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• come to see the “generation of refugees” not just as an unavoidable consequence of military operations but as a means of depriving the guerrillas of the population they needed for support. At a press conference that fall, Robert Komer, the chief of the U.S. pacification program in Vietnam, explained, “If we can attrit the population base of the Vie...
• after the end of the French war in 1954, the United States installed a non-communist government in Saigon
• Unable to find the guerrillas amid the population that supported them, the American forces used their overwhelming firepower against the villages. As a matter of policy, the Marines bombed and shelled the hamlets from which they took fire and the hamlets they believed were contributing food or labor to the enemy. “The U.S. Marines will not hesitate...
• By August 1967, according to Jonathan Schell, the Marines and the Army units that succeeded them had destroyed 70 percent of the hamlets on the coastal plain, caused countless civilian casualties, and driven some 40 percent of the 650,000 people in the province into towns and refugee camps along
• (In three and a half months the 3rd Brigade’s battery had fired 64,000 artillery shells on Duc Pho and the adjoining district.)