[News] Vietnam Will Win: Emptying the Sea

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/02/28/vietnam-will-win-emptying-the-sea/


  Vietnam Will Win: Emptying the Sea

by Wilfred Burchett - February 28, 2018
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Among the ways Washington tries to sell a “continuous progress” story to 
the American public is by the synthetic creation of “refugees from 
Vietcong terror.” The statistical increase of those in the shanty camps 
around major cities is portrayed as “progress” and proof of communist 
perfidy.

These unfortunates are indeed refugees from terror. But it is American 
terror from the countless tons of bombs dropped by B-52 bombers. Others 
are refugees from the sweep operations of U.S. troops, which often had 
no other aim than to strike terror in the population in the NLF zones 
and the disputed zones and to serve as an object lesson in the restive 
Saigon-controlled areas. A similar process produced the statistics of 
“defectors.” In the sweep operations the same American officer decided 
whether those rounded up should be herded off into refugee centers or 
“open arms” camps for conscription into the Saigon Army, or handed over 
to the torture and execution squads as “hardcore Vietcong.”

Jonathan Schell, in his book about Ben Suc, described how the survivors 
of the assault on the village were taken off by force to the infamous 
Phu Loi[1] <#_edn1> camp and found the words WELCOME TO FREEDOM AND 
DEMOCRACY and WELCOME TO THE RECEPTION CENTER FOR REFUGEES FLEEING 
COMMUNISM on cloth banners strung over the barbed wires surrounding the 
camp.[2] <#_edn2> Their numbers, however, were added to the progress 
reports.

It is a commentary on the state of self-deception which dominates the 
U.S. Command in Saigon, that before the mass bombings started General 
Westmoreland employed psychologists to sample public opinion in South 
Vietnam’s villages about the bombings and reported back to Washington 
their surprising conclusion that the peasants apparently enjoyed being 
bombed and had no hard feelings about the United States on this score. 
Farfetched? There is a report from Washington in the October 13, 1965 
/New York Herald Tribune /by columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak 
which states:

“Two bits of evidence fly in the face of all the lamentations that 
although U.S. bombing of villages in South Vietnam may be winning 
battles, it is losing the war by alienating the people.

“Evidence No. 1. The results of a special task-force studying the 
psychological reaction in the villages, indicates no mass anti-US. 
feeling resulting from the bombing.

“Evidence No. 2. The counter-insurgency mission headed by retired Major 
General Edward Lansdale that has gone into the villages to win over the 
people has not sent back a single complaint about the bombings.

“This good news is crucially important because for strictly military 
reasons the U.S. bombings in the South figures are to accelerate-not 
decrease-in the near future…

“Still U.S. policy-makers have kept their fingers crossed about the 
ultimate impact of the bombings…

“Although no official announcement was made, a special task force has 
been set up by Army General William C. Westmoreland …

“Its assignment, to study psychological reactions in the villages to 
remorseless pounding from the air. A Pentagon expert in mass psychology 
has been assigned to the task force …

“In the classic definition by Mao Tse-tung, guerrilla warriors are fish 
and the sea they swim in is the people. Without the sea, the fish could 
not swim.”

As the U.S. war machine was unable to catch the fish, it was to be used 
to try to empty the sea. The Evans-Novak article was the prelude to a 
concentrated effort to wipe out everything that lives, moves or grows in 
the areas controlled by the NLF. By bombs on the villages, poisonous 
chemicals on the vegetation and “kill all, burn all, destroy all” sweep 
operations, total war was declared on every man, woman, child, beast and 
bird, everything that lived and grew in the NLF-controlled areas. The 
only way to escape immediate death, according to official U.S. policy, 
was to accept the living death of the concentration camps dubbed 
“Refugee Reception Centers.” Exaggerated?

