During the '50's, when Nixon was Vice-President, John Foster Dulles liked to explain that he wanted to build up a gigantic bomber fleet that could contain communism simply by devastating any country that liked land reform too much.

But when Kennedy was elected, the new set of intellectuals that invaded the White House decided that bombing was a little too spectacular. What was needed, they decided, were specially-trained Marines who would be ready to make a quick trip to a rebellious land, get rid of the rebellion, set up a puppet government, and then return to defend the homeland. After all, hadn't the CIA coup in Guatemala worked just that way in 1954?

So Kennedy dispatched advisors to Vietnam, adopting the recommendations of General Maxwell Taylor and Stanford economist Eugene Staley. U. S. advisors would arm the South Vietnamese army and help them with three objectives:

first stage: pacification of South Vietnam and implantation of bases in North Vietnam;

second stage: economic rehabilitation of South Vietnam, reinforcement of the army and intensification of sabotage activity in North Vietnam;

third stage: development of the South Vietnamese economy and a march to the North.

The whole thing was to take 18 months. What happened was that the South Vietnamese proved that the Kennedy strategy couldn't work. The U. S. sent all of the troops it could find into South Vietnam but they couldn't defeat the Vietnamese.

So, it turns out, the Dulles strategy was better after all. The U. S. has ceased most of its ground activity in South Vietnam and is simply bombing the whole country. The areas friendly to the NLF, which are now more than 80 per cent of the South, will be bombed until they are totally isolated from each other and can no longer receive medical supplies, ammunition, or information. The idea is to kill enough Vietnamese so that the NLF has to understand that the U. S. wouldn't hesitate to kill them all. Then the NLF will have to call a cease-fire. That, at least, is the plan.

Sometimes the bored Defense Department public relations officers make an effort, yawn, to explain that the U. S. is only bombing the NLF supply lines in Laos. But as Noam Chomsky points out, it is difficult to defend the bombing of population centers and civilian targets in Northern Laos by saying that the U. S. is bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Northern Laos is at the opposite end of the country. Chomsky interviewed one Laotian refugee in a concentration camp outside of Vientiane recently who told him that the U. S. had bombed his village and forced them to move into the hills and build tunnels to protect themselves. Then the U. S. bombed the tunnels, so that they had to move yet farther out and build more tunnels. The U. S. eventually forced them to build new tunnel systems to house the entire village nine separate times. There are supposed to be one- and two-year old kids in Norther Laos who have never seen the sun.

The whole bombing thing makes a lot of sense when you realize that it solves the so-called problems very easily. First, there are spectacularly fewer American casualties, mostly those who are shot down on the bombing raids. Remember, they moved the airfields to Thailand after the NLF began attaching them in October 1964.

Second, by bombing the villages in the countryside, the U. S. has forced almost a third of the country into concentration camps around Vientiane. The rest are forced into the hills. Neither group can help the Pathet Lao by giving food to them, because they've all been forced from their farms.

It now seems that Nixon invaded Cambodia to give a pretext for the continued bombing of Cambodia after the U. S. troops pullout. The plans for Cambodia come from the same drawing board that produced those for Laos. In any case, the U. S. Army found very few NLF soldiers in Parrot's Beak. As they passed through the densely populated rice-producing area- if we can believe the American papers- they razed village after village, killing only peasants. Maybe Nixon thinks that the Red Khmers and the Cambodian resistance is not yet as strong as the Laotians and the Vietnamese, and that his policy of intimidation-by-genocide may work there. In any case, it is clear that the attacks in Cambodia were directed against the rural opposition to the Lon Nol government.

But if bombing the South Vietnamese, the Cambodians and the Laotians doesn't bring peace quickly enough, then Nixon has shown that he is ready to begin the continuous saturation bombing of North Vietnam once again. He's been denying the possibility of using tactical nuclear weapons lately, which, I bet, really scares the North Vietnamese.

In a word, if the NLF, the Pathet Lao and the Red Khmers continue to make it difficult for the U. S. to commit genocide on the peoples of their countries, then Nixon will respond by committing it on North Vietnam.

I used to think that war was Henry Fonda shooting it out behind a water trough on a dusty Wyoming street. Or Achilles chasing Hector around Troy. So the only way that I have been able to understand the war in Vietnam is to pretend, 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 80 thousand Americans. If all of us felt even a little bit of that in our stomachs, not even all of America could digest that much sorrow.