A War of Angry Cousins

Dong Dang. Lang Son. Blunt yet musical Vietnamese place names, redolent of history, blood and death. At the railhead city of Dong Dang, a 30-ft. yellow gate marks Japan's invasion of Indochina in 1940, which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt's perhaps apocryphal vow that "we will not go to war over any damn Ding Dong." At Lang Son, a crowded market town nine miles to the southeast, a nipple-crested mountain that colonial troops named the "baroness's breast" overlooks the ruins of a fort demolished even before the Viet Minh's war against the French.

Last week Dong Dang and Lang Son had been turned into tormented battlegrounds again. In an escalating war between angry Communist neighbors and cultures that have been antagonistic for 2,000 years, three divisions of invading Chinese troops descended on Dong Dang and on the Vietnamese coastal plain to the east in giant pincers aimed at Lang Son. Battalions of the Vietnamese regular army hauling heavy weapons rushed north to meet them head-on and force a confrontation that could be the first major battle of the week-long war. In preparation, China threw three fresh divisions against forward Vietnamese defenses. At week's end Vietnamese forces launched a counterattack in three border provinces.

Meanwhile Soviet freighters at Haiphong were unloading resupplies of sophisticated hardware, including missiles and radar equipment. Soviet reconnaissance kept watch on the battlefronts with high-altitude sorties over the Gulf of Tonkin. A flotilla of 13 Soviet ships cruised the South China Sea, awaiting the arrival of the flagship of the Soviet Pacific Fleet, the 16,000-ton cruiser Admiral Senyavin.

In Moscow, Soviet Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov assailed China's "dangerous provocation" and accused Peking of trying to "plunge the world into a war." The U.N.'s Security Council prepared to meet in urgent session, at Washington's request, to deal with the Chinese invasion as well as the earlier Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

China's assault on Viet Nam was expected and well advertised. Tensions had been building up ever since Hanoi's forced expulsion of ethnic Chinese last spring, Viet Nam's lightning rout of Peking's client regime in Cambodia last month, and an intensifying series of incidents on the China-Viet Nam border. Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing repeatedly and publicly telegraphed the punch during his U.S. visit this month, railing against the "hegemonistic" ambitions of the Soviet "polar bear" and against Vietnamese "aggression" in Southeast Asia. Hanoi "has to be taught a necessary lesson," he warned. In Tokyo on his way home, Teng again pointedly talked of "punitive action" against "those Cubans of the Orient."

Taking Peking's avowals at face value, Western intelligence experts predicted that the Chinese offensive would be limited to a "punitive lesson," and once the punishment had been meted out, the troops would withdraw. But in capitals around the world there were shudders at the ominous global implications if the war were not contained and short-lived, if it were to provoke direct Soviet intervention or retaliation on behalf of their Vietnamese client. It was a heyday for alarmists: "I would bet that it won't happen--but we are very much in danger of a third world war. It could be starting at this moment," warned New York Senator Daniel Moynihan. Administration advisers and military strategists were less worried, but no one was prepared to deny that the world's newest war contained the potential for much wider, and even uncontrollable, conflagration.

The fighting, in the wooded hills and tilled valleys of a scenic region called the Viet Bac, was shrouded behind military secrecy on both sides and by a cloud cover that thwarted satellite observation. Hanoi issued regular self-serving communiques; Peking's announcements were so cryptic as to be meaningless. Said one Hong Kong observer: "It's like hearing a couple of cats squawling in the middle of the night --they're making a helluva racket, but you don't know if they are fighting or making love." From the start of hostilities, however, it was all too obvious that the front-line units of China's huge, 3% million-man land army and those of Viet Nam's leaner but highly honed 615,000 troops were not embracing. At dawn on Saturday, Feb. 17, Chinese forces, massed more than 300,000 strong north of Viet Nam in Yunnan and Kwangsi provinces, loosed a massive artillery barrage on key border positions. Hardest hit were Vietnamese concentrations around the cities of Lao Cai, Muong Khuong, Cao Bang, Lang Son and Mong Cai. The People's Liberation Army, untested in major formation warfare since it crossed the Yalu River in October 1950 to surprise and rout the U.N. forces in Korea, stormed across the border at 26 different points.

The declaration of war came in a transparently disingenuous Peking announcement that its forces were engaged in a "counterattack" against Vietnamese provocations. "The Chinese frontier forces took the action when the situation became intolerable and there was no alternative," said the official Hsinhua News Agency. "We don't want a single inch of Vietnamese soil. What we want is a stable and peaceful frontier. After hitting back at the aggressors as far as necessary, our frontier forces will turn to guard strictly the frontiers of our motherland."

