In mid-1965, the United States began the wholesale destruction of rural South Vietnam. The destruction came in many forms. U.S. airplanes bombed hamlets, infantrymen set fire to the houses of peasants, Army artillery batteries indiscriminately shelled patches of forest, Air Force C-123’s dropped chemical defoliants on crops, and U.S. troops forcibly removed peasants to refugee camps. These actions were not the unintentional and unfortunate consequences of war. Rather, the United States military, with the full-backing of the President of the United States and the head of Military Assistance Command – Vietnam (MACV), General William C. Westmoreland, purposely carried out a scorched earth policy across the South Vietnamese countryside. Continue Reading »
In 1965, on the recommendations of the Rand Corporation, the U.S. military in South Vietnam began conducting what officials called harassment and interdiction missions, or “H and I” for short. H and I fire involved the shelling, by artillery and mortars, of known or suspected areas of Communist activity. In the northern province of Quang Ngai, where the Vietcong controlled most of the countryside, that meant almost the entire province. The bulk of H and I fire fell on river crossings, footpaths, trail junctures, gullies, ridgelines, or where river valleys left the highlands and entered the coastal plain. These landscape features acted as North Vietnamese and Vietcong lines of communication. American artillery batteries also regularly shelled the likely approaches to the U.S.’s divisional bases, fire support bases, and night defensive positions.[1]