“Each day, each week, each month, more and more of your comrades, base 
camps, and tunnels are found and destroyed… Only DEATH is near. Do you 
hear the planes? Do you hear the bombs? These are the sounds of DEATH: 
YOUR DEATH. Rally now to survive.”[3] <#_edn3>

This is a typical text of leaflets dropped over villages. The reverse 
side is illustrated with the photo of a bomb victim with entrails 
gushing out or some other depiction of death intended to terrify the 
viewer. But to try to escape death in any other than the approved method 
of fleeing to Saigon-controlled areas is evidence of guilt. For any 
villager to flee the bombs or machine-gun bullets during a bombing raid 
was evidence of guilt and justification for being cut down; anyone who 
hid in a shelter during the aerial and artillery bombardment that 
preceded American entry into any village was automatically a “Vietcong” 
to be gassed like a rat in a burrow. Even possession of such a shelter 
was evidence of guilt, which is why the casualties when the Americans 
“accidentally” bombed villages under Saigon control or in the disputed 
areas were immeasurably higher than when they bombed one in the NLF 
areas, where every home had its deep shelter and every village its 
communication trenches.

Only those who stood and died above ground could be presumed innocent. 
The only live, “guiltless” Vietnamese in the countryside were those 
behind barbed wire or who accepted this for their immediate future.

“Perhaps if you accept this war, all can be justified – the free strike 
zones, the refugees, the spraying of herbicides on crops, the napalm… We 
have flown at a safe height over the deserted villages, the sterile 
valleys, the forests with huge swathes out and the long-abandoned 
rice-fields… We read with anguish the daily count of ‘enemy’ dead. We 
know that these ‘enemy’ are not all combat soldiers committed to one 
side. Many are old men, women and young boys who ran when a helicopter 
hovered, who were hiding from bombs in an enemy bunker, or who refused 
to leave their farms… ”

This was written by a group of Americans who knew better than any others 
what was going on in the villages. It is an extract from an open letter 
sent to President Johnson on September 19, 1967, signed by Don Luce, 
head of International Volunteer Services (IVS), a social welfare group 
operating in South Vietnam with U.S. endorsement. Besides Luce, four 
deputy heads and 44 others from IVS signed the letter. After seven years 
service in South Vietnam, Luce and his four deputies resigned in protest 
over American conduct of the war. Another 35 IVS members, almost all the 
Americans, also wanted to sign but were intimidated by U.S. Embassy 
threats to draft them immediately into the U.S. Army if they signed. 
Apart from a few isolated Quaker groups, the IVS was the only American 
organization to have real contacts with the population in the 
countryside. Some of the signatories of the “open letter” told me that 
virtually all members had come to South Vietnam deeply convinced of the 
righteous nature of the American commitment in Vietnam but had become 
sickened by the realities. The signatories demanded, among other things, 
an end to the bombings of North Vietnam, recognition of the NLF, an 
immediate end to the practice of defoliation (the spraying of crops with 
toxic chemicals) and an end to the war.

The “refugee reception center” was Westmoreland’s contribution to the 
“strategic hamlet” conception of his predecessors. At all costs, South 
Vietnam’s rural population was to be put behind barbed wire, and if the 
promise of dollar handouts proved ineffective to lure the peasants in, 
then the threat and the reality of extermination of the rural 
recalcitrants would be applied. One of the methods was to designate 
regions as “free strike zones.” Any area not under Saigon control, that 
is, where the peasants were not behind barbed wire, was declared a “free 
strike zone” where bomber crews who had no combat missions or were 
returning with unused ordnance could bomb and strafe at will, their 
activities supplemented by regular raids by B-52 bombers, each of which 
carried well over 30 tons of bombs.

During one period, it was only South Vietnamese Air Force pilots who had 
the right to` dump their bomb loads in the “free strike” zones. But 
according to a /New York Times/[4] <#_edn4> report, the Pentagon 
assigned a Rand Corporation study group to advise whether American 
planes should also start large-scale bombing of the villages. The study 
group’s conclusion was summarized by the /Times /as: “We’ve got the 
onus, let’s get the bonus.” This curious expression, explained the 
/Times, /meant that the Rand group had taken into consideration that the 
“South Vietnamese” planes which had been destroying villages for years 
past were piloted by Americans, so the additional opprobrium incurred by 
openly using the US. Air Force, and on a much bigger scale, would not 
make much difference.