B.y 9 a.m. on Saturday, mortar shells descended near Lang Son, according to an Agence France-Presse correspondent on the scene. To the north, heavy artillery shells could be heard every ten to 30 seconds. "Chinese troops have launched a general attack, all the frontier posts are being shelled by heavy artillery," a Vietnamese provincial official announced. "Bloody fighting is taking place, human casualties are certainly heavy." Said a wounded 18-year-old Vietnamese soldier named Trien Van Mien, who staggered into town and fell in the road: "The Chinese are close by, they are everywhere."

After laying a carpet of artillery fire to soften Vietnamese defenses, an estimated 60,000 Chinese troops advanced in a broad surge along the jagged 480-mile border. Infantry, supported by T-59 tanks, spurted through the passes of the rugged, hilly terrain, bowled over Vietnamese outposts and fanned out in a broad, coordinated advance about six miles deep. By Hanoi's own admission, the Chinese after two days had occupied eleven towns and villages and had surrounded Dong Dang with tanks and self-propelled guns.

Then they appeared to pause.

In Peking, Teng assured a visiting Argentine diplomat that the invasion would be "circumspect" and "will not be extended or expanded in any way." That statement seemed to confirm the initial Western interpretation of the possible Chinese objective: a swift, hit-and-run offensive, and then go home. But the Chinese were not yet ready to withdraw. At this point the Chinese shock troops, led by General Yang Teh-chih, China's deputy field commander in the Korean War, had not tangled directly with Viet Nam's crack regular army--battle-tested by victorious successive campaigns in South Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia and equipped with the latest sophisticated Soviet hardware.

Abundantly forewarned, the Vietnamese let regional border forces and local village militia take the brunt of the initial attack. An estimated three to five regular divisions (at least 30,000 troops) were held back. They were apparently arrayed in a crescent-shaped defense line that stretched from Yen Bai on the Red River in the west to Quang Yen on the east coast. Their mission: to defend the coastal plain surrounding Hanoi and Haiphong, and wait for the Chinese to show their hand.

On Tuesday, the fourth day of the war, the Chinese advance resumed with a vengeance. A seemingly formless front rapidly developed two main, logical prongs of attack: one in the northwest on the railroad line leading south to Hanoi, the other in the the east on the major rail link that parallels Highway 1, the jugular thoroughfare from Friendship Pass. Both thrusts appeared to aim directly at Viet Nam's capital. At the same time, an auxiliary Chinese force, spearhead units of an estimated three more divisions, probed toward the coast for a possible end run aimed at cutting off Highway 4 to Lang Son and later, perhaps, the main Vietnamese reinforcement and supply route of Highway 1, which years ago gained the dolorous nickname "street without joy."

In the west, as the bulk of the Chinese offensive doubled its penetration to ten or 15 miles, PLA infantry captured Lao Cai, a rail center of 100,000 on the Red River. To counter this threat to Hanoi, the Vietnamese marched north to engage the Chinese at Lang Son and Dong Dang.

"Several thousand men of both regular and regional Vietnamese units with heavy arms are advancing toward Chinese positions," a correspondent for Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun reported from Lang Son. He described Vietnamese trucks with 105-mm. guns rolling north on Highway 1; other vehicles carried troops, weapons, ammunition and fuel toward the border. Meanwhile, under the fire of long-range 130-mm. howitzers, columns of refugees fled south, leaving Lang Son to the troops, security cadres and government officials who teemed around staging areas.

Hanoi radio blared that Viet Nam's defense of Lang Son had inflicted more than 3,000 Chinese casualties, and that in just one coastal battle 50 miles southeast, Vietnamese forces had "trounced three battalions and wiped out 700 Chinese aggressors." In all, Viet Nam announced, its forces had killed 5,000 to 8,000 Chinese in five days, while losing less than half as many. The lopsided claims were remindful of the inflated enemy "body counts" reeled off each day by U.S. briefers during the Viet Nam War. Western sources in Peking estimated that the Vietnamese had suffered the most in the early fighting: 10,000 killed or wounded, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 Chinese casualties.

The Vietnamese easily outmaneuvered Peking in the propaganda war if not on the battlefield. They issued virulent denunciations of Chinese conduct, including alleged atrocities and biological warfare. Radio Hanoi claimed that Chinese warplanes bombed factories, power plants and communications centers, inflicting "terrible" damage and civilian casualties, and that Chinese artillery fired "chemical shells" at border targets. Backing up its ally, the Soviet Union accused Chinese troops of indiscriminately burning down villages and shooting women and children. Pravda, in a dispatch from Lang Son, alleged that a Chinese unit intercepted a civilian bus on a country road and executed all the passengers.

