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<h1 id="reader-title">Vietnam Will Win: Emptying the Sea</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">by Wilfred Burchett -
February 28, 2018<br>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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<a
href="#_edn1" name="_ednref1">[1]</a> 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.<a href="#_edn2" name="_ednref2">[2]</a>
Their numbers, however, were added to the progress
reports.</p>
<p>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 <em>New York Herald Tribune </em>by
columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak which states:</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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…</p>
<p>“Still U.S. policy-makers have kept their fingers
crossed about the ultimate impact of the bombings…</p>
<p>“Although no official announcement was made, a special
task force has been set up by Army General William C.
Westmoreland …</p>
<p>“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 …</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>“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.”<a href="#_edn3"
name="_ednref3">[3]</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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… ”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>New
York Times</em><a href="#_edn4" name="_ednref4">[4]</a>
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 <em>Times </em>as:
“We’ve got the onus, let’s get the bonus.” This curious
expression, explained the <em>Times, </em>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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<a href="#_edn5"
name="_ednref5">[5]</a> ‘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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.<a href="#_edn6" name="_ednref6">[6]</a></p>
<p>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:</p>
<p>“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.)</p>
<p>“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…</p>
<p>“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…”</p>
<p>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…”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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 <em>nuoc mam, </em>the concentrated
fish sauce indispensable for Vietnamese diet.</p>
<p>“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 <em>nuoc
mam </em>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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”).</p>
<p>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,<a href="#_edn7" name="_ednref7">[7]</a>
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.”</p>
<p>Part of the conversation went as follows:</p>
<p>– What was your unit doing in this region?</p>
<p>– It was taking part in an operation to rescue five
Americans thought to be held prisoners on a nearby hill.</p>
<p>– Why did you decide to come to Cambodia?</p>
<p>– I became disgusted at the destruction of Khmer
villages and massacres</p>
<p>of the Khmer population in our “mopping-up operations.”</p>
<p>– What is meant by “mopping-up”?</p>
<p>– We are parachuted or dropped in with helicopters. We
fire at everything and kill everyone we can.</p>
<p>– Do you have orders to this effect?</p>
<p>– Yes.</p>
<p>– Who gives the orders?</p>
<p>– The Americans.</p>
<p>– Can you describe a recent operation against a Khmer
village?</p>
<p>– 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.</p>
<p>– Did Americans take part?</p>
<p>– Yes. Our commanding officer in charge of the
operation was Major Marchand.</p>
<p>[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.]</p>
<p>– What kind of village was it?</p>
<p>– It was almost entirely Khmer. It was after this
operation that I decided to leave.</p>
<p>– Can you describe other cases of this kind, recently?</p>
<p>– 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>“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.<a href="#_edn8" name="_ednref8">[8]</a> “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.</p>
<p>“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…”</p>
<p>If Senator Kennedy can be moved toward such heights of
indignation, then one can imagine what is the real state
of affairs.</p>
<p>Giving evidence at the second session of the
International War Crimes Tribunal, Dr. Erik Wufff<a
href="#_edn9" name="_ednref9">[9]</a> also accused the
U.S.A. of a deliberate policy of “generating refugees.”
He described what happens at the “refugee centers”:</p>
<p>“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?’</p>
<p>“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…”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><strong>Notes.</strong></p>
<p><a href="#_ednref1" name="_edn1">[1]</a> Scene of an
atrocious massacre-by-poisoning of over 1,000 “Vietcong
suspects” in October, 1959.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref2" name="_edn2">[2]</a> Jonathan
Schell, <em>The Village of Ben Suc</em>, Knopf, New
York, 1967, page 94.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref3" name="_edn3">[3]</a> Jonathan
Schell, <em>The Village of Ben Suc</em>, pp. 15-16.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref4" name="_edn4">[4]</a> November 22,
1965.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref5" name="_edn5">[5]</a> 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.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref6" name="_edn6">[6]</a> Shell was
quoting from an article titled “Vietnamese Prisoners” he
had written for the <em>New York Review of Books</em>,
in replying to questions by the French lawyer, Gisèle
Halimi, acting on behalf of the International War Crimes
Tribunal.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref7" name="_edn7">[7]</a> Together with
Madame Cukier-Kahn, a biochemist, Professor of Medicine
Francis Kahn and the French TV producer, Roger Pic.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref8" name="_edn8">[8]</a> 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.</p>
<p><a href="#_ednref9" name="_edn9">[9]</a> 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.</p>
<p><strong>NEXT: Chapter Ten – The Repression-Resistance
Spiral</strong></p>
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