South Vietnam: War without End?

"IN THE FALL the war was always there, but we didn't go to it any more." While for the first time in a decade it was entirely a Vietnamese war, I came away from interviewing official and involved Americans with a sense of deja vu as profound as that evoked by the opening lines of Ernest Hemingway's "In Another Country." As he has for four years, President Thieu of South Vietnam maintained that the North Vietnamese would try one more offensive before "fading away" and as American officials in Saigron and Washington have warned since the Tet Offensive of 1968: "The real battleground for Vietnam is capitol hill." Nineteen seventy-four was the first year, however, when many officials thought they would actually lose the battle for a Vietnam aid appropriation, and there was genuine uncertainty among U.S. officials about whether the Thieu government and the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) could withstand a full scale North Vietnamese offensive. As this article appears, the outcome of both battles may already be in doubt.