Hanoi also claimed that it had firm evidence of Peking's long planning for the invasion. Newsmen based in the capital, taken on a guided tour of the front, were shown printed Vietnamese phrase books found on the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. Among other things, the eight-page pamphlets contained instructions to be given Vietnamese prisoners ("You will be taken to a safe place and allowed to rest ... Don't worry. Your wound will be treated immediately.")

The fuse under the China-Viet Nam explosion had been sputtering for nearly a year. Last spring, intent on consolidating their purer-than-thou socialist revolution, the Vietnamese authorities decided to root out "bourgeois trade" and "dangerous elements," namely ethnic Chinese who had lived for years in northern mining areas, in Danang and in the bustling Cholon district of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). An estimated 160,000 Chinese refugees fled the country, aboard fishing boats or on foot across Friendship Pass, to resettle on communes in Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces. Meanwhile, a sporadic series of raids and skirmishes that were to intensify in the next months flared back and forth across the border.

Irate at the maltreatment of the Chinese, Peking--which had provided Hanoi with an estimated $14 billion in aid over the past two decades--abruptly cut off 21 current assistance projects. In June, as the last Chinese aid technicians went home, Hanoi yielded to longstanding Soviet blandishments and formally jumped into Moscow's economic orbit as a member of the Communist trade alliance, COMECON.

In November Moscow and Hanoi formalized their alliance in a 25-year Soviet-Vietnamese treaty of friendship, which was signed with much ceremony in Moscow by Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Aleksei Kosygin and the Vietnamese Communist Party head, Le Duan, as well as Premier Pham Van Dong. Inside the usual bouquet of trade and cultural agreements there was no mistaking the glaring military nutshell: an ambiguous degree of mutual defense, to the extent of "consultations and appropriate effective measures to ensure the peace and security of their countries." For Peking the treaty was a stinging political rebuke.

Then came Viet Nam's lightning conquest of Cambodia. Within a month of its full-scale invasion on Christmas Day, pro-Hanoi insurgents backed by Vietnamese regulars routed the barbarous China-supported Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. Few international tears were shed as Pol Pot and the straggling remnants of his army were driven into western jungle pockets. From these redoubts, the Khmer Rouge has carried on vigorous resistance against the new regime, a pro-Vietnamese government headed by a former Khmer Rouge defector, Heng Samrin, and propped up by an estimated 130,000 Vietnamese troops. For China the fall of Cambodia meant an enormous loss of face. Ever since, as Teng admitted in Washington, China has steered weapons and supplies to Pol Pot's insurgency in an effort to reverse its fortunes and avenge its own humiliations.

Tension mounted meanwhile along the border with Viet Nam. China alleged that Hanoi's troops had intruded into its territory on 1,100 different occasions. Viet Nam accused China of almost daily incursions. Charges and countercharges enlivened every artillery barrage and exchange of small-arms fire, not to mention kidnaping, livestock rustling and planting of poisoned bamboo stakes. In its loud political buildup to the invasion, China underscored the border aggravations to anyone who would listen--at the U.N., in diplomatic exchanges, and in a shower of communiques. Peking also claimed that Viet Nam was mobilizing for war by drafting recruits at a rate that surpassed the height of the war against Saigon and the U.S., and by calling 200,000 ex-servicemen back under arms.

On D-day minus one, Pham Van Dong, Army Chief of Staff General Van Tien Dung and other Cabinet members flew to Phnom-Penh to sign a friendship treaty with the new Heng Samrin regime. The absence of Viet Nam's top officialdom from Hanoi may have helped determine the timing of Peking's attack.

For many Sinologists, Peking's invasion was another illustration of China's "Great Wall mentality": its obsessive fear of encroachments, real or imagined, against its borders. This siege mentality compelled China to enter the Korean War. It has contributed to periodic flare-ups between Chinese and Soviet troops along the Ussuri and Amur rivers. It may also have been behind China's attack against India in 1962. That assault, in which the Chinese penetrated up to 100 miles inside Indian territory on a broad front but withdrew benignly one month later, was regarded by some as a possible blueprint precedent for the current punitive action.

