Saturday, June 3, 1972
It Looks Peaceful - But They're Out There
By Spec. 4 Jim Smith
CAN THO, Vietnam --Walk along the teeming streets of this bustling city of 160,000, in the heart of the Mekong Delta, in a helmet and flak jacket and the shopkeepers look at you and laugh.The Delta is the only one of four South Vietnamese military regions that have not erupted in the flames of a major Communist offensive.For most of the 6.9 million residents of the country"s most populous area, life goes on as usual.But there is another kind of war down here. Not a conventional war with tanks and heavy guns, but a guerrilla struggle of midnight sapper raids and shellings.None of the major population centers has been threatened, and it does not appear that any of them will be. But the war goes on."The enemy has had limited success in a few areas," a high-ranking American civilian official said. "He was trying to spoil our pacification program and keep ARVN units tied down here so they couldn't be used as reinforcements. But we've been holding our own. We haven't lost a provincial capital yet -or a district capital, for that matter.The high point of enemy activity in the Delta came on April 6 and 7, coincident with the Communist drive across the Demilitarized Zone, when there were 140 enemy-initiated incidents throughout the Delta's 16 provinces.But in recent days the level has dropped to about 20 incidents per day, and a very few of them have involved large Red forces.Maj. Gen. Nguyen Vinh Nghi, 42, former commander of the 21st ARVN Div., was appointed IV Corps commander on May 3 when Maj. Gen. Ngo Quang Truong was rushed to I Corps following the fall of Quang Tri.Soon after assuming command, Nghi began removing his Popular Forces (PF) and Regional Forces (RF) militiamen from the more remote and less strategic of the more than 5,000 outposts that dot the Delta. A U.S. source said about 100 bases, some of them manned by only a squad of soldiers, were either abandoned or overrun.Nghi also began inserting regular ARVN troops into areas infested with North Vietnamese Army regulars and made his Rangers, the 44th Special Tactical Zone which patrols the Cambodian frontier, more mobile.The results have been good. According to Nghi almost 7,500 Communists were killed and nearly 1,000 weapons captured in the Delta in May.He termed his own loss light -"less than a thousand."According to Nghi, there are 46,000 Communist soldiers in the Delta or just across the Cambodian border.Arrayed against them are two ARVN divisions, the 7th and the 9th, 12 battalions of Rangers, over 200,000 PF and RF soldiers and 200,000 People's Self Defense Forces (PSDF).There are three main areas of concern in the Delta. The first is Chuong Thien Province, just east of the U Minh Forest and west of Can Tho.American sources said two NVA regiments, the 95A and 18B, began moving out of the U Minh in early April, hoping to seize the provincial capital of Vi Thanh and use it as a springboard to other operations throughout the Delta.But in a series of heated battles, with U.S. and VNAF support, the Communists were driven off with heavy casualties, according to American sources.Another troubled area is the Ha Tien region in the extreme west of the Delta, near the Cambodian border. According to ARVN spokesmen, recent week-long operations in Ha Tien and in adjacent Chau Doc Province netted almost 300 Communists killed. Government deaths were put at 45 killed and 228 wounded.The third hot spot is the area where the provinces of Kien Phong, Kien Tuong and Dinh Tuong meet, about 50 miles southwest of Saigon. According to a U.S. military source, 1,000 NVA regulars from the Parrot's Beak area of Cambodia moved south in early April to join 2,500 NVA and VC troops already operating from their forested base camp area.In a dozen major clashes between April 7 and May 24 in the tri-border area, 203 Communists had been killed and government losses were negligible, according to a government source.He said 766 enemy had been killed in Dinh Tuong Province since the beginning of April and that government troops suffered 132 killed and 389 wounded.According to the Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) figures supplied by Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) in Can Tho, about three-fourths of the Delta's over 4,000 districts are solidly under government control. In June, 1968, just after the Reds' offensive at Tet, CORDS officials said 2,106 hamlets were controlled by the Communists and 984 were "contested."Sources said less than one per cent of all the hamlets in the Delta are now rated as Communist controlled."It Looks Peaceful - But They're Out There", by Spec. 4 Jim Smith, published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Saturday, June 3, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.