Tran Van Thien, a political officer at NLF headquarters, commented on 
the Evans-Novak and Rand reports as follows: “The Nazis in their time 
carried out so called ‘scientific experiments’ on the living bodies of 
their victims, deliberately infecting them with deadly bacteria to study 
the reactions as they died. The Americans are now experimenting with the 
living body of the whole South Vietnamese people. From the Nazi 
experiments came extermination in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and 
other such camps. For our people mass extermination is to be applied in 
the countryside on a national scale.”

The number of “refugees from Vietcong terror” moved up by tens of 
thousands a month, according to the intensity of the bombing raids and 
the success of American “sweep” operations. Every additional 100,000 was 
acclaimed by U.S. press officers, in Saigon and Washington, as proof of 
progress in the war, a fantasy repeated by high officials, including the 
U.S. President. When the figure approached the million mark, there were 
some conscience pangs in certain circles. Senator Edward Kennedy, after 
an on-the-spot look at the refugee camp situation, ran off to Geneva and 
other world centers trying to present this deliberate manufacture of 
refugees as an international problem, the relief of which should be 
financed by international refugee organizations.

Everything from bombs to bulldozers was used to wipe out of existence as 
many villages as American power could reach. Late in 1966 I entered Cu 
Chi District, one of the six that make up Gia Dinh Province, in which 
Saigon is located. The district center is about 12 miles north of Saigon 
in a straight line, 24 miles by road. Of the prosperous 
bamboo-surrounded villages I had seen during my first visit to Cu Chi 
nearly three years previous, not a trace remained – not a hamlet, not a 
house (in the usual sense of the term), not a tree, not a buffalo. Where 
there had been lush stretches of rice, magnificent fields of cabbages, 
turnips and pineapples, there were only overlapping craters. Earlier 
that year in North Vietnam I had seen fields of sweet potatoes and corn 
“rise to their feet.” Actually these were camouflaged self-defense units 
during maneuvers in one case, and school children with green-leaf 
camouflage getting to their feet after an air raid, in the other. But at 
Cu Chi, I saw the soil itself standing up after the passage of a flight 
of helicopters. Stark naked men who rose from the mud to haul and push 
plows and wield hoes, and drop back into the mud when the helicopters 
returned.

There had been 60,000 people in the six villages of Cu Chi when the 2nd 
Brigade of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division set up its headquarters there 
on January 19, 1966, after a 10-day “search and destroy” offensive in 
the district. In the month that followed the Americans claimed they 
fired 180,000 shells into Cu Chi District, continuing at about the same 
tempo throughout that year. There were daily plane attacks against any 
sign of life: a bush moving with the wind, a chicken running out of a 
hedge or a buffalo wallowing in a pond. While I was there high velocity 
guns were fired at all hours of the night, sending streams of shells 
pouring into the fields in every direction from the brigade headquarters.

I spoke with one gaunt, naked cultivator. He was not embarrassed and he 
did not need to be. The gory mud caked over his body removed any 
impression of nudity. He was a statue in living clay, part of the soil 
come to life in human form.

“My people have always been here,” he said. “My father, my father’s 
father and his father as long as we can count back. Their bones lie 
here, even if the Yankee devils have torn up the tombstones with their 
bombs and shells and tanks. I will live and fight here and if I die from 
Yankee shells or bombs, at least my bones win remain on the same bit of 
soil as those of my ancestors.”

