New York, April 30—President Nixon’s admirable speech [April 26] nevertheless leaves us with the difficulties that crawl through the text, haunting the reader.
He began, as usual, by describing the scale on which the United States has withdrawn its soldiers. Ninety-five per cent of the fighting men who were there when Mr. Nixon took office are now gone, and the remaining 5 per cent are not directly engaged in combat operations. Instead, the South Vietnamese are carrying the full military load on the ground. And it is a very considerable load. Their losses in dead and wounded last week were the highest of the entire war. At four thousand dead and wounded, you would need to visualize fifty thousand American casualties to get a comparable figure.
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