Bloody news from Vietnam

The scan: The Week v4 no14.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

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In the last week of September, there were again heavy casualties in the war in South Vietnam. According to a Reuter dispatch from Saigon, the National Liberation Front (Vietcong!) was estimated to have lost 1,067 killed and 144 captured. During the same seven days, the ‘Government of South Vietnam! as the U.S.-directed and financed dictatorship is called in some yuerters - lost 229 killed, 566 wounded and 68 missing, At the same time 22 Americans were killed, 64 wounded and one missing. Considering that no estimate of N.L.F. wounded or of civilian deatis and caualties can be made, and that the constant U.S. air attacks on South Vietnam leaves trails of dead and dying behind them every day, a conservative estimate of casualties all round in the war in the South is several thousand dead or maimed every week - nearly all of them Vietnamese. The Pentagon has tried to keep the Saigon puppet army at between 500,000 and 600,000 = from a population less than that of South-East England. It has been able to find cannon fodder in the past in two ways: people joined to escape the general economic misery or = even worse - to get out of the concentration camps (‘strategic hamlets'). With the collapse of the U.S. Staley-Taylor plan for 12,000 concentration camps in South Vietnam, the American-held cities in the South have been ransacked for draft-dodgers. According to military sources in Saigon, more that 8,000 Vietnamese reluctant to be conscripted have been picked up off the streets of the capital in the past four months. Saigon authorities have fiequently admitted in the past that desertion from the puppet army is a major problem «= Vietnamese desert by the hundred at a time. The Free World doesn't seem so attractive to the Vietnamese as it does to Presidmt Johnson or Harold Wilsons Meanwhile in North Vietnam the Hanoi Government several weeks ago claimed its 500th U.S. aircraft shot down since the Americans started bombing the North. The American economy is reliably reported to be moving rapidly into its healthiest condition since the Korean war.