I asked how anything could be produced under such conditions. “We can’t 
produce as much as before, but enough to keep us alive and fighting,” he 
said. “We have no buffalo and the Americans have destroyed most of the 
plows. They plow the fields with their bombs and shells. Sometimes we 
have only to rake over the water-filled craters to plant some rice 
seedlings and a few cabbages. They started to send tanks to crush our 
little plots but after the first couple got bogged in the mud, they gave 
up. We give the plots a bit more water these days,” he said with a grim 
laugh which brought some caked mud peeling off his cheeks. “We from Cu 
Chi,” he concluded, “will eat grass and roots, the earth itself if need 
be, but we will never leave this soil of our ancestors. We will fight, 
and our sons and grandsons will fight until the invader takes himself off.”

Hiep, a member of the Cu Chi district committee of the NLF, whom I had 
met during my previous visit, explained that Cu Chi formed the southern 
point of a zone extending about 12 miles northeast to Ben Cat, which was 
bombed and shelled continuously in order “to turn the area into a desert 
in which nothing can move, live or grow. But apart from trying to 
prevent our forces from advancing toward the capital,” Hiep continued, 
“the Americans hope to force our people into the refugee camps as part 
of the so called Lansdale[5] <#_edn5> ‘pacification plan.’ But in spite 
of everything the population hangs on. Of our 60,000, less than 
800-representing 150 families-have left the district. But not to enter 
the refugee camps. As this is an old revolutionary area and our rear 
stretches back into the solidly liberated areas, most of those who left 
went back into those areas, while some others left for contested areas 
where the bombings are not so fierce. Nobody fell for the American 
promise of money to buy a house and 500 piastres a month in the refugee 
camps. Some of our agents went into the camps, then came out to report 
on the terrible conditions there, and if any had ideas about taking off 
for the camps they changed their minds when they heard what goes on 
there, families starving to death in filth and squalor, and the camp 
commanders grabbing most of the miserable sums the Americans give for 
their upkeep.”

In an area like Cu Chi, where the formidable guerrillas remained 
strongly organized and could protect the population, the Americans could 
make no headway in rounding up the population. This was also the case in 
the Mekong Delta, where there was no strong implantation of U.S. forces. 
But Quakers and IVS people who worked in the Delta regions, have told me 
of innumerable cases in which helicopters suddenly swooped down on a 
village, sending roofs and street-market goods flying into the air in 
swirls of dust, while troops rounded up as many people as they could 
catch, throwing them aboard the helicopters and taking off with the 
motors never having stopped. Mothers had no idea where their children 
were taken even; children, no idea of the fate of their mothers. 
Families were ripped apart in this artificial creation of a refugee 
problem which will make the “displaced persons” of World War II seem 
insignificant considering the proportion of families involved. That the 
might of the United States is being used deliberately to create a new 
“displaced persons” problem on an unprecedented scale is one of the most 
scandalous aspects of U.S. activities in Vietnam. The systematic 
breaking up of families is all the more horrifying in a country where 
family ties, of all things, are held most sacred.

“They neither know why they are arrested nor why they have been torn 
from their homes and separated from their families. And this is all the 
more intolerable and contrary to official statements that those 
concerned were only IC’s, that is to say, civilians recognized as 
innocent following a tough interrogation,” stated Orville Schell.[6] 
<#_edn6>

The IVS “open letter” to President Johnson quoted above is in some 
respects as bitter an indictment as I have ever heard from an NLF cadre. 
Another portion of the letter includes this statement from an IVS 
volunteer at the showplace refugee center of Cai Be in the Mekong Delta:

“Cai Be has a very successful refugee program as measured by the 
criteria of the government, but when measured by any human criteria, it 
stinks. We have neatly arranged hamlets, good canals, military security, 
elections and dozens of other assets which win points in Saigon, but we 
don’t have people living decent lives… These refugees are with few 
exceptions farmers, but they have been settled on plots of land so small 
that only the ingenious can manage anything like a decent life. I say 
the most ingenious can do this without knowing a single person who is 
that ingenious… Not only do refugee camps force these people into an 
existence which is marginal at best they do incalculable violence to the 
customs and traditions of the Vietnamese people… The government has not 
offered a new and better life, it has only exchanged one form of 
terrorism for another.” (It should be borne in mind that the IVS group 
had come to Vietnam firmly convinced that they were helping to save the 
South Vietnamese from “communist terrorism” and “aggression from the 
North.” Their criticisms were based on what they saw in the U.S.-Saigon 
areas; none had experience of life in NLF zones.)

