civil conflict may be one of the major reasons for the considerable amount of confusion, guilt and soul-searching among Americans over the Vietnam war.

I know this is true in my own case and in the case of many Americans of my acquaintance who have lived for long periods in Vietnam. We are continually chagrined to discover that idealism and dedication are largely the prerogative of the enemy. The American soldier makes the lack of aggressiveness of the Government forces the butt of unending gibes. He grows to hate "Charlie," the G.I. slang name for the Vietcong guerrilla and the North Vietnamese regular, because "Charlie" kills his friends, but he soon learns to respect Communist bravery and cunning.

An American general recently paid a strange tribute to a Vietcong guerrilla who held up an entire U.S. Army infantry company for an hour in the jungle north of Saigon. The guerrilla was the lone survivor of several Communists defending a bunker. He fired off all his own ammunition and that of his dead comrades, and hurled back at the Americans the grenades they tossed into the bunker. He was finally killed while throwing rocks in a last gesture of defiance, "If one of our men had fought like that," the general said, "he would have been awarded the Medal of Honor."

Since the beginning of last year, Hanoi has increased the size of its regular army contingent in the South to a total of about 47.000 men. In the face of sustained bombing of the road and rail system in the North and the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos, the Communists continue to infiltrate men at an estimated rate of 4,500 to 5.000 a month. Many of these young men are conscripts who march south because of pressure on themselves and their families. Yet, once in the South, they fight well, and desertions are few despite the hardships and the severe losses through disease and battle. The Vietcong guerrillas have also managed steadily to expand their forces through recruitment and conscription.

The Saigon regime, on the other hand, has experienced great difficulty in increasing the strength of its armed forces because of a very high desertion rate. Desertions are greatest among conscripts, an indication that the average South Vietnamese feels little or no commitment to defend his own society. About 85 percent of Saigon's armed forces are, consequently, volunteers who take up arms for pay. This gives the Government forces a distinctly mercenary cast that affects both their attitude toward the population and, except for a few elite units, their performance in combat.

From the contrast in behavior of the two sides. I can only conclude that Vietnamese will die more willingly for a regime which, though Communist, is at least genuinely Vietnamese and offers them some hope of improving their lives, than for one which is committed to the galling status quo and is the creation of Washington. The official assertion that the Communist soldier endures the appalling conditions of his daily life and behaves so commendably in combat out of terror of his superiors becomes patently ridiculous to anyone who has witnessed a battle. Terror may drive a man to march toward the enemy's guns, but it will not make him fight valiantly. The course of the conflict has made apparent that the Communists are able to arouse and to exploit the native Vietnamese qualities of hardihood and resilience, and to convince large numbers of their people that the cause of their Government is just.

Most non-Communist Vietnamese are incapable, because of the values of the society in which they live, of looking beyond individual and family interests. Their overwhelming concern with "me and my relatives" deprives the society of a social consciousness Americans take for granted in their own culture and fosters the corruption and nepotism that exist throughout the administration. The disease of corruption appears to be worsening in direct proportion to the burgeoning amounts of American aid flowing into the country. Stories of embezzlement are legion and repeatedly embitter Americans.

Province and district chiefs' positions are frequently sold to the highest bidders by those responsible for making the appointments. The incumbent is then expected both to recoup the cost of his job from corruption and to make payoffs to the higher officials who sold it to him. Some American officials with long experience in Vietnam estimate that about 20 per cent of United States aid supplied for counter-insurgency projects in the countryside finds its way to the Vietcong and that another 30 to 40 per cent is diverted by Government officials. Cement, roofing, steel bars and other building materials destined for schools and refugee housing mysteriously end up on the open market or in private villas and apartment buildings. "What gets down to the poor son of a bitch in the paddy field," one official said, "is a trickle." A U.S. Army Special Forces captain once told me how he had arranged for rice to be flown

in American planes to a camp of several thousand refugees in a remote area who were suffering from malnutrition. The local district chief confiscated the rice and sold it to the refugees at exorbitant prices.

While Americans worry about winning the war and creating an effective Vietnamese Government that can gain the support of its people, the mandarin families that run the regime have a different set of priorities. In one important province on the central coast this spring a rare honest and effective Vietnamese official, who was a favorite of the Americans, was fired because he began to talk about corruption by the two senior military commanders in the region. He was replaced by a cousin of one of the generals.

Numerous complaints from the American Embassy led Premier Ky to warn his fellow generals at one meeting of the junta that they were embezzling too much and should exercise some restraint. Their reply was that they had to think of their families. Vows by the Premier that corrupt officials will be shot have brought periodic headlines in the Saigon newspapers and the execution of one Chinese businessman and a half-dozen common hoodlums. Ordinary Vietnamese assume that Premier Ky has found it imprudent to arrange firing squads for some of his colleagues on the junta. One general's wife is sometimes referred to as "Queen of the Payoff."

