Word: napalmed
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...noncombatants to get out fast. More than 2,000 did. Then planes saturated the woods with chemical defoliants. After a few weeks of sunny, wind-scoured weather, the Boiloi Forest was tinder-dry. Last week U.S. bombers swept in with loads of Incendijel (an incendiary compound derived from napalm), while behind them flew C-123s dropping drums of fuel...
Hardly anybody noticed the word "nonlethal." Compared with napalm bombs that incinerate whole villages, or white phosphorous shells that burn a man to the bone, the temporarily disabling gases used in Viet Nam seem more humane than horrible. But the words "gas warfare" and "experimenting" stirred macabre memories. There was the afternoon of April 22, 1915, when German infantrymen gave the world its first whiff of poison-gas warfare by sending a huge, grey-green cloud of noxious chlorine rolling over two French divisions in the trenches at Ypres, killing 5,000, incapacitating 10,000, and cutting a 31-mile...
Ground fire against the raiders was minimal, because low-flying jets had swooped in ahead with napalm to burn out the enemy...
...cannot use napalm bombs and supersonic bombers until you regard the guerillas and the peasants among whom they live as synonymous. American pilots do not make any distinction now, and with reason. If the villagers were not against Diem and his U.S. advisors from the start, they unquestionably oppose his successors and the Americans now. The rebels are receiving some aid from the North, but their spirit and most of their weaponry come from the struggle in the South...
...escalation in Vietnam but the bombings will certainly accomplish one thing. They will create a sharper hatred for America than already exists in most of Asia. What do Asians gain from a doctrine that promises to preserve freedom for Americans by pounding the jungles and sweeping the villages with napalm-bomb fires wherever Communism threatens? And one day, in this or some other war like it, the opponent may not back down. Nuclear war would not be the last even in world history, but the United States would not emerge stronger from...