Word: vietcong
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During the Tet Offensive in 1968, the Vietcong under Communist leadership had massacred thousands of civilians in the village of Hue; after the war, the regime imposed a series of land reforms that drove thousands of South Vietnamese families into “re-education camps...
...heroics in the heat of battle, and later one of the most respected legislators on both sides of the aisle in the Senate telling the nation that despite the medal, he believes he did nothing heroic that night in Thanh Phong. Although the military honored him for killing 21 Vietcong in the operation, he now maintains that the only people who died were unarmed Vietnamese men, women and children...
...those sent to do the fighting were quickly apprised of the fact that for many South Vietnamese, the invaders were not the North Vietnamese, but the Americans. And often they found themselves in situations where their enemy included the civilian population of South Vietnam that supported and sustained the Vietcong guerrillas...
...Kerrey opines, in the Times story, that the civilians of the village his men attacked were, in all probability, Vietcong supporters. And a local woman interviewed for the story makes no bones about the fact that her husband was a guerrilla. Because the Vietcong were not an invading force from the north; they were an indigenous guerrilla army that survived, prospered and the ultimately prevailed because of the support they received not only from their compatriots and commanders in the North or from Moscow and Beijing, but, more important, from within the civilian population of the south...
...behind-the-lines" mission, but they were also not very far from Saigon. In the Vietnam war there was no frontline; the enemy was everywhere. Not in uniform, not always armed, not always a male of fighting age. And if a whole South Vietnamese village supported the Vietcong, providing a base, logistics and intelligence to soldiers who were often their husbands and sons, then where exactly was the line drawn between civilians and enemy personnel? It was that reality that gave rise to oft-quoted statement by an American officer in the field that "we had to destroy the village...