“As volunteers in Vietnam, we work with people, not statistics,” the 
letter continues. “War reported in statistics gives a false picture. We 
read the monthly totals of Hoi Chanh (Open Arms Returnees) and then ask 
who these people are. Hardcore Vietcong suddenly disillusioned with a 
philosophy that has been their life and bread for years? No. They are 
marginal Vietcong at best, if Vietcong at all, looking for a little rest 
from this tired war and attracted by the dollar signs of the program. 
People who can be bought are not going to effect change in Vietnam…

“A village lives peacefully under Vietcong control. Government or 
American troops arrive to ‘liberate’ the population. Violence ensues, 
refugees are created, but the Vietcong vanish. If the military decides 
not to plow the village under – as with Ben Sue in Operation Cedar Falls 
– the Vietcong will come back and resume their authority…”

That “Violence ensues” when Saigon or American troops “liberate” a 
village is an understatement. At the beginning of March 1967, I visited 
a refugee center in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng Province in which there were 
altogether 3,801 refugees including 358 men, 980 women, the rest 
children. They had fled from barbarous attacks on their frontier 
villages in South Vietnam’s Kien Phuong Province. Their stories were 
distressingly similar. Diep Van Day, a peasant of 63 years, from Tan 
Thanh village, said: “The Americans swarmed down in helicopters. They 
opened fire at everything: people, animals, huts. Anyone they laid their 
hands on who refused to talk, they killed immediately. They killed all 
the buffalo, pigs and chickens and burned the village down. Then they 
went away in their helicopters. Planes came and sprayed the crops with 
blue and yellow powder. Everything dried up. Those of us who could get 
away into the forest crossed the river at night into Cambodia…”

Lam Thi Vo of Hung Dien village told what happened to her family: “My 
husband was in the rice field They grabbed him and asked if there were 
any Vietcong around. He said there were not. They asked where were his 
children. Weren’t they with the Vietcong? He said, ‘No. I only have one 
girl of 15 and she is here in the field.’ They stabbed at his stomach 
with bayonets until his entrails gushed out. Others had already grabbed 
my daughter and asked her where the Vietcong were. She said she didn’t 
know. They killed her the same way, threatening her first with their 
bayonets, then driving them deep into her stomach.”

Was she sure these were American troops, not South Vietnamese or South 
Koreans? “They were American,” she insisted. “Only Americans came to our 
village, with one or two South Vietnamese interpreters.” And all were 
unanimous on this point. Nguyen Thi Vien, an old woman from Vinh Thanh, 
said: “They swarmed out of their helicopters and grabbed anyone they 
could. My son was one of them. He couldn’t tell them anything, so they 
shot him. He has six small children so I brought them here. Four days 
ago they came back and burned the village down.”

Le Bong a woman also from Hung Dien village, said: “They came out of the 
helicopters with their guns blazing. My husband was pulling in his 
fishing net and they shot him. His body just slumped down in to the 
river. People rushed to save him. Perhaps he was only wounded, but they 
shot them down with their machine guns.”

Vo Thi Ba, 75 years, a toothless, shrunken-faced woman from Vinh Thanh 
village, said: “My husband and my son were in their fishing boat, 
getting ready to set their nets. The soldiers came running out of the 
helicopters and fired at them from the bank. Both were killed. Four days 
ago they, the Americans, came back and set fire to all the houses.”

