Command Center), the plane is in fact a flying command post, equipped with eight television screens for projecting slides and maps from its data storage drums, which contain 5,000 pieces of military intelligence—the last word for armchair-borne commanders.
Still Saigon's War. When massive U.S. intervention in Viet Nam was bruited, there were those who argued against it on the grounds that weary South Vietnamese troops would simply quit in relief, let the Americans do their fighting for them. The U.S. buildup has indeed been decisive in halting the Viet Cong drive toward victory—but in large part because it has given the South Vietnamese, whose 600,000-man army continues to bear the brunt of battle, the help they need to go on fighting.
It remains very much their war. In the four months after U.S. combat units largely went into action, some 3,000 government soldiers were killed in action compared to 275 Americans. Over the same period, U.S. troops ran 384 company-size operations resulting in contact with the Viet Cong; South Vietnamese soldiers conducted 1,605. As the U.S. buildup has mounted, the monthly government losses have been pared: from 1,300 in July, to 800 in August, to 567 in September.
While Saigon's soldiers got some breathing room, the once-cocksure Viet Cong found themselves choking in a new kind of war. Their massive mon soon assaults never materialized—be cause quick-scrambling allied planes all too often flew off through the rainstorms to blast a company apart before it could attack. Whereas in the first flush of their summer successes the Reds could count on an eye for an eye, by August the kill ratio had dropped to 1 to 3 against them—and they are likely to lose 27,000 men in action this year against an estimated 12,000 for the allies (including 1,000 Americans).