Menu
U.S. Policy
FREE FIRE ZONES
“American commanders declared entire areas free-fire zones. Troops would round up villagers, burn their hooches [homes] and relocate them from their ancestral lands into squalid refugee camps. The area would then be bombed and shelled. … Caught between the Viet Cong and the Americans, villagers who wanted only to be left alone became sullen or outright hostile. ….American firepower destroyed homes, villages and crops and alienated those whose hearts and minds were to be won.”
-George C. Herring
Wage war against everybody
The policy of declaring areas Free Fire Zones resulted in the razing to the ground of over seventy percent of the villages in Quang Ngai province. Foot soldiers burned as a matter of course almost every village they entered.
The orders coming from Washington assumed that the population would be friendly to us, and ordered the troops to separate the enemy from the population. But the military were unable to distinguish between friend and foe in Quang Ngai, so they improvised their own policy, which was to wage war against everybody.
“The villagers moved to the mountains. They dug shelters and tunnels, and then concealed them with earth. When they cooked at night, they covered their fires. Many people were killed because of the smoke from the cooking. Even when they cooked in the forest, the smoke would signal a target for the American pilots, and they dropped their bombs, and people were killed. If the villagers chose to work in the daytime, they went one by one or two by two, and for only a few hours in the very early morning, before the fog lifted.”
– Mr. Nguyen Huu Thien
“Strafe the town and kill the people Drop napalm in the square, Get out early every Sunday And catch them at their morning prayer.”
-A song sung to journalist Jonathan Schell by an American pilot after an operation in which the pilot had called a bomb strike on two Vietnamese churches with white flags flying in front of them.
From a psychological-warfare leaflet dropped on villages:
“THE U.S. MARINES WILL NOT HESITATE TO DESTROY, IMMEDIATELY, ANY VILLAGE OR HAMLET HARBORING THE VIETCONG. WE WILL NOT HESITATE TO DESTROY, IMMEDIATELY, ANY VILLAGE OR HAMLET USED AS A VIETCONG STRONGHOLD TO FIRE AT OUR TROOPS OR AIRCRAFT.”
Sources:
– Jonathan Schell, Commentary in the New Yorker, December 1969
– Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late, TomDispatch.com
– Martha Hess, And Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam