Bombs in the Ballpark

It was the third inning, and the 2nd Air Division Cobras held a 6-1 lead over the Advisory Group Support Branch in their night game at Pershing Field, the U.S. military's softball diamond outside Saigon. In the stands, 150 partisan American fans--soldiers, sailors, embassy civilians, wives and children--booed and cheered. Suddenly, two explosions under the stands sent shrapnel slicing through the planking, shearing the leg off a G.I., hurling jagged splinters like missiles into the crowd. Amid the wreckage, two soldiers lay dying, 23 other Americans dazed and injured.

Set off by two stolen, U.S.-made fragmentation bombs buried in the soil, the sabotage was the gravest anti-American terrorist episode in South Viet Nam's war against the Communist Viet Cong --and an unsettling commentary on the Saigon military regime's security apparatus, since the U.S. stadium is next door to Vietnamese Joint General Staff headquarters. (The government belatedly arrested three Vietnamese living near by as suspects.) The incident was also the latest in a fresh wave of terror ism directed at Americans. Two Saigon bars popular with G.I.s have recently been bombed, killing one U.S. serviceman and six Vietnamese, and last week a terrorist on a motor scooter hurled a grenade that damaged the home of a U.S. Air Force captain.

But to their Vietnamese brother foes, the Viet Cong offered a respite, proclaiming a five-day cease-fire during Tet, Viet Nam's festive New Year's holiday. Going along with the Reds, the government called a virtual halt to its own military operations. Troops poured into Saigon exploding firecrackers and firing rifles into the air (to ward off evil spirits), and the war ground to a strange near-standstill.

The country's new strongman, goateed General Nguyen Khanh, took the occasion to make a second grass-roots tour, this one to mountainous central Viet Nam. At a village of montagnard tribesmen, Khanh let his feet be ceremonially washed in rice wine and buffalo blood. At a bleak infantry fort guarding the Laotian frontier, Khanh trotted out three sparsely clad Saigon cabaret cuties to put on a show, then announced an even greater morale booster--a 20% pay raise for privates and corporals.

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