Pham Thi Suc, a woman of 26, also from Hung Dien village, suckling a 
very young baby, explained that the attack was at the moment when the 
water in the rivers was low and all the able-bodied were engaged in 
catching fish for making /nuoc mam, /the concentrated fish sauce 
indispensable for Vietnamese diet.

“It will be a bad year for us all,” she said. “My husband was also out 
fishing. The Yankee troops just opened up on all the boats, on anyone 
they could see. My husband was there with the boats and was killed. All 
our boats were riddled with holes and went to the bottom. The soldiers 
rushed around grabbing all the nets they could find. They piled them up, 
poured gasoline over them and set them on fire. They smashed all the 
/nuoc mam /pots they could find and any boat still on the bank. I have 
three more little children,” she said, her large black eyes brimming 
with tears, her lips trembling as she looked down at the tiny baby 
nestling in the crook of her arm. “We must go back as soon as possible 
while the fish are still easy to catch.”

In this case the Americans had “flea-hopped” from village to village in 
swift “kill all, destroy all” raids, coming back a week or so later to 
carry out the “burn all” part of their mission.

The refugees sent scouts back every night to report on the situation in 
the various villages. One scout had been surprised the night previous to 
my visit to the refugee camps and had been killed. As soon as they were 
sure the Americans had left the area the refugees would all go back to 
start rebuilding their villages. A week later when I returned to the 
camp to get some additional information, there were less than a hundred 
left. And these people were awaiting word from their village, which was 
further away from the frontier than the others.

On another trip to the frontier areas at that time, I visited the 
Cambodian village of Chrak Kranh, in Kompong Cham Province. This village 
had been occupied for one week by U.S. troops during a supplementary 
action of Operation Junction City. Prior to the occupation, the area 
surrounding the village was bombed, strafed and bombarded by 105-mm 
artillery, some 27 shells being fired. Before they withdrew, the 
Americans destroyed every house, the school, public health center and 
pagoda with incendiary grenades. They killed all the livestock and 
smashed everything they could find from agricultural implements down to 
enamel wash bowls. The facts of this vandalism in a peaceful Cambodian 
village were confirmed by the International Control Commission, whose 
chief delegates visited the village after the Americans withdrew.

Whether this was another of the famous American map reading “mistakes” 
and they thought Chrak Kranh was “only” another South Vietnamese village 
is beside the point. Fortunately there was no loss of life. Alerted by 
the bombs and shells and the noise of tanks crashing through the jungle, 
the villagers of Chrak Kranh withdrew from their village, driving ahead 
of them as many of their buffalo and pigs as they could round up. The 
smallest children trudged along with chickens under their arms and loads 
on their backs. They were fortunate. They had a vast peaceful hinterland 
into which to withdraw. The unfortunates in villages like Huong Dien, on 
the other side of the frontier were caught with a river at their backs 
and blazing machine guns ahead. For the areas of South Vietnam 
accessible to U.S. power there are only two alternatives: the wreckage 
and cinders of the village Chrak Kranh or life behind the barbed wire of 
concentration camp villages and “strategic hamlets” (now called 
“revolutionary development centers”).

Further confirmation of “emptying the sea” methods was revealed in an 
interview with a deserter from a “Mike” force paratroop unit of the U.S. 
Special Forces. As a member of an investigation team of the 
International War Crimes Tribunal,[7] <#_edn7> I was in the frontier 
village of Phnom Denh in Cambodia’s Takeo Province, on September 11, 
1967, to take evidence from refugees of the Khmer (Cambodian) minority 
people in South Vietnam. Their accounts of the destruction of their 
villages was similar to those of the Vietnamese refugees at the Svay 
Rien camps. The day before our arrival, a Special Forces master sergeant 
of Khmer origin, carrying an AR-15 combination automatic rifle and 
grenade launcher, had crossed the frontier and given himself up. He gave 
his name as Muong Ponn, a veteran soldier of 19 years service, first 
with an infantry battalion under the French, then with the Diem army and 
finally, until the day previous to our meeting, with the U.S.officered 
“Mike Force.”

