Were civilians given any warning prior to these counter attacks?

In some places a loudspeaker would come over in a helicopter or sometimes they came up to a segment of a city and broadcast over bull horns that people were to leave their homes immediately because they were bombing an area. In other sectors no warning was given. Sometimes you had as much as a couple of hours; sometimes you had no warning whatsoever. Anything which ran out of these areas of course was shot as being a suspected Viet Cong.

How badly was Saigon disrupted?

There was this marvelous juxtaposition. The Armed Forces Vietnam Network, which has a news broadcast for five minutes every hour on the hour, would come on first with this bland statement by General Westmoreland about the victory we are winning and how Saigon has now been completely retaken and that there are just pockets of resistance left. And that would be followed at the end of the news by an important anouncement to all American personnel: All American personnel are required to stay in their billets until further notice. There is a 24-hour curfew for all American personnel. Do not leave your billets except under armed escort.

Nine days after this, when I left, American personnel were only getting to work part of the day and were having to go in armed convoys. And half of the offices hadn't reopened yet. This huge war machine--you've got no idea how big it is until you see it--this huge war effort of civilian and military personnel in Saigon had ground to a halt for over a week.

Was the kill ratio in these battles as great as the U.S. forces have claimed?

Most of the newsmen I talked to just laughed. The body count is given primarliy by the South Vietnamese. If you compare the number of bodies supposedly counted to the number of weapons captured, the ratio was five, six, and even seven to one. The reporters told me to look at that figure because they said weapons are a good indication of how many soldiers you have killed.

There's little doubt that the Viet Cong did lose men in this attack. I saw dozens of Viet Cong dead in the city. The figures they were giving, however, I think were absolutely ludicrous, believed by no one on the scene.

What is the significance of the arrests in South Vietnam in the last few days?

At the moment I know of four men who've been arrested although the teletype tells us that there probably have been upwards of thirty-five arrests. Among these four, we met and talked with two of them. Thich Tri Quang, the militant Buddhist leader, perhaps one of the most important of the Buddhist leaders in South Vietnam, has been arrested. We saw him just before the attacks; we saw one of his colleagues, Thich Tinh Minh, just after the attacks.

During the attacks themselves the South Vietnamese government announced that An Quang pagoda where Thich Tri Quang had been living just on the outskirts of Cholon was being used as a command post by the V.C. Thich Tinh Minh said it's absolutely absurd.

He said that what was happening was that the Thieu government was using this as an occasion to take revenge and create harrassment for the Buddhists against whom they feel they have many scores to settle.

He said the An Quang pagoda was probably the place under greatest surveillance by the police, since they distrust it so. He said the Viet Cong would have been idiots to try to come near the place, and probably stayed very clear of it if they were going to try to get into the city secretly.

Trich Tri Quang, probably the single most influential Buddhist in the country and a major opponent of the current government is now jailed.

The two runners-up in the presidential campaign against Thieu, including the man who received the greatest number of votes in Saigon itself, Truong Dinh Do, have been arrested. As has the man who was behind him in the number of votes he received, Pham Khae Suu.