Promises of land reform are solemnly reported in the American press and are apparently taken with some seriousness in official circles in Washington. I have often wondered why, since the promises are never carried out and the speeches made today are practically identical in content and phrasing to those made four years ago by some other Government leader. To gain their own

ends, Asians frequently tell Americans what they think Americans want to hear. The Vietnamese, possibly because of their greater experience with Americans, seem to have developed a particular talent for this. Last April, during one of his more candid moments, Premier Ky told a group of correspondents: "Never believe what any Vietnamese tells you, including me.'

In February, amid the hoopla following the Honolulu conference that was to lead to an intensive program of social, political and economic reform, the junta organized a "Social Revolution Day" in Saigon. Two thousand civil servants, soldiers, students and religious leaders were assembled on the lawn of the former presidential palace in the center of the city. The social reformers arrived in their Mercedes-Benz sedans and, dressed in well-tailored suits or bemedaled uniforms, began to read the usual speeches. The scene had a disturbing atmosphere of déjá vu. Within 10 minutes, a segment of the crowd, less polite than the rest, began walking out in boredom. The police, having apparently anticipated what would happen, had locked the gates of the palace grounds. No one was allowed to leave until the speeches had ended, despite a good deal of shouting and arguing back and forth through the steel bars.

The current social system discriminates against the poor and prevents social mobility. The mandarin families resist all efforts to change it, since it works in their favor. Although the United States has spent millions of dollars building primary schools in Vietnam, for example, it has been unable to bring about any fundamental reform of the Vietnamese educational structure, which makes certain that the sons of the prosperous, and almost no one else, will achieve the secondary education necessary to social advancement-whether in the army, the civil service or the professions.

Sending a peasant boy to primary school and then making it virtually impossible for him to achieve a decent secondary-school education fosters discontent, rather than lessening it. There is considerable evidence that many young Vietnamese of peasant origin join the Vietcong because the Communists, who have been forced by the nature of their revolution to develop leadership from the countryside, offer them their best hope of avoiding a life on the rung of the ladder when they began-at the bottom.

A friend of mine once visited a hamlet with a South Vietnamese Army major who is one of the few field grade officers to defeat the system by rising from a humble beginning. The major spoke to the farmers in peasant dialect instead of in the sophisticated urban Vietnamese most Government officials use. "You're not a major," said one farmer in astonishment.

"Yes, I am," said the major.

"No, you're not," said the farmer. "You talk like a peasant and no peasant could become a major."

A drive through Saigon demonstrates another fashion in which the social system works. Virtually all the new construction consists of luxury apartments, hotels and office buildings financed by Chinese businessmen or affluent Vietna

mese with relatives or connections within the regime. The buildings are destined to be rented to Americans. Saigon's workers live, as they always have, in fetid slums on the city's outskirts.

Since 1954, the United States has poured more than $3.2 billion of economic aid into South Vietnam, but no Saigon regime has ever undertaken a lowcost housing project of any size. The Singapore Government, in contrast, is erecting thousands of low-cost housing units for its people.

While Vietnamese with influence prosper in the cities and towns, the war has created a different world in the countryside. It is a world in which the masses of the peasantry no longer live-they endure.

Each afternoon, in the air-conditioned press-briefing room in Saigon, the United States Military Command releases a communiqué reporting that 300 or more "enemy structures" have been destroyed by American fighter-bombers or by the guns of Seventh Fleet warships that day. The statistics imply sound military progress until a visit to the countryside reveals that what is meant by an "enemy structure" is usually a peasant hut in a hamlet the Communists control, or which the American and South Vietnamese authorities suspect the Communists control.

No comprehensive statistics on civilian casualties are available. The nature of the war would make the assembling of such statistics very difficult, but the military authorities have also never seriously attempted to gather them.

An indication of what civilian casualties may be, however, is given by the fact that American and other foreign medical teams working in three-quarters of the country's 43 provinces treat 2,000 civilian war-wounded each month. If one accepts the normal military ratio of one dead for two wounded, the monthly figure is 1,000 civilian dead.

The number of wounded handled by the medical teams, I believe from my own observation, is merely a fraction of the total. The medical terms treat only those wounded who reach the hospitals in provincial capitals. There are undoubtedly many more who never get that far. These victims are helped at Government district headquarters of militia outposts, or by Vietcong field hospitals and dispensaries-or they simply survive, or die, without treatment. Most of the wounds I have seen in the provincial hospitals are the type a victim could survive for two or three days without medical attention. Wounds that require rapid treatment are not usually in evidence, presumably because the victims die before they can obtain hospitalization.

