Knowledgebase
Viewing articles tagged 'civilians'
Viewing articles tagged 'civilians'
4 articles
Dak Son, December 5, 1967
On the night of December 5, 1967, Viet Cong troops with flamethrowers burned a Stieng settlement called Dak Son in Phuoc Long province. That much is not in dispute and never has been. What is in dispute, though almost nobody says so, is the number: the 252 dead that everyone quotes was published by an American magazine four days after the CIA’s...
The battles fought on our land
Both armies agreed that whoever held the Central Highlands would decide the war, so the largest battles of the American war, and the offensives that ended it, were fought where our villages stood. The histories of those battles count sorties, tons of bombs and enemy dead to the last digit. They name the hills by their height and the villages by...
Tet 1968 in the highlands
The American field force that held the highlands wrote its own verdict on Tet four pages after it counted the dead: “Heaviest attacks were launched initially” at “the highlands population centers of Kontum and Ban Me Thuot.” The first and hardest blows of the 1968 offensive in the whole of II Corps fell on two of our market towns. Then the same...
Highland women in the war, 1954–1975
In 1966 the United States Army published a handbook that told its own personnel, in one identical line repeated for nineteen of our peoples, to stay away from our women. The same book recorded that in Darlac six or seven of every ten of our babies died before their first birthday, and that Rhade law puts the land in the women’s keeping. A year l...
Powered by WBAMS