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“Pump out the water and catch the fish”
Free Fire Zones
“To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits, intelligence, and other support, American command policy turned large swathes of those provinces [sympathetic to the NLF ]into “free fire zones,” subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was expressly designed to “generate” refugees, driving people from their homes in the name of “pacification.” Houses were set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums short of water, food, and shelter.”
-Nick Turse
“Although the Americans pumped money into Vietnam, corruption and the fact that they weren’t Vietnamese meant they wouldn’t win. How could they? Americans couldn’t win against guerrilla warfare. The Americans would have to kill everyone to force the Vietnamese to do things their way.
“They wanted us to follow the American Way. But we weren’t American. Our traditions were different. Our values were different. Our experiences were different. In the end all the American did was make us dependent on them.”
-Khon Luu, was a sergeant in the South Vietnamese Air Force who escaped from Vietnam in 1987
“[The Americans] put everybody in a camp. If we tried to stay in our village they burned the houses. If we still stayed, they shelled the villages and destroyed them. But we would escape from the camp and come back home. The camp was terrible, very bad conditions. It was not just the lack of things, but the lack of freedom. You see there were not only American and South Vietnamese soldiers but also South Korean, and they were barbarous. They raped women.”
– Mrs. Luu Thi Nao
“You’ve got to dry up the sea the guerrillas swim in — that’s the peasants — and the best way to do that is to blast the hell out of their villages so they’ll come into our refugee camps.”
– U.S. General
Sources:
– Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
– Martha Hess, And Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam
– Mary Terrell Cargil and Jade Quang Huyhn, Voices of the Vietnamese Boat People: Nineteen Narratives of Escape and Survival