Vietnam War Series

 

Opium Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_war

The Opium Wars were two wars fought in the mid-1800s that were the climax of a long dispute between Brtain and China. In the second, France fought alongside Britain. This dispute was around the opium trade which was perceived from a variety of cultural and economic vantage points, as is often the case with global economic conflicts. The Chinese Emperor had banned opium in China due to its harmful effects on Chinese citizens and its denigratory impact on the Chinese culture; the British Empire, however, saw opium as a profitable good for commercial trade, as its import would help balance Britain's huge trade deficit with China. The Opium Wars and the "unequal treaties" signed afterwards led in part to the downfall of the Chinese Empire, as many countries followed Britain and forced more treaties to increase trade within China.

 

History of the Precious Metals by Alexander Del Mar, 1902

 

In 1838 the Chinese government, desiring to destroy a traffic which corrupted the morals and promoted the degeneracy of its people, made the use of opium a capital crime, and destroyed British stock of opium at Canton.

 

In 1899 baron Ketteler, of the German legation at Peking was killed by a Chinese fanatic. This incident, and the pretense of protecting their own legations, was made the occasion of an attack upon China by the combined forces of Germany, Great Britain, France, Austria, Italy, the United States, Russia, and Japan, in which upwards of one hundred Chinese cities were captured and plundered, upwards of 50,000 innocent people were destroyed.

 

The allies took the silver, jade, silks and furs, everything of value. The English gathered the furs, ornaments and furniture from every house in their quarter and sold them at auction. The Japanese devoted their energies to gold, silver, and munitions of war, which they shipped to Japan. The French took all they could find. The Germans came late, so they organized "punitive expeditions." A Peking dispatch says that the Chinese women, to escape the nameless bestiality of the Russians, drowned themselves by tens of thousands. The scene of wanton carnage, outrage and spoliation, defy description. The poor innocent children were slain without mercy. Gold, silver and lust were not the only incentives. Wanton murder was added to the other horrors of war upon a defenseless people, against whom war had never been declared.

 

By this conduct the Chinese hatred of the foreigner will be very justly intensified, and the Chinaman now hates the foreigner a thousand times more than he did when the Boxer troubles began.

 

 

 

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997

 

Arab traders introduced Greek opium to the receptive Han Chinese during the reign of Kublai Khan in the thirteenth century, CE. It quickly became an integral part of Chinese social life and was valued for its ritual and medicinal value. As the Chinese moved down into the hills of Southeast Asia, they brought along their poppy that thrives in the verdant high altitudes – optimum is 1000 to 1500 meters. It was cheap to grow and served as a convenient way for the hill people to meet the tax levy imposed by the Chinese overloads. Everyone prospered. In many ways it was an ideal smuggler’s contraband: light weight and low volume, nonperishable for years at a time; and year in and year out for millennia, it has retained high value.

 

In the 1960s when the Americans began to invade Southeast Asia in substantial numbers, the value of the trade crescendos sharply, and American military men became integrally involved in its transport. The American Central Intelligence Agency provided valuable conduits for the transportation in competition with the drug overlords and a certain amount of friction developed. The communists not only shared in the profits, but they made it easy for the Americans to pollute themselves as one more weapon in the hands of the weaker, but more determined nations. Even as the Thai government took steps to interdict the farming, trade, and traffic in opium in its country, the LPRP [Laotion People’s Revolutionary Party], the new rulers of Lao, took strong steps to increase its production, refineries, and market share.

 

Southeast Asia Heroin Trade

 

Thailand was mainly a country of conduit for the massive amounts of opium produced in Southeast Asia. Burma produced some 500-600 tons in an average year, and as much as 3000-4000 tons in bumper crop years, Laos about 200 tons, and Thailand about 60 tons. The farmers who grew the poppies and did the backbreaking work f harvesting the latex received less than a thousandth part of the billions of dollars the traffic eventually generated. A farmer was lucky to get $2000 a kilo for his backbreaking work. The vast majority of the heroin traffic moved from the Golden Triangle to Bangkok.

 

Burma Heroin Trade

 

Until 1962, Burma was the world’s largest exporter of rice, shipping two million tons annually. But after General Win seized power in that year, closed all borders, nationalized all industry, imprisoned all intellectuals and government executives, halted all developmental activities of the World Bank, forced all Indians and Chinese to flee the country, and drove out all foreign business – her economy failed.

