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With the arrival of the 5,000 marines of South Korea's 15,000-man Blue Dragon brigade at Cam Ranh Bay last week, the allies' combined strength rose to nearly 750,000. Orders for the Vietnamese forces issue from the quiet, air-conditioned offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two acres of yellow stucco French colonial buildings in Saigon that once housed the French high command. Chief of State Thieu heads it. Downtown, in his offices on Pasteur Street, the American commander in Viet Nam, General William C. West moreland (TIME cover, Feb. 19), presides over the complex of U.S. commands ranging from Lieut. General Joseph Moore's 2nd Air Division to Major General Lewis Walt's Third Marine Amphibious Force. The Army's biggest clout is contained in the recently created Field Force Viet Nam under Major General Stanley ("Swede") Larsen. Headquartered in Nha Trang in the largest and hardest-pressed of Viet Nam's four corps areas, Force V includes the First Team at An Khe, the 101st Airborne's 1st Brigade, and the arriving South Koreans, who will be under American command. The Royal Australian Regiment and the Royal New Zealand Artillery batteries are largely under their own command. Working from the long-established pattern of the advisers' program, U.S. officers confer with their Vietnamese counterparts virtually on a daily basis up and down the line.
The Heroes. There are many Vietnamese heroes of the long war. One of the most bemedaled is Lieut. Colonel Nguyen Thanh Yen, 42, of the Vietnamese marines, who has spent 15 years fighting the Communists. A bitter, brown gnomish man called the "Little Tiger," Yen last week, as he always does, was walking every step of the way with his 1,400-man Vietnamese task force in Operation Concord. Beside him was his adviser, U.S. Marine Major William Leftwich, 34, whom one of his superiors has called "the best American adviser in the country." They set out early in the dazzling morning sun, trudging past the napalmed black bodies of V.C. killed in a battle the week before.
By midday the heat had Yen's men gasping. Some were vomiting. Then the V.C. sprang their ambush. Two marines were killed instantly, and five were wounded. "Get up, you bastards," snarled Yen. "It's only a few snipers—get up and move after them." The marines went, and Bill Leftwich, one of the 6,500 U.S. advisers who sometimes feel that they are the "forgotten men" in the new war, went too. The brittle Yen had run through five U.S. advisers until Leftwich came along. By quiet persuasion, Leftwich got Yen to add an engineering platoon, a 75-mm. howitzer platoon, a support and a signal detachment to what had been a medieval band. Since then, Colonel Yen and his men have been killing V.C. at a 9-to-1 ratio.