All four volumes have plenty of material on the war against South Vietnam (which of course they call the “defense of South Vietnam”).

There is more in the 17 volumes released shortly after by Congress, and a lot more in the State Department documentation released later.

I reviewed the two versions of the Pentagon Papers in For Reasons of State (1973), recently republished, including what the Gravel edition had about operations in the South; quite a lot. Reviewed the later releases in Rethinking Camelot, 1993, shortly after they appeared. In both case using lots of other material about the US war in the South as well, notably province studies, which have been quite revealing, from Jeffrey Race in 1969 until the present.

It’s true that the main focus of planning was on the bombing of the North. The much worse attack on the South involved very little planning, as far as the record shows. That difference shows up sharply also in the protests that finally developed: elite protests were almost entirely directed against the bombing of the North, and that was also largely true of the principled anti-war movement. I presume the basic reason is that the South was almost completely defenseless, so the war against it carried little cost for the US (apart, that is, the soldiers who were killed, wounded, serious affected by US chemical warfare, etc., but those are marginal issues for planners). In contrast, the bombing of the North had potentially quite serious costs. It involved bombing an important internal Chinese railroad that passed through North Vietnam, Haiphong harbor where there were Russian ships, Hanoi and areas around it where there were European Embassies and a lot of observers, etc. Could have had serious international complications, unlike the far more devastating war against the South. The same was true of the bombing of North Vietnam below the 20th parallel, which apparently turned it into a wasteland and the “secret war” in northern Laos, another monstrosity, but carrying little cost for the US, therefore not worthy of much attention.

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