Bigger & Uglier

Asleep in a scramble tent at the south end of the 10,000-ft. Danang airbase runway, U.S. Air Force Major George V. Moore of McCook, Neb., was rudely awakened at 1:25 a.m. "Suddenly there were explosions going off all around me," he said later. "I was knocked out of my bed and against the side of the tent."

Near by, Pfc. Bruce Devert, 19, of Los Altos, Calif., one of 9,000 U.S. Marines assigned to guard the Danang airbase, which is the major staging center for the U.S. aerial bombardment of North Viet Nam, found himself "in a dark vacuum with the whole world made up of flashing noises and explosions."

This was the start of a Viet Cong raid against Danang last week. Under heavy-mortar-fire cover, the raiders stole out of a graveyard toward a sector of the base perimeter patrolled by South Vietnamese troops. The guerrillas snipped one barbed-wire fence, stepped through a dozen holes cut in another fence by defensive troops to facilitate their own movements, and let go with a barrage of grenades, satchel charges and recoilless rifle fire. The Reds ran into no outer guards, were on Danang's runway before they met their first challenger. Carrying coffee to a guard on duty down the line, a U.S. Air Force enlisted man spotted the raiders, emptied his pistol at them -- and was cut down by a burst of sub machine gun fire. He was the only American killed.

Before they fled under a hail of Marine mortar and small-arms fire within minutes after they had come, the raiders destroyed one Delta Dagger jet and two four-engine C-130 Hercules transports and damaged two Delta Daggers and one Hercules. Estimated total cost: $5,000,000. The Viet Cong left behind them trails of blood indicating that several had been wounded. One was captured, turned out to be a North Vietnamese soldier named Do Xuan Hien, 29, who under questioning said that he had infiltrated into South Viet Nam three months ago with his entire battalion and had trained for the Danang raid for a month.

In the Danang raid, as in many other ways, that "ugly little war" in Viet Nam last week got uglier -- and bigger.

>At Soctrang, 100 miles south of Saigon, Communists lobbed 17 mortar shells onto a U.S. helicopter base, damaging seven choppers.

>Near Chu Lai, 320 miles northeast of Saigon, four U.S. Marines were killed and four others wounded in a clash with the Viet Cong.

>In Kontum province in the monsoon-drenched central highlands, where a major Red offensive may be shaping up, the Communists took over the district capital of Tou Morong; heeding the advice of U.S. officers, who feared that rescue troops might fall into an ambush, the South Vietnamese government temporarily abandoned any attempt to recapture the town.

> In the Mekong Delta 35 miles south of Saigon, South Vietnamese troops overran the Communist-held village of Tan Hiep, surprised and killed seven Viet Cong provincial officials in the midst of a meeting; the dead included the Reds' Dinh Tuong province chief and the political commissar of the Viet Cong's 261st Battalion. Later in the same operation, air-supported South Vietnamese soldiers killed an estimated 255 Viet Cong, whose unit had been spotted along a canal.

>Outside Duchoa, 15 miles west of Saigon, two bugle-blowing Viet Cong battalions overwhelmed a South Vietnamese command post. Recalled an American adviser of a South Vietnamese machine gunner: "He was shooting the Reds down as fast as he could, but there were just more people coming at him than there were bullets coming out of his machine gun. He stayed right there and fired every round from his machine gun until they just physically overran him." Later, South Vietnamese forces counterattacked, sent the Communists fleeing with heavy casualties. The toll: 44 South Vietnamese dead, an estimated 134 Viet Cong killed.

> Four miles east of the northern city of Hue, a government unit killed 92 Viet Cong and captured eight. Seven South Vietnamese were killed.

> Near Cheo Reo in the central high lands, a Red regiment attacked three South Vietnamese battalions, ran into a buzz saw of resistance that left the hillsides littered with 123 guerrilla dead, to 37 Vietnamese and four Americans killed.

> North of the 17th parallel, U.S. Navy Skyhawks from the carrier Oriskany blew up eight big oil storage tanks 40 miles from Hanoi, the closest that attacking American aircraft have come to the North Vietnamese capital. U.S. planes also showered down millions of leaflets exhorting the North Vietnamese to halt the war.

> Above Hanoi, the American planes extended their raids to an army base at Thuan Chau, 75 miles from the Red Chi nese border. And, zeroing in on a tar get whose name evokes bitter Western memories, U.S. planes blasted an airfield and barracks at Dienbienphu, 185 miles northwest of Hanoi and site of the disastrous 1954 French defeat by the Communists. In two strikes, 30 American planes rained 58 tons of bombs and rockets on Dienbienphu, destroying 18 buildings, damaging nine, and pocking the runway with craters.

From the U.S. viewpoint, the major action of the week came when American troops for the first time went into combat action as a unit operating along side the South Vietnamese allies. Out of the Bienhoa airbase twelve miles north east of Saigon swarmed helicopters carrying 2,900 men of the U.S. Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade and two battalions of Vietnamese paratroopers. Their orders: through to "Zone D," so designated on French colonial army maps in the last century, although no one remembers quite why.

Except for a few French-owned rubber and cashew-nut plantations and villages too small to appear on maps, Zone D is virtually all jungle. For two decades, Zone D has been a Communist stronghold. Under its rain forest, towering in some places to a canopy 200 feet high, the Reds have burrowed out a honeycomb of underground tunnels and fortifications from which they mount major assaults including, in recent months, a bloody attack on Dongxoai, and another against the big airbase at Bienhoa.

Nutcracker Sweep. Three weeks ago, Zone D was the target of a saturation bombing by Guam-based B-52 intercontinental bombers; two weeks ago a battalion of the 173rd Airborne reconnoitered it. Last week the area where the U.S. troop-carrying copters would land, 16 miles north and slightly east of Bienhoa, was first pounded by artillery, B57 jet bombers and prop-driven Skyraiders. Then the 173rd went into action. The American paratroopers made a curving, four-mile sweep to the southeast. The South Vietnamese, some of whom were later relieved by 800 members of an Australian military assistance force, made an arcing sweep in the opposite direction (see map). In support were massed U.S., Australian and Vietnamese artillery 14 miles north of Bienhoa. Each national force was directed by its own commander -- the Americans by the 173rd's boss, Brigadier General Ellis W. Williamson, 47, a rock-jawed veteran of World War II and Korea, the Vietnamese by Sub-Brigadier General Du Quoc Dong, South Viet Nam's air borne commander.

Booby Traps & Dragonflies. Pushing through the forbidding foliage amid nervous dragonflies, the Americans, most of them youngsters who had never seen combat before, found the going eerie and treacherous. Private Robert L. Pedrotti, 19, of San Pedro, Calif., heard leaves rustle, froze, found himself the target of gunfire from a Viet Cong sniper 20 feet away; a bullet dented his helmet but only stunned him. Three other guerrilla snipers opened fire on Pedrotti's 13-man squad, which gave chase, killed one Viet Cong who was carrying a Russian-made machine gun.

The paratroopers also found and destroyed a Viet Cong cache of 250 tons of enemy rice (enough to feed a Viet Cong battalion for five years), medical supplies and cigarettes. When, after three days, the paratroopers withdrew from Zone D, they had suffered one dead, 22 wounded. In return, they had won a psychological victory. For, as an officer of the 173rd explained: "It turned out to be pretty much a walk in the woods. But these were some damned important woods. Any time we can do anything in D Zone--even if it's just psychological--we're doing well."

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