 

The rice export fell to 170,000 tons; and civil warring among the seventy fractious ethnic groups made anything but opium production unprofitable for the majority of the peasantry. More than one-third of the gross national product became accounted for by smuggling, a natural response to the needs of the impoverished populace. To people whose average annual income did not exceed $179, the niceties of how one made a living were relegated to a low place on the list of concerns. The Burmese became rice importers and sophisticated drug refiners, transporters, marketers and exporters.

 

The SUN, or Shan People, maintained a 20,000 man army and concentrated their activities on the running and protection of refineries that turned out heroin by the ton. Together with the UWS, they owned and controlled more than 75% of all the heroin produced in the area, and they were the largest supplier [70%] of the insatiable American market. They were responsible for 50% of the entire world’s supply. The Shan people jealously guarded that status. Their $4-10 billion yearly trade afforded them ample profit to maintain a more than adequate security establishment and to deter any government that might foolishly try to rein them in. It also allowed them to participate in the hugely profitable and perfectly legitimate business of mining rubies and sapphires, the only other product worthy of mention in Burma.

 

Acetic Anhydride

 

Acetic anhydride: the chemical use to convert opium to heroin, shipped in military holds that were as untouchable as the diplomatic pouch. The bags were discretely labeled and handled. The chemical was transported in flour sacks marked with the large lettered logo C.A.R.E., and accompanied by a statement “Gift of the Generous American People.” In the course of their business arrangement, the generous American people shipped in thousands of pounds of the valuable chemical which was then transported by US Army trucks over GVN highways without VC attack and transshipped across the borders of Viet Nam, Laos, and Burma without Pathet Lao, police or customs agent impediment. A considerable amount of money changed hands; large profits were realized; and triumph of international relations of sorts resulted when a common language and purpose [money] was involved.

 

 

Afghanistan Opium at Record High

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6965115.stm

27 August 2007

The UN says opium production in Afghanistan has soared to record levels, with an increase on last year of more than a third. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime report says the amount of opium produced there has doubled in the last two years. Afghanistan now accounts for more than 93% of the world's opiates.

 

UN Report: Afghan Opium Production Rises

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/06/26/international/i002328D82.DTL&hw=opium&sn=001&sc=1000

 

June 26, 2007

 

Afghanistan produced dramatically more opium in 2006, increasing its yield by nearly 50 percent from a year earlier and pushing global opium production to a new record high, the report found. Opium production in Afghanistan increased from about 4,500 tons in 2005 to 6,700 tons in 2006, according to the report. Opium is the main ingredient for heroin.

 

In 2006, Afghanistan accounted for 92 percent of global illicit opium production, up from 70 percent in 2000 and 52 percent a decade earlier. The higher yields in Afghanistan brought global opium production to a record high of nearly 7,300 tons last year, a 43 percent increase over 2005. The area under opium poppy cultivation in the country has also expanded, from nearly 257,000 acres in 2005 to more than 407,000 acres in 2006 — an increase of about 59 percent.

 

"This is the largest area under opium poppy cultivation ever recorded in Afghanistan," the report said, noting that two-thirds of cultivation was concentrated in the country's south.

 

 

 

Kyrgyz MP: Grow Opium to Beat Debt

 

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0C671C55-1A9F-4031-AA25-DD01A991ABE2.htm

 

Mar 09, 2007

 

A Kyrgyz opposition leader has suggested the country cultivate opium in order to prompt foreign creditor nations to provide debt relief. The plan was put forward on Wednesday by Azimbek Beknazarov, leader of the Asaba National Renewal Party, who pointed to Afghanistan as an example of how the trade could be used to win concessions from the West.

 

"This year Afghanistan announced almost officially that it will increase opium crops. We have to do the same and permit our people to plant opium for a year or two. After that, all the international organizations will be alarmed and will offer to cover our country's debts," Beknazarov said. "To solve this problem [of foreign debt] we need unordinary steps. I know that my suggestion will stir a heated debate," he said.

 

 

Warning over Afghan Drug Economy

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6190922.stm

 

28 Nov 2006

 

Afghanistan's soaring opium production threatens to wreck efforts to rebuild the country after years of war, the UN and the World Bank have warned.

Afghanistan supplies more than 90% of world opium. The drug trade accounts for a third of the economy and permeates the "higher levels of government", the report said. It says 2006 saw opium cultivation rise by 60% and production by 50%.

