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Life in the camps
“The camps comprised rows of corrugated tin panel huts and little else. The children never dared to leave the confines of the camps. As many as 50 refugees lived in each hut, crammed in two layers of hammocks where they stayed mostly idle, avoiding the heat. On the floors stacked against the walls were the meager possessions they carried with them when they fled their villages: metal tea pots, ceramic tea cups and rice bowls, tin spoons and knives.
There were few wells and no latrines. Almost nothing grew in the sand-clogged land around the camps. Hunger and disease were widespread. Women searched for edible plants nearby or twigs to light fires to boil tea. Some haunted the local market, waiting to pick up rice grains that had fallen on the dirt. It could take a whole day to fill a small cup, which they would bring back home to cook to feed their families.
The children were thin and weak. Some were dying from undiagnosed diseases, stricken in their last days with lethargy and diarrhea.”
– Thomas C. Fox, aide worker with International Volunteer Services describes the refugee camps Dong Tac and Ninh Tinh in the provincial capital of Tuy Hoa on the coast in central Vietnam in 1966. Each camp held several thousand Vietnamese, mostly the young and very old.
Villagers forcibly sent to refugee camps
Some of these camps were ‘New Life’ hamlets — artificial villages surrounded by barbed wire and located far from the villagers’ own fields, homes, and ancestral burial grounds.
Other villagers wound up in one of the South Vietnamese government’s many refugee camps, overcrowded and unsanitary stretches of barren land where dispossessed, unemployed, and hopeless peasants were expected to wait out the war in squalor. Not sure where to get the next meal, formerly independent and self supporting families were doomed to sit idle, waiting for the next handout of food from the government.
“The cumulative effect of many abortive [resettlement] programs — all of them accompanied, from 1965 on, by the full force of the Americans’ overwhelming firepower — had been to bring disruption, destruction and death to the countryside on an immense scale, and to leave among the people an indelible bitterness that no new program — unless it were a program to raise the dead — could hope to overcome.”
– Jonathan Schell
Sources:
– Huu Ngoc, Viet Nam: Tradition and Change
– Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
– Jonathan Schell, The Real War: Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War