Part of the conversation went as follows:

– What was your unit doing in this region?

– It was taking part in an operation to rescue five Americans thought to 
be held prisoners on a nearby hill.

– Why did you decide to come to Cambodia?

– I became disgusted at the destruction of Khmer villages and massacres

of the Khmer population in our “mopping-up operations.”

– What is meant by “mopping-up”?

– We are parachuted or dropped in with helicopters. We fire at 
everything and kill everyone we can.

– Do you have orders to this effect?

– Yes.

– Who gives the orders?

– The Americans.

– Can you describe a recent operation against a Khmer village?

– Yes. On April 12, this year, we took part in an operation against a 
village at Phnom Ak Yom. First the F-105s bombed it. Then we were 
parachuted in. There was a terrible massacre, mostly women and children. 
There were only a few men, apart from the very old ones. Our 
instructions were to shoot to kill at anything that moved.

– Did Americans take part?

– Yes. Our commanding officer in charge of the operation was Major Marchand.

[It was impossible to get the name accurately as Muong Ponn could not 
write in Latin script and could give only an approximate rendering of 
the name. He confirmed, however, that the unit was based at Can Tho, in 
the Mekong Delta, and the same officer commanded all operations.]

– What kind of village was it?

– It was almost entirely Khmer. It was after this operation that I 
decided to leave.

– Can you describe other cases of this kind, recently?

– Yes. There was an operation in My Da village in Moe Boa Province. 
Sixty inhabitants were killed, nearly all of them women and children. It 
was a mixed village of Vietnamese and Khmers. We were given orders to 
wipe out the whole village. There were practically only women and 
children; they were the only ones that had remained behind. I was disgusted.

An officer from Cambodian Army Intelligence later added that during his 
first interrogation, Muong Ponn had explained that a group of women and 
children in My Da village had been lined up and the American officer, 
the same Marchand, gave the order to fire. The Khmer soldiers refused 
and it was the Americans who did the shooting. Ponn said his unit was 
made up of three companies of about 180 men each, with 30 American 
officers and NCOs.

Had the survivors of these massacres fled to one of the South Vietnamese 
“refugee centers” instead of to Svay Rieng and Takeo Province of 
Cambodia, they would certainly have been added to the statistics of 
“refugees from Vietcong terror.”

“It is a fact, a brutal and alarming fact that because of the war, 
almost a third of the Vietnamese population has been displaced,” said 
Senator Edward Kennedy in an address to the International Committee on 
October 31, 1967.[8] <#_edn8> “The tragic and destructive consequences 
of this tremendous upheaval in the lives of the refugees and on that of 
the society of which they are a part, shocks the imagination and defies 
understanding. The war has created a people without roots, it has 
destroyed family rites and village traditions, it has engendered apathy, 
disorientation and even mistrust and hatred towards our efforts, among a 
by no means negligible part of the South Vietnamese people.

“We have flown over whole groups of villages and hamlets showering them 
with leaflets describing their fate if they do not evacuate. We arrive 
in those areas with our convoys and cram our trucks with people snatched 
away from their homes. We have razed villages and leveled the 
countryside, transporting the inhabitants to places called camps, places 
absolutely not prepared to receive them, at which there are neither 
buildings, sanitary facilities, roads, nor any possibilities of finding 
work or subsistence. Their houses and farms are then placed in a zone in 
which anything that moves must be considered a hostile element…”

If Senator Kennedy can be moved toward such heights of indignation, then 
one can imagine what is the real state of affairs.