The UN-World Bank report also called for a "smart and effective" strategy to curb demand in consuming countries, mainly in the West.

 

Afghan Drug Crop to Flood Europe

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6174854.stm

 

28 Nov 2006

European cities risk higher numbers of heroin overdoses as Afghanistan's record opium poppy crop floods cities with the drug, the UN has warned. Europe has traditionally been the biggest market for Afghan opiates and opium cultivation in Afghanistan increased by 59% this year.

 

Quandary of Afghan Opium Industry

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4312557.stm

 

2 March, 2005

 

Yet again, an alarming study on the rise in opium production in Afghanistan - source for most of the world's supplies of heroin.

 

Vietnam War Series

 

War Objectives

 

US Aims:

[a] To protect US reputation as a counter-subversive guarantor

[b] To avoid domino effect especially in Southeast Asia

[c] To keep South Vietnamese territory from red hands

[d] To merge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods

John MccNaughton, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Affairs, to Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, April 16, 1964

 

 

Words of Warning

 

“The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Cong or even force them to the conference table on our terms, no matter how many hundred thousand white, foreign [US] troops we deploy.”

 

“The alternative – no matter what we may wish it to be – is almost certainly a protracted war involving an open-ended commitment of US forces, mounting US casualties, no assurance of a satisfactory solution, and a serious danger of escalation at the end of the road.”

 

Once we suffer large casualties, we will have started a well nigh irreversible process. Our involvement will be so great that we cannot – without national humiliation – stop short of achieving complete objectives. Of the two possibilities, I think humiliation would be more likely that the achievement of our objectives even after we have paid terrible costs.”

 

George Ball, Under Secretary of State, memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson, July 1, 1965

 

“Let us face the fact that there are no really attractive options open to us. We should concentrate our attention on cutting our losses.”

 

George Ball, Under Secretary of State, memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson, April 9, 1966

 

 

General Concedes Failure in Baghdad
Bush Acknowledges Comparison to '68 Tet Offensive in Vietnam

 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/10/20/MNGJ9LT21H1.DTL

 

In a confluence of grim official assessments of the war in Iraq, President Bush acknowledged that sectarian bloodletting in Baghdad could be compared to the Viet Cong's 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam, and one of the top U.S. generals said the American military's two-month drive to crush the spiraling violence in the Iraqi capital had failed.

 

Such downbeat opinions, accompanied by reports of alarmingly high American casualties and unabated violence in Iraq, indicate that U.S. officials at the highest levels are rethinking the progress the United States is making in Iraq, experts said.

 

The increasing pessimism among serious analysts of the conflict is beginning to have an effect," said White, a former government intelligence analyst. "Policy makers are beginning to, if not accept the ultimate conclusions, then at least the main thrust of it: that we're not getting better, that the Iraqi government isn't working, that the Iraqi security forces are not standing up the way we would like them to."

 

Vietnam War Series

 

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was neither a trail nor a highway; it was an engineering and human marvel. The Trail was a maze of twisting tracks, foot paths, and two lane packed clay surfaced roads filtering from North Viet Nam through Laos and Cambodia and into South Viet Nam. The system was started by the Viet Minh for use against the French. In mid 1972, it was a seemingly haphazard array of 12,500 miles of road with five long parallel routes and twenty-one axes in a thirty mile corridor.

 

The sides of The Trail were liberally dotted with thousands of identical foxholes made to the exact specifications of French manuals and with Vietnamese originated spider holes reinforced and camouflaged with sturdy lashed bamboo. The Trail and its contribution to the NVA war effort became the principle focus of attention and activity of US regular forces.

 

Thirty thousand NVA engineers, security forces, transportation soldiers, and antiaircraft battery crews, and a legion of Laotian peasant workers, originally built The Trail; and 300,000 more maintained the vital net of roadways with their equally important classrooms, political indoctrination centers, and support installations. Segments of the Trail were divided with permanent garrisons of necessary personnel. The communists worked under indescribably difficult conditions to build, repair, and to camouflage the Trail that was under continual bombardment from the United States Air Force as well as the grueling forces of nature.

 

Not the least of their problems was dealing with the terrible rain of death they suffered requiring the replacement of tens of thousands of workers. Between 1966 and 1968 the United States, in Operation Rolling Thunder, dropped 643,000 tons of bombs along the route killing an estimated 29,000 people, only two percent of whom were soldiers. No matter what the US did, the communists could always enlist more workers; and they did so without coercion, for the most part.

