"I swear Dick, all he was doing was pushing his buffalo to cover."

ABOUT the war. The Big Generals have asked for a six month moratorium on troop withdrawals. A week or two ago. the Man, the President promised that we shouldn't worry, that there will still be 225,000 troops in Vietnam by July 1971.

The numbers don't matter. Marines back from the war explain that the U.S. has built massive fortified bastions at places like Cam Ran Bay and Da Nang. They don't intend to leave. The strategy is to pull all of the American troops back behind the battlements and cease most of the American ground attacks. "Vietnamization" means putting a buffer of South Vietnamese troops between the attacking NLF and the Americans in order to cut American casualties.

The U.S. then increases attacks in Laos and Cambodia which force the North Vietnamese to give aid to the guerrillas in those countries, thus giving less to the NLF. As it is, more bombs have been dropped on Laos than on any other country in the history of the world. A few years ago, there were 3 million people in Laos. Now there are somewhat below 2.5 million. For a little comparison, straight from Kurt Vonnegut, America killed 135,000 Germans at Dresden, 83,793 Japanese in Tokyo, and 71,379 at Hiroshima.

The final part of the strategy is to bomb all of South Vietnam, which the U.S. does every day. The areas friendly to the NLF, which are by now more than eighty per cent of the South, will be bombed until they are totally isolated from the rest of the country and can no longer receive medical supplies, ammunition, and information. The idea is to kill enough Vietnamese so that the NLF has to understand that they'll all die if they don't call a cease-fire.

With a cease-fire, the Green Bercts go back in and start all over again. Nixon has until the beginning of 1972 for all of this to happen.

He can then present his achievements to the American people: 150,000 American soldiers out of Vietnam, American casualties reduced to a half or a third of what they were under Johnson, and a cease-fire, which the NLF would find very difficult to break. Nixon then gets elected in 1972 and has four more years to put the Vietnamese in concentration camps.

If the plan doesn't work, then Nixon will use other means. The weekend everyone left for Christmas vacation, a high Defense Department official announced that the President had ordered contingency plans drawn up for "returning the war to the North" if infiltration continued and if American casualties remained high. Izzy Stone has a seemingly endless amount of documentation showing that Nixon is planning to start bombing North Vietnam once again.

In a word, if the NLF continues to make it difficult for the United States to commit genocide on the people of South Vietnam, Nixon will respond by committing it on the North.

The only way that I have been able to understand the war is to pretend that each time a GI or a Vietnamese died, that it was my brother or my father or my mother that died. By now over a million Vietnamese have been killed and probably eighty thousand Americans. All of America could not begin to digest that much sorrow.

You will probably notice that there is a peculiar lack of statistics in all that I have written. It is very tempting to give one stroke of the pen for each of the millions of people that America has killed or starved or maimed, or the thousands of rivers it has polluted, and reduce it to a table or graph and then say, "Look!"

Six or seven million South Vietnamese-nearly half of the population of the country-now live in concentration camps around the major cities. Saigon now has 2,800,000 people in it, making it the densest city in the world, twice as dense as Tokyo.

The newspapers give numbers killed every day. Numbers, the ultimate refuge of rational man. You can show anything with numbers. The New York Times, March 17, 1968, page one:

"Saigon-American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement in the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day long fighting."

That's the Times' story about the My Lai massacre. How many stories like that have you read in the last week? in the last year?