Giving evidence at the second session of the International War Crimes 
Tribunal, Dr. Erik Wufff[9] <#_edn9> also accused the U.S.A. of a 
deliberate policy of “generating refugees.” He described what happens at 
the “refugee centers”:

“Families are divided into groups at the head of which a police stooge 
is placed. How do they manage this? People don’t leave [their villages] 
voluntarily; the Vietnamese are particularly attached to their rice 
fields, their villages; ancestor worship plays an important role. Every 
Vietnamese peasant wants to live, marry, have children and die where he 
was born, in his own village. People don’t leave voluntarily. They have 
to be forced to go to the refugee camps and for that, the Americans 
employ different methods, called in general, according to a relatively 
recent term, ‘generating refugees.’ This term, employed by the majority 
of American officials, is naturally never spoken at press conferences. 
How does one ‘generate refugees?’

“First they declare a certain region a ‘free-fire zone,’ ‘free-strike 
zone’ or ‘free-target zone,’ the technical terms employed…” Dr. Wulff 
went on to describe the sort of process mentioned by Senator Kennedy of 
leaflet drops followed by bombing, napalming and machine-gunning of the 
villages and when people still refuse to move out by such terror 
methods, the forced evacuation. “For that, planes, helicopters are 
brought in, with troops moving the inhabitants out at gun-point. They 
have to leave without taking anything at all with them, a sort of 
punishment for not having followed the benevolent instructions of the 
Americans…”

By the means described in this chapter, the U.S.-Saigon Command managed 
partially to “empty the sea,” although Senator Kennedy’s figure of 
“one-third of the population” was exaggerated, certainly at that time. 
But that there was still enough water for the fish to be swimming around 
more vigorously than ever was shown by the NLF successes in their 
1967-68 dry season offensives. What the Americans found to their cost 
was that they had moved a very important part of the “sea” to the 
approaches of major towns and the “fish” felt very much at home there, 
preparing for their 1968 Lunar New Year attacks. It was through this 
artificial “sea” that the NLF forces swam in their Têt offensive. 
Hundreds of thousands of “refugees,” their hearts burning with hatred 
against the Americans, were among the most trusty allies the NLF forces 
had, hiding them and their arms and helping them to make their way 
secretly into towns and cities throughout South Vietnam. And so the U.S. 
policy of “generating refugees” brought about results precisely contrary 
to those planned.

*Notes.*

[1] <#_ednref1> Scene of an atrocious massacre-by-poisoning of over 
1,000 “Vietcong suspects” in October, 1959.

[2] <#_ednref2> Jonathan Schell, /The Village of Ben Suc/, Knopf, New 
York, 1967, page 94.

[3] <#_ednref3> Jonathan Schell, /The Village of Ben Suc/, pp. 15-16.

[4] <#_ednref4> November 22, 1965.

[5] <#_ednref5> Then a brigadier general, Lansdale was a leading CIA 
agent who played a key role – as Colonel Lansdale – in setting up Ngo 
Dinh Diem in power in Saigon and in eliminating the pro-French armed 
religious sects. He was later retired, but brought back to South Vietnam 
by Lodge when the latter returned for his second term as U.S. 
ambassador, to direct “pacification” After an admitted total failure, 
Lansdale was retired again when Ellsworth Bunker replaced Cabot Lodge as 
ambassador in March 1967.

[6] <#_ednref6> Shell was quoting from an article titled “Vietnamese 
Prisoners” he had written for the /New York Review of Books/, in 
replying to questions by the French lawyer, Gisèle Halimi, acting on 
behalf of the International War Crimes Tribunal.

[7] <#_ednref7> Together with Madame Cukier-Kahn, a biochemist, 
Professor of Medicine Francis Kahn and the French TV producer, Roger Pic.

[8] <#_ednref8> This extract was Presented by Gisèle Halimi, a French 
lawyer, at the 2nd Session of the International War Crimes Tribunal and 
is retranslated from French, the original English text not being 
available at the time of writing.

[9] <#_ednref9> Dr Erich Wulff of the Federal German Republic’s Medical 
Aid Mission to South Vietnam who spent over six years in Hué, his work 
there ending only a few days before he gave evidence at Roskilde.

*NEXT: Chapter Ten – The Repression-Resistance Spiral*

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