 

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997

 

Vietnam War Series

 

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997

 

“The counter-terror program will have three areas of focus. First, we will identify and track every party secretary, finance and supply unit, information service, social welfare provider and unit, and proselytizing section. Second, we will launch a psychological warfare program and a hearts-and-hands-to-the-people on a national level with rewards such as were used so successfully in the running dogs war in Malaysia and with informational leaflets on a grand scale.  Third, we will imply small counter-terror teams on a scale never before imagined until we bring real fear, danger, insecurity, and death to the communists and their functionaries even in the areas of the cities and the countryside where they no feel secure. As never before we will fight fire with fire; we will employ their own Viet Cong methods against them. The methods will include everything from psy-ops, to intimidation, to physical persuasion, to literal counter-terror.”

 

“Phoenix is going to be the union of all the police, military, and paramilitary intelligence gathering programs and insurgency interdiction in the whole region; and it is going to be under direct and continuous United States control. We are going to eliminate duplication and conflict among the contributing agencies. The Company and the President have had enough with all the career creating bureaucrats. We are going to get down to the business of coring out the heart of the Viet Cong organization.”

 

Phoenix did things to people that were unspeakable and had contrived them to appear to be the work of the Viet Cong with the argument that the ends justifies the means. Phoenix shifted its focus progressively toward the Cambodian and Laotian borders, determined to interdict the assistance being given the PAVN forces that streamed down the Ho Chi Minh trail and into the south.

 

 

NVA Visits a Village

 

In the NVA, as in all communist armies, the political officer has the ultimate authority.

 

The young NVA privates and corporals were dispatched to round up the children on the list. When it became evident that it was the intention of the NVA company to march away with the thirteen children, the eldest of whom was sixteen, the women began a keening wail of protest, of grief. Only the headman and Dung’s mother dared lift their heads and to protest.

 

“Stop!!!” screamed the irate and flustered cadre. Dung’s mother either did not hear or was insubordinate. Whatever the case, she did not stop. The cadre pointed at her and at the headman, barked a series of harsh commands to his men, and brought himself to stiff attention, his face contorted with anger. The men looked at each other with brief unhappy glances, then moved sharply to bring the disobedient woman and insolent old man before the political officer on their knees. The children who were to accompany the military unit were summarily marched out of the village while ten of the most hardened combat veterans remained behind to follow the next set of orders.

 

While her two youngest children looked on in fascinated horror, the cadre ordered two of the men to strip the foolish woman to the waist and to pin her supine on the ground. The officer walked deliberately up to the woman who was now lying passively on the ground, bent over her form, then in a lightening quick movement roughly seized her right breast by the nipple and pulled it as taut as he could elevating it from her thin chest. She cried out in involuntary pain. The brutal cadre then whipped a French flic knife through the air and amputated the soft appendage neatly at the level of the pectoral muscles. She fainted. The battle-hardened soldiers blanched and stepped back. The cadre nonchalantly threw the severed breast fragment to some dogs hiding under a nearby stack of bamboo poles. He calmly took out his service pistol and dispatched the meddlesome woman with a single bullet in the middle of her forehead. The two children, ages four and seven, stood mute. The four year old, the youngest daughter, never spoke again.

 

The political officer, using a conversational level of amplitude, then ordered two of the other NVA soldiers to bend the back of the horrified old man. The cadre withdrew his regimental saber, jabbed it roughly into the middle of the old man’s upper back, and when the headman involuntarily arched backward from pain, swept the razor-like edge sword down across the nape of the man’s neck with the force of a thunderclap. The dignified head, with a grimace of agony permanently etched on its wrinkled face, dropped into the red dust. The body made two convulsive twitches before toppling on its side with twin fountains of blood geysering from the severed carotid arteries.

 

 

Phoenix Raid on Village Designed to Blame VC/NVA

 

The three commandos moved into the tiny targeted community in the night and kidnapped the elderly first wife of the headman and a pregnant teenaged girl. The two women were mercifully knocked on the head and rendered unconscious; then, they were decapitated. The unborn infant was cut from his mother’s womb. The fetus was far enough advanced to be able to determine its sex. The heads of the two women were impaled on the two gate posts of the entrance to the village. The women’s bodies were suspended upside down by their ankles and notes in Vietnamese were pinned to their naked breasts. The notes read in Vietnamese INFORMER on the older woman and TRAITOR on the younger woman, the victim of the rude Caesarean section. The fetus was hung form a branch. His sign read ROTTEN FRUIT. The murders, mutilations, and ‘progressive information’ signs, as the NLF euphemistically called their propaganda, were typical of Viet Cong retaliations; and the villagers would readily blame the VC for the atrocities. The anguish would be all the worse since the women were innocent – willing providers for the NLF.