By invading Viet Nam, Peking clearly intended to regain some lost prestige and prove it is no paper tiger. The invasion also presumably had a tactical goal: drawing Vietnamese troops away from Cambodia in order to ease the pressure on Pol Pot's surviving forces. But the risks involved in the Viet Nam invasion were far greater than those involved in the border war with India. Besides a possible Soviet retaliation that could come at any time, China already has suffered a political setback in world eyes. The Japanese, who joined them in decrying "hegemony" when they signed a treaty with Peking last year, were upset that China was practicing such blatant hegemony of its own. Some American policymakers took grim satisfaction at the ironic spectacle of five Communist countries--the Soviet Union, China, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos--caught in a bloody family feud. But there is not much to be satisfied about. China's shining image as a new friend intent on furthering peace and stability in Asia is suddenly badly tarnished.

Not that Viet Nam has come off much better. Hanoi's expansion into Laos and its invasion of Cambodia did much to demolish Viet Nam's widespread image in the Third World as a brave anticolonial underdog and show it up more as an Oriental 20th century Sparta intent on becoming gendarme and ruler of all it can grasp. One mystery: How do the Vietnamese maintain that martial impulse after more than 30 years of constant warfare? Part of the answer derives from who has the upper hand in the collective leadership that succeeded Ho Chi Minh. The eleven-man Politburo is divided between pragmatists who want to concentrate on internal reconstruction and hard-liners who are bent on military adventure, despite the gruesome hardships involved. The hardliners, led by pro-Soviet Party Boss Le Duan and Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, are in control. Says a diplomat long acquainted with Hanoi:

"The Vietnamese leaders regard themselves as messianic representatives of the purest revolutionary movement in the world. They are affected, if you will, by an arrogance of power." Combined with the arrogance is the urging of Moscow, which moved into the power vacuum left behind by the U.S. retreat. There is some small justification for the argument that the U.S. may have driven Viet Nam into the Soviet embrace last summer when it spurned Hanoi's modest attempts at reconciliation.

The complex causes of the China-Viet Nam War are also rooted, however, in the historic animosity between the two ethnic cousins, which dates back 21 centuries to the Chinese colonialization of the kingdom of Nam Viet in the Red River Delta. In A.D. 39 two sister queens named Trung Trac and Trung Nhi led a four-year revolt against the Middle Kingdom; a wrathful counterattack smashed the Vietnamese troops at the River Day. Rather than surrender to the Chinese, the two queens jumped in the river and drowned--a martyrdom still honored by Vietnamese girls every March on Hai Ba Trung Day.

Other major revolts, in the third, sixth and tenth centuries, helped the Viets build a martial spirit, which was needed to ward off attacks from Tais in the west and Chams in the south. A dozen more wars and another ruthless Chinese occupation in the early 15th century reinforced the Viets' independent spirit and burned hostility toward the Chinese into their minds for good. Before World War II, Nationalist China gave shelter to anti-French Vietnamese political refugees, but even this consideration failed to erase the enmity. In his subsequent war against the French, Ho Chi Minh was offered the support of Mao Tse-tung's advancing Communist army, which might have meant quick, joint victory. Ho declined. Later, with pithy logic, he explained why he had preferred to fight a protracted guerrilla war on his own: "It is better to sniff the French dung for a while than to eat China's all our lives."

The spectacle last week of the two big Communist powers, China and the Soviet Union, at each other's throats on the brink of a possible shooting war--with the U.S., their once common adversary, passively standing by--bordered on a global Theater of the Absurd. After some initial confusion, the increasingly fragmented international Communist movement swung overwhelmingly against China. In Eastern Europe, independent Yugoslavia maintained its customary neutrality. Maverick Rumania appealed to both sides to "stop military actions immediately." The rest of the Warsaw Pact countries, predictably, supported Moscow in condemning what Bulgaria called China's "adventurous and aggressive actions." Even Albania broke out of its longstanding isolation to condemn its recently estranged Chinese ally.

In France, Italy and Spain, the major Eurocommunist parties all lined up against China, with one quirky difference: as a reminder of his vaunted autonomy from Moscow, Spanish Communist Party Boss Santiago Carrillo compared China's aggression against Viet Nam to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Throughout Latin America, leftist groups raised an anti-Chinese chorus. Thousands of students marched down Mexico City's Paseo de la Reforma with banners that said VIVA VIET NAM--VANGUARD OF THE WORLD REVOLUTION.

