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er eh oe eT eee Se ee They were speaking in the sense thet the etated objectives of the American govern- ment could not, in fact, be achieved by our present methods and that the couniry was gradually being destroyed and the culture ruined. Mr. Scott Cohen, a member of Senator Fercy's steff, stated that out of epproximately twenty newsmen with whon they telked, nineteen felt the present American posture in Vietnen was a disaster. The sere opinions were held by numerous International Voluntary Service personnel and many USATD representatives. es well as leading Vietnamese. The representative of CARE in Da Nang reported that he no longer uses the main route leading south as he recently was ambushed in broad daylight. Elizabeth Brown, the director of Foster Perents Plan no lenger can permit her 4 social workers to travel and nox confines the staff to Saigon. IVS personnel told me that many areas heretofore open to them are closed; particularly in the Central Highlends but also in many other areas such as the Delta. Roger Montgomery. who is the director of IVS operations in Four Corps, which covers the entire Delite, told me thet villages where his agricultural workers had stayed were now insecure _ and that they had to return to the provincial capital at night. He spoke of the cifficulty of traveling f from Can Tho, which is the milit wary head quart vers of Four Corps, down to Soc Tr ang, the provincial capital Ba Xuan Province, 2s this road had become insecure. In fact, in Can Tho stselt there is a curfew at 9 pm and Americans and American military personnel within the city live behind barbed wire and anti-grenade nets extending to the third floor of the billet and protected by guards with machine guns. I = oF . Witnessed Vietnamese personnel entering and leaving American basis in the Delta being given body search. The ability of the Viet Cong to travel freely through the Delte and their hold on the great majority of the people is admitted by the American military. Vietnamese Christian Service personnel, a Protestant service mro organization assisting primarily in work with refugees, confirm thet in the Da Nang area there is a serious deterioration of security. This was underscored by a recent Viet Cong mgrtar attack on the massive American air base at Da Nang from the hills a short distance away. A visit to a large American air base located at Phu Gat, which is east of Pleiku, revealed that large numbers of planes had to be evacuated recently because of VC shelling of the base. One must remember that these are heavily protected bases of enormous size, located in populous areas which are unlike the jungle areas and show the ability of the VC to move pretty much at will even the the coastal areas. :; The Saigon Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Mr. Thomas Buckley, said to me that security is probably worse and certainly no better than a year ago and that one should assume that General Westmoreland would always put a good light on "progress". Two long conversations with Francois Sully of Newsweek revealed that American combat groups were 20% under -manned and that ‘soldiers with only 90 days of training were going into combat. As I had just read the article in the December 11 issue of Newsweek entitled “Filling the Holes" which reveals how the Pentagon is able to quickly replace those killed _ in battle, it seemed in direct conflict with the information given by Francois Sully. He reported, however, that his own story on the 20% deficiency had "been checked by his magazine with the Pentaron ar’ +4 ensuing story was the result. -22-