 

 

Civilians Caught in the Middle

 

Posing as DRVN [Civilian Secret Police], the three Vietnamese imposters rousted the entire hamlet from their beds and lined them up in front of the headman’s house. Cham, the best actor of the group, harangued the sleepy and frightened people for nearly an hour, accusing them of collaboration with the corrupt GVN oppressors and of betrayal of the righteous cause of the people. From a long rice-paper list of crimes Cham read in terrifying slow magisterial tones.

 

When Cham finished his communistic condemnation of the hamlet, he announced that the headman must suffer the crimes of the rest of the villagers and would serve as an example for other would-be betrayers of the people. Cham stepped aside, and Ngoc and Hai dragged the petrified old man to the center of the line. There was muffled weeping from the other family members, even the men. The headman was made to kneel, then he was decapitated with a scimitar.

 

The indictment document was laid on the blood covered thorax of the headless corpse, and scimitar was stabbed through it so the blade remained standing in the dead man as a deep lesson and as evidence of VC culpability should proof be required by disbelieving villagers from neighboring hamlets. The terrorized villagers were convinced by the lesson they had witnessed; they indeed feared the Viet Cong cadres all the more, almost as much as they feared and mistrusted the representatives of the RVN who pillaged their homes and raped their women by day.

 

 

Helicopter Ride

 

In forty-five minutes they were in a helicopter over the South China Sea traveling at about three thousand feet. The moonlight shimmered and sparkled on the calm surface of the water casting beautiful but eerie shadows from the silhouettes of the archipelago of islands. There was a single US Navy destroyer making its way toward Danang and a few sampans sitting at anchor, the lamplights and cooking fires on their afterdecks creating dots of light on the surface of the black water.

 

The softly whimpering girl lay in the fetal position on the greasy steel deck of the chopper. The Nungs were each armed with a .45 and a cruel looking curved two-edged dagger. There were no signs of resistance, and none of the occupants talked until they were well out to sea. There was only the steady loud rattle of the craft’s engine and rotors to interrupt the silence of that starless night.

 

“You have one chance to repent and to make yourself clean. Do it now. If you don’t, you alone are responsible for your daughter’s fate.” Mr. Phan begged, cajoled, pleaded, and cried in a stream of nearly unintelligible Vietnamese. DuParrier shouted in the ear of the Nung guard seated next to him. The Chinese man roughly grabbed the diminutive girl by her blouse front and the belt of her blue pleated school uniform skirt. He easily lifted her off the vibrating floor and duck walked to the open door with the terrified girl.

 

“Tell me!” menaced DeParrier. “Five seconds!” was all he added. He looked straight into the stricken father’s eyes and began to lift the fingers of his right hand methodically.

 

Phan watched the number of fingers increase in horrified fascination. It was as if he were struck dumb. He dropped his face into the palms of his hands, and his body shuddered with his sobs. DeParrier jerked the captive man’s head up when the five seconds had elapsed. He nodded to the Nung.

 

The Chinese mercenary sneered at the girl then made a sign crossing two fingers in front of her as a mortal insult. Then he made a sudden violent jerking motion and pitched the hapless little girl into the black void. Her decrescendo screaming trailed off into the night.

 

Anders had heard and ignored rumors that the CIA backed system had condoned the torture and killing of old people, women, and even children, sometimes for mere sadism, sometimes for petty revenge. This reality he had just witnessed made even the worst of what he had heard about have a deep ring of truth.

 

First, Mr. Pham’s right arm and leg became flaccid and dangled like wet spaghetti at his side. The left side of his face became slack. He burbled unintelligently, emitting a nearly inaudible syllable salad. Then he slumped to his right. Phan Pho Ngo, the Coca Cola bottler and distributor for South Viet Nam, was dead. When his daughter flew out of the helicopter door, his blood pressure had shot off the manometer; a blood vessel deep in his brain burst from the strain and blew the left side of his cerebrum to pieces.

 

Duparrier gestured angrily at the two Nungs. They took hold of Phan’s limp body and pitched it unceremoniously out over the South China Sea. There would be no evidence of their night’s work.

