Wednesday, May 31, 1972
The Street Without Joy - It Still Is
ON ROUTE 555, Vietnam (AP) --The desolate dunes of the "Street Without Joy" are giving South Vietnamese troops no more cause for jubilation than they did for French soldiers who gave the area its name two decades ago. A North Vietnamese regiment with tanks and 130mm artillery hammers the My Chanh defense line daily, despite massive B52 bomber strikes and thunderous naval gun barrages. "Usually it's an artillery duel," said one American adviser, "but ... it gets close, and it's a hard fight." A battalion of elite South Vietnamese Marines was landed last Wednesday from the sea, just as the French did in 1953. Another made an assault aboard helicopters in a plan to link up with ground forces just to the south and catch the Communist in the middle. The operation killed many North Vietnamese, allied officers claim, but that portion of this coastal road called the Street Without Joy was still contested Friday. Instead of blocking the southern perimeter to contain the Communist forces on the "Street," some 1,500 Vietnamese Rangers were in heavy combat and had lost many killed and wounded, field sources said. Marines who were supposed to push north joined with them to help hold the line. Officers said it appeared likely they would hold. The French committed 30 battalions to clearing out the Viet Minh's 95th Regt. in the 1953 assault, but took severe losses on the coastal strip which had hamlets with intricate, interlocking defenses, snipers on high sand dunes, and a population that was unsympathetic. The Street Without Joy offered no happiness to American troops in the 1960s either, and much of the population was evacuated. Whole towns fell into ruin. But by 1970, the area was considered generally pacified, and many villagers were permitted to return and rebuild. The numbers, the weapons and the rules have changed somewhat. The North Vietnamese pushing south from the Demilitarized Zone use tanks and big guns that have moved the fighting into a new stage of conventional warfare. But one think that never changes when the fighting reaches a given area is the refugee. Thousands of them came out of the "Street," hiking down the beach with the two Marine battalions which had completed a partial sweep. District officers scanned them carefully to spot infiltrators. The refugees, mostly women, children and old people, included many who were sick. There was no estimate of how many had been hurt in the fighting. The South Vietnamese Rangers are commanded from a shabby district headquarters at Huong Dien, 13 miles northwest of Hue over deeply rutted roads and a coastal inlet just south of the "Street" itself. The fighting hasn't filtered as far south yet as this sand spit, which can be reached only by sampan because an old causeway that once carried Route 555 toward Hue no longer exists. "I don't know what they're doing here," a U.S. adviser said in reference to the Communists. "But they aren't coming through." Until they try, life here probably will continue unchanged: the yellow South Vietnamese flag dangling in the still air, its red stripes faded as to be almost gone. A soldier wearing an old pith helmet taken off a dead enemy. Soldiers riding bicycles along the paddy dikes, rifles slung across their backs.___________________________________________"The Street Without Joy - It Still Is", by (AP), published in the Pacific Stars and Stripes Wednesday, May 31, 1972 and reprinted from European and Pacific Stars and Stripes, a Department of Defense publication copyright, 2002 European and Pacific Stars and Stripes.