Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...worst atrocity yet committed in the Viet Nam war (see pictures opposite) began its course last week when a handful of Viet Cong crawled up to the wall-and-wire perimeter of the hamlet of Dak Son, some 75 miles north east of Saigon. The V.C. called for the hamlet's inhabitants to surrender and come out. When they got no takers, they withdrew, hurling behind them their ultimate epithet: "Sons of Americans!" Earlier in the day, villagers had reported to their 140-man defense force that some Viet Cong were roaming through the surrounding fields. But that...
...reason for the Communists' in tense interest in Dak Son, a hamlet of 2,000 Montagnard people, was that it was the new home and sanctuary of some 800 Montagnard refugees who 14 months ago fled from life under the Viet Cong in the surrounding countryside, where they had been forced to work in virtual slavery as farmers and porters. The Montagnards are the innocents of Viet Nam: primitive, peaceful, sedentary hill tribesmen. The women go bare-breasted and the men, who scratch out a living by farming and hunting with crossbows and knives, wear loincloths. The Viet Cong...
...that end, long ugly belches of flame lashed out from every direction, garishly illuminating the refugee hamlet and searing and scorching everything in their path. The shrieking refugees still inside their houses were incinerated. Many of those who had had time to get down into dogholes beneath the houses were asphyxiated. Spraying fire about in great whooshing arcs, the Viet Cong set everything afire: trees, fences, gardens, chickens, the careful piles of grain from the annual harvest. Huts that somehow survived the fiery holocaust were leveled with grenades. Then the hoses of fire were sprayed down inside the exposed burrows...
...flames on the plateau mount higher and higher into the dark sky. Their small force of helicopters had earlier been sent out on another mission and could not be recalled. A march on foot to relieve Dak Son would lead through a wild and deep ravine separating the burning hamlet from Song Be. It meant three miles on a tortuous and twisting trail in the darkness-and an almost certain Viet Cong ambush. Dak Son's only outside help during its long night of terror and death was a single C-47 Dragonship that hovered over the hamlet, spraying...
After three harrowing months, the Hoffmanns fled to a hamlet of 800 people on the Mediterranean coast, where their heritage would be safely obscured. Nine months later, in August of 1944, the Allies liberated France...