 

 

Phoenix Terrorizes a Village

 

They coordinated their entrance; and one by one the men slithered into the house, quieter than the breathing of the sleeper inside. All three of them were now wearing their night vision glasses and had adjusted to the green light and head heaviness that accompanies the use of the night vision devises. By habit, each of them moved his head to and fro frequently to compensate for the limitations of peripheral vision. There were three persons sleeping, two teenagers and a middle-aged man. None of the sleepers stirred as the night stalkers entered their sleeping chamber.

 

Each PRUC took one of the victims as his responsibility; Anders stood in the center towering over the older man. He held up three fingers, then counted silently, one…two…three. As one, each of the PRUCs slapped a lead filled sap hard against the side of his victim’s sleeping head. Then each pasted a strip of wide duct tape over the mouth of the man beneath him. Only Anders’ man stirred requiring another blow from the sap. It had been very quietly done; the noise had not carried outside the walls of the well ventilated hooch. Less than three seconds had elapsed fro the time Anders had reached his count of three. A circlet of tape was wrapped around the unconscious VCIs’ ankles and wrists, trussing them adequately for the short time Anders had in mind.

 

The PRU cadres loaded their unconscious bundles over their shoulders, squatted low, and duck-walked out of the low door, Anders in front, and led their cautious way up the gentle grassy incline out of the village and onto the well-trodden secondary trail out of the community.

 

As the first step, Anders stepped behind the small VCI men, one at a time, lifted the man up to a semi-sitting position and cupped the man’s chin in one hand and the base of his skull in the other. He lifted the man’s head up as hard as he could, then sharply twisted counterclockwise pushing the chin down and the opposite occiput up. The resounding snapping noise was followed by an instant painless death as the first and second vertebrae separated, fractured, then sheared apart narrowing the intraspinal space drastically and physiologically transecting the cervico-medullary junction of the nervous system.

 

Next, the two Vietnamese PRUCs stripped the bodies naked and strung the three from tree limbs, head down. Then, using the sharpest pointed knife they had, two punctures were made into the engorged jugular veins, and the still fluid blood flowed freely and darkly into a rich pool at the base of the tree. Anders had his men strip the legs and abdomen down to mild as much of the blood out as possible. Finally, they hung the bodies by their wrists so that they were high enough, outstretched enough, and near enough to the main trail to command immediate and complete attention.

 

Dawn eased into the village gently with the light coming in overhead from the mountain tops beore the sun made its first appearance. Sunlight dappled through the trees gradually bringing the light and heat of the morning to the just arousing people.

 

Children began to herd their families’ potbellied pigs into the nearby forest to graze. Women began to cajole their lazy husbands to get up and to go out to the green carpets of the rice fields that were now undulation in the slight breeze. Half-asleep men cursed the perfidy of their buffaloes and jerked the nose loops unnecessarily, causing the powerful beasts to wince and stamp their feet. Ducks quacked; roosters crowed; and boys and girls began to yell friendly insults at each other across the dust now rising between the close order rows of nipa nuts.

 

Suddenly all of that stopped. From the edge of the forest, along the secondary trail, came the high keening wail of a woman in terror. All else, even the animals, became silent; and the village was momentarily transfixed in soundless animation. The sentries reacted first. Three of them raced across the village in the direction of the screaming woman. The population of the village departed en masses to where the source of such dismay was located.

 

The villagers stood looking at the three pale bodies suspended from the trees not daring to speak. No one noticed the three intruders as they quietly departed in the opposite direction.

 

Vietnam War Series

 

The Last Phoenix by Carl Douglass, 1997

 

The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army had launched the Tet Offensive of 1968 upon Hue and dozens of selected sites all over South Viet Nam. The offensive had been planned for weeks, and the infiltrators had brought in artillery pieces, small arms, and ammunition in small hidden lots with great patience. Communist soldiers had surreptitiously infiltrated into the city along with holiday festival traffic. Once in the city, they shucked their disguises and donned their military uniforms.

 

The miserable weather became worse, offering further aid to the attackers. The temperature dropped to fifty degrees, and a strong monsoon downpour drenched the town. Heavy ground fog hid the movements of the two attacking regiments [7500 NVA and VC in eight battalions] as they overran the city. The invaders started a campaign of slaughter of Hue’ civilians in a prearranged manhunt, killing defenseless citizens named on extermination lists.