The conflict between Communist neighbors had a disillusioning impact on some leftist European intellectuals. In an article for Milan's Corriere della Sera, Journalist Giuliano Zincone recalled how he had marched in protest against the American presence in Viet Nam and had contributed money to the Viet Cong. China was "on the side of Viet Nam, like Che, united in the struggle." But then came Peking's turmoil: the masses attacking the Gang of Four, the resurgence of the old "capitalist reader," Teng. By invading Cambodia, Viet Nam betrayed its principles. "Now the circle has closed," Zincone wrote. "Gentle China, the solid, the responsible, sends its tanks to 'punish' its former brothers, with the risk of triggering catastrophic conflict. We are starting from zero. Orphans."

With so obvious a propaganda advantage, the Soviet Union at week's end had essentially limited its counterattack against China to a fusillade of words. Pravda ventilated Soviet "wrath and indignation" at the Chinese aggression. Without making a specific threat, Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov reaffirmed that the U.S.S.R. "will honor its obligations under the treaty of friendship and cooperation with Viet Nam." Official press and radio also charged the U.S. with connivance in the Chinese attack. Emphasizing that the Chinese invasion was launched "almost the next day" after Teng Hsiao-p'ing's return from Washington, Pravda protested that "no propaganda twists and turns will help cover up the responsibility of those circles in the U.S.A. that facilitated, directly or indirectly, Peking's actions." The attack on the U.S. was preposterous, but the Soviet ire was understandable and predictable. Nothing about the new U.S.-China relationship has pleased them.

As long as the Vietnamese forces can hold their own, the Soviets will probably prefer to reap the propaganda benefits of restraint. The danger is that if the Chinese were to press the war too far, moving against Hanoi or Haiphong or indicating an intention to stay on Vietnamese soil, the Soviets themselves would not want to appear weak and would feel compelled to act. If so, what would they do? Administration experts say the Soviet options are many. They could mount a major resupply of Vietnamese forces, dispatch large numbers of military advisers, or even take direct military action in Viet Nam.

More ominous, they could also threaten Peking's sense of security by moving along the 4,500-mile Soviet-Chinese border, which is bristling with 44 divisions of the Red Army. Soviet troops could strike into the frozen, inhospitable terrain of Sinkiang, but a more likely target is Manchuria, China's industrial heartland. Analysts hopefully discount an air attack on China's nuclear faculty at Lop Nor as a "doomsday" option, one perhaps favored by Moscow's military brass, but not by the Politburo.

The U.S. has been relegated to the role of sideline observer, without much influence on either combatant. The Administration's position was that the Chinese intrusion was a direct result of the Soviet-encouraged Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, which, in turn, was seen as Moscow's response to the normalization of

Chinese-American relations. U.S. policy was based on the notion that this country should not become involved in a conflict among far-off Communist states. Thus Washington evenhandedly urged Peking and Hanoi to withdraw their troops from both Viet Nam and Cambodia. Pursuing its honest-broker role, the U.S. also pressed for an urgent meeting of the United Nations' Security Council, hoping to rally enough votes for a resolution calling for reciprocal withdrawal.

In the opening debate Friday, U.S.

Ambassador Andrew Young called the Southeast Asia situation "dangerous" and urged the combatants "to move the dispute to the negotiating table." Unaligned nations seemed to be lining up behind the proposed U.S. resolution, while China and the Soviet Union offered diametrically opposed resolutions, one condemning the aggression by Viet Nam, the other condemning aggression by China. On Saturday, in protest against the council's decision to give the floor to the representative of Pol Pot's defeated regime in Cambodia, Soviet Delegate Mikhail Kharlamov stalked out. He was followed moments later by the Czechoslovak delegation. Kharlamov was careful to leave an aide in attendance at the table, but it was the first Soviet walkout from the Security Council since the Korean War.

Some foreign diplomats referred to Peking's possible use of Washington as a tool in its invasion strategy. Administration officials scoffingly denied anything like the connivance alleged by Moscow, and persuasively insisted that Carter had indeed tried to deter Teng from any "unwise" action. The question was whether Washington, eager to normalize relations with Peking, might not have been inadvertently enlisted in China's diplomatic preparation for the attack. "Now we know why China showed such haste to normalize relations with the U.S.," said Senator Charles Percy after the invasion.

At week's end, there were indications that the Chinese were encountering tougher terrain and tougher resistance than they had perhaps expected. Presumably, they had the might and numbers to penetrate as far as they chose. But could they extricate themselves from the historic quicksand with similar ease? The gravestones at Dien Bien Phu. The carcasses of Marine helicopters near Danang. Other place names, other landmarks testify to the tragic fortunes of outsiders who visited Viet Nam in the past and later wished they had never come. In meting out their "lesson," the Chinese--like the French and Americans before them--could find Viet Nam to be an unruly classroom.

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