Although civilians are being killed and wounded by both sides, my own investigations have indicated that the majority of civilians casualties result from American and South Vietnamese airstrikes and artillery and naval gunfire. Last November, I found one fishing village in Quangngai province, on the central coast north of Saigon, in which at least 180 persons-and possibly 600-had been killed during the previous two months by aircraft and Seventh Fleet destroyers. The five hamlets that composed the village, once a prosperous community of 15,000 people, had been reduced to rubble.

The gun and the knife of the Vietcong assassin are, in contrast, far more selective than cannon and fragmentation bombs; the victims are usually limited to Government officials and sympathizers. It has been estimated that, over the past decade, about 20,000 persons have been assassinated by Communist terrorists. This is a gruesome total, but the annual average is a great deal lower than the probable yearly number of ordinary civilian victims of the war.

Lack of sufficient American troops to occupy and hold ground when it has been wrested from the Communists is one of the major reasons for the extent of damage to civilian life and property. Once a battle has ended, the American and South Vietnamese troops withdraw. The theoretical follow-up by South Vietnamese territorial forces, police and administrators to pacify the region does not materialize except in a very limited number of instances, and the Vietcong guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies move in again. The Americans eventually return and the same region is thus fought over repeatedly.

It would be easy to blame the American military authorities for the destruction, but this would not be fair. The Vietcong and the North Vietnamese regulars habitually fortify hamlets with elaborate trenchwork and bunker systems. Infantry attacking in classic style across open paddy fields would suffer prohibitive casualties. Under these circumstances, military commanders can only be expected to use whatever force is at their disposal.

Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the United States military commander in Vietnam, has ordered that all possible care be taken to avoid killing and wounding the innocent and that, whenever feasible, civilians be warned to leave their

hamlets prior to airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Unfortunately, General Westmoreland's order has sometimes been ignored by subordinate commanders. Hamlets are also habitually bombed and shelled at the request of a South Vietnamese province or district chief who has been told by some paid informer that Communist troops are present there. Information from informers is notoriously unreliable, the peasants are often not responsible for the presence of the Communists and, since ground units do not exploit the bombings and shellings, these attacks seem to have negligible military value. American officials excuse the practice by claiming that the Vietnamese, as the legal authorities, have the right to destroy their own hamlets, even if Americans perform the destructive acts-a fine bit of legalism that ignores the basic moral issue. I have occasionally thought that the practice results largely from the cynicism of South Vietnamese officialdom and a superfluity of aircraft and artillery.

The extraordinary firepower of American weaponry, whose ferocity must be witnessed to be comprehended, is another contributing factor to widespread civilian suffering. On an average day, U.S. warplanes alone loose 175 to 200 tous of explosives on the South Vietnamese countryside. Then there are the thousands of artillery and naval shells and the hundreds of thousands of rounds of mortar and small-arms ammunition. The cratered landscape seen from an airplane window is an excellent advertisement for the ingenuity of American munitions makers.

The flow of refugees from the countryside is the most eloquent evidence available of the gradual destruction of rural society under the impact of the war. The number of refugees has now passed the million mark. It takes a great deal to make a Vietnamese peasant forsake his land and the graves of his ancestors.

Most refugees I have questioned told me that the Vietcong taxed them and made them work harder than usual, but that they could live with the Communists. They left their homes, they said, because they could no longer bear American and South Vietnamese bombs and shells.

If resettled properly, the refugees could conceivably develop into an asset for the Saigon Government. Yet, true to its usual behavior, the regime neglects them and the majority are left to shift for themselves. Refugee slums have risen in the cities almost as fast as G.I. bars.

Deserted hamlets and barren rice fields, now a common sight, are other evidence of what the war is doing to rural South Vietnam. In several provinces on the northern central coast as much as one-third of the rice land has been forsaken. The American policy of killing crops in Communist-held areas by spraying them with chemical defoliants from aircraft is hastening this process. During the first six months of this year 59,000 acres were destroyed.

The corrosive effect on the country of the American presence is not confined to military operations. Economically and culturally, the advent of the Americans has introduced maladies only time can cure. One is inflation. The primitive economy, already seriously disrupted by the war, has now been swamped by the purchasing power of tens of millions of dollars being dispensed for the construction of bases, airfields and port facilities and by the free spending of the individual American soldier.

