Word: conge
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
These relentless bulletins are part of a chronicle of immense human suffering caused, with a hammer-and-anvil effect, by both Viet Cong terrorism and U.S. firepower. The victim of that disaster is the civilian population, all too easily overlooked amid the concern for American and South Vietnamese military casualties. In the process, millions of civilians, the innocent and largely silent victims, have been killed, injured or rendered homeless. In South Viet Nam alone, there have been an estimated 1,050,000 civilian casualties, including 325,000 dead, since 1965. Reliable figures on civilian losses are not available for Cambodia...
...reasons for the massive displacement of civilians have been debated as heatedly as any of the basic tenets of the war. U.S. officials maintain that most of the problem in Viet Nam was created by the Jet offensive of 1968 and other Viet Cong harassment of innocent villagers. U.S. antiwar groups insist with equal fervor that the problem has been created solely by American policies and bombs. Both sides in the bitter struggle have played a role in turning a proud, independent rural people into a displaced urban population, and the process is far from over...
Free-Fire Zones. The nature of the guerrilla war precipitated the dislocation. Viet Cong tactics derived with bloody logic from the Maoist metaphor that compared the guerrilla to a fish in the sea of humanity. Viet Cong terrorists viewed village officials as legitimate targets and the murder of innocent peasants as ideologically justified. "It is better to kill ten innocent persons," according to a Radio Hanoi slogan, "than to let one guilty person escape." Countless peasants fled their homes to escape terrorism. U.S. military power accelcrated the process. In adapting traditional weaponry to guerrilla warfare, military strategists placed heavy reliance...
...inevitably land in the wrong place, others in the right place but on the wrong people. Bureaucratic demands for a show of allied progress on the basis of "hamlet-evaluation systems" have sometimes encouraged officials to evacuate villages unnecessarily. In early April, 650 people were removed from a Viet Cong-controlled valley south of Quang Ngai city. A U.S. senior adviser subsequently charged that the real motive behind the exercise was not a military need but a desire to eliminate the "V"-rated (Viet Cong-controlled) hamlets and thus improve the overall rating of Quang Ngai province...
...village by U.S. planes because he was playing in a distant field; an old woman sent him to Saigon, and for three years he shined shoes and slept on the streets until he moved to Hughes' "Hope 5" hostel. After his father was killed by the Viet Cong, Nguyen Van Thanh. 12, ran away from his village and met a bar girl who brought him to Saigon; there he ran away again and moved to the streets. When Son ("Mountain") was eight, his mother left him in an orphanage and disappeared to the U.S. with his father. He disliked...