This year the United States will pump a minimum of $140-million into the Vietnamese economy to cover the locally generated costs of the construction of new bases and the maintenance of existing ones. This sum constitutes about one-seventh of the country's entire money supply. American troops are themselves currently spending another $7-million a month. The moral degeneration caused by the G.I. culture that has mushroomed in the cities and towns is another malady. Bars and bordellos, thousands of young Vietnamese women degrading themselves as bar girls and prostitutes, gangs of hoodlums and beggars and children selling their older sisters and picking pockets have become ubiquitous features of urban life. I have sometimes thought, when a street urchin with sores covering his legs, stopped me and begged for a few cents' worth of Vietnamese piastres, that he might be better off growing up as a political commissar. He would then, at least, have some self-respect. Rarely in any war has the name of the people been evoked more by both sides than in the Vietnam conflict. Yet the Vietnamese peasantry, who serve as cannon fodder for Communists and non-Communists, remain curiously mutea hushed Greek chorus to their own tragedy.

The conditions of life in Vietnam will probably always make an accurate assessment of the peasants' attitudes toward the war impossible to obtain. I have received the impression, however, on visits to accessible hamlets, that

many of the peasants are so weary of the fighting they would accept any settlement that brought them peace.

Last March, I spent two days in one hamlet south of the port of Danang on the central coast. A company of U.S. Marines had seized the hamlet from the Vietcong six months previously, and a Government pacification team, protected by the Marines, was working there. In three years, the hamlet had changed hands three times. There were almost no young men in the community. Roughly half of the families had sons, brothers or husbands in the Communist ranks. The remaining families were about equally divided between those with neutral attitudes and those who were Government sympathizers.

The morning after I arrived, the peasants, under the supervision of the Government pacification workers, began constructing a fence around the hamlet perimeter to keep out Vietcong infiltrators. Through an interpreter, I asked two farmers among a group of old men, women and children digging postholes, if they thought the fence would be of any use.

"Maybe it will," one said, "but I don't think so. A fence won't keep out the Vietcong."

"What did the Vietcong make you do when they controlled the hamlet?" I asked.

"They made us pull down the fence we had put up before, and dig trenches and lay booby traps," the second farmer said.

"Well, if you don't think the fence will do any good," I asked, "why are you putting it up?"

“We are just plain farmers," the first peasant said, glancing apprehensively at a policeman a few feet away with a carbine slung across his arm. "We have to obey any Government here."

As he spoke, a Vietcong sniper, hidden in a patch of sugar cane beyond the paddy fields, fired two shots. The old men, women and children scurried for cover, their fear and lack of enthusiasm for fence-building evident on their faces.

During a tour of South Vietnam in 1963, Gen. Earle G. Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, referred to the conflict as a "dirty little war." While the Vietnam conflict may be even dirtier now that it was in 1963, it can no longer be termed little.

Reliable statistics are very elusive in Vietnam, but I would estimate that at least 250,000 persons have been killed since the war began in 1957. Last year, according to official figures, 34,585 Communists were killed and the Saigon Government forces suffered 11,200 deaths. Through mid-September of this year, again according to official statistics, 37.299 Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars have died in battle and 7,017 Government troops have been killed.

American losses remained at a relatively low level until 1965, when the Johnson Administration committed ground combat units and began to create an expeditionary corps. That year, 1,369 American servicemen died in North and South Vietnam and neighboring Laos, and 6,114 were wounded. This year, as American offensive operations have picked up stride with the strenthening of the logistical apparatus, casualties have soared to 3,524 killed and 21,107 wounded, through mid-September. American dead are now averaging nearly a hundred a week and can be expected to increase as the expeditionary corps grows and more Americans are exposed to hostile fire.

The attitudes of the leadership in Hanoi and Washington indicate that the contest is far from being resolved. The rate at which North Vietnam is infiltrating its regular troops into the South and the willingness of the United States to engage its own ground forces and to escalate the air war against the North portend several more years of serious bloodshed. The world may hope for peace, but neither side has yet hurt the other sufficiently to prevent it from continuing. Both sides are trapped in a dilemma created by their history and political and strategic considerations. Washington cannot withdraw its troops from South Vietnam, as Hanoi demands, without making certain an eventual Communist seizure of power there and negating all the efforts of the last decade to maintain a friendly Government in Saigon.

Hanoi's best chance of winning now lies in prolonging the bloodletting to the point where the American public will tire of a war for a small land whose name most Americans cannot even pronounce correctly (they tend to say "Veetnam”). If the North de-escalates the fighting it will remove the principal source of political pressure on the Johnson Administration-the number of coffins being flown home from Saigon. Without the killing, the United States might be able to occupy South Vietnam indefinitely. The fact that 60,000 U.S. troops are sta