 

A huge Viet Cong flag was mounted over the Imperial Palace the first morning of the offensive. The brilliant red, blue, and gold NLF pennant fluttered over the palace day after day to taunt the men and women trapped inside the limited protective walls of the Citadel.

 

Frantic radio messages brought marines from Danang. They were transported in limited numbers by helicopters at first, and then their units were able to enter the city over bridges that the NVA engineers had not had time to destroy. They did not even have a map of the city until a grunt obtained one from a battered Shell gasoline service station. By nightfall of the first night of fighting, the marines were methodically and painfully locked in door to door combat in the early efforts to dislodge the determined communists. In the dark and secret, the murders proceeded. It was a scene form Dante’s Inferno.

 

The NVA troops were being reinforced by fresh soldiers rushed unimpeded down the myriad paths of the Ho Chi Minh Trail and from the villages and farms. They pulled out all the stops and committed all of their assets, hidden and open. The hit squads continued their daily work of murder along with the commitment to the hot battle raging from building to building, street to street, and neighborhood to neighborhood. Every time the ARVN forces attempted to move out of the Citadel, they were driven back.

                                         

The weather was atrocious and continued to work in the NVA’s favor. Visibility was minimal; and the marines could not advance more than a few blocks. The orders to the ARVN troops were to stay put and to keep their casualties to a minimum.

 

By February ninth, the tenth day of fighting, General Ngo swallowed his pride and requested assistance from the US Marines who were, themselves, locked in a deadly struggle for survival, let alone advancement. The marines advanced on the northeast wall of the old Citadel fighting furiously as they went. When they entered the narrow streets in front of the wall, the Citadel tower, house windows, doors, sheds, and ditches erupted into a hell storm of gun, rocket, and grenade fire. The marines could do nothing but duck into the protection of civilian homes. They drove out the terrified citizens and helped themselves to the few belongings that had not been taken by the wave of communist soldiers who holed up in the homes before driven out by the marines.

 

The fighting around the Citadel continued unabated for a full four days. Navy cruisers fired heavy artillery that made a noise like a freight train coming in; and they and the 106mm recoilless rifles fired by the marines on the scene slowly pounded the tower, most of the ImperialCity, the Citadel, and the emperors’ tombs into varying degrees of rubble. Irreplaceable architectural treasures already badly damaged in the First Indochina War were destroyed. Finally, the communists retreated.

 

The counter-attack started after the battle of the Citadel was over. It took a month of hunting, fear, surprises, and killings to drive out the last of the PAVN and VC forces from the city and surrounding countryside. Five thousand of them were killed in battle. When it was all over, 216 Americans were dead, 1,364 were seriously wounded, 384 ARVN regulars had been killed and 1,830 seriously wounded, and 6,000 civilians were dead, In the investigations during the aftermath of the offensive, it was determined that at least 3,000 defenseless civilians had been murdered over and above those who had perished in the crossfire.

 

There were men, women, and children; age and sex were no protection. Some of the victims were killed simply because they had been witnesses to the atrocities. Fifty percent of the venerable old city of the Nguyen Lords was destroyed leaving 116,000 homeless. Hue lost its innocence, its security, its treasured old buildings, and its belief that it was exempt from the war. In the days that followed, there was a climate of bitterness, hatred, and fear that was almost palpable.

 

City Mood Change

 

Ordinary activities of Hue closed down for months while stunned citizens wearily tried to clean up and to rebuild their shattered city and lives. Sewage, water, electrical, garbage, and police services were nonexistent for a time. The cafes no longer blared jazz music. There were no prolonged circuitous intellectual discussions. The students conversed in hushed tones about their ultimate exposure to reality. There were no more illusions. War had come to Hue; no place was safe, or sane, or had promise for the future. A profound depression settled over the old city.

 

Phoenix Retributes for Tet Offensive

 

And there was retribution. From its vaunted blacklist the Phoenix program cranked out scores of names of VCI, and the PRUs all over South Viet Nam went after them with a coldhearted vengeance. Phoenix accounted for twenty thousand killings in the next two and a half years. The US counter-attack was the personification of brutality on the remnants of the VC not already cut to pieces in their desperate and militarily unsuccessful Tet Offensive. 1968 was a year that would live in infamy and would result in the virtual destruction of COSVN fighters in any kind of useful force. By 1969, nearly the entire war was conducted by regular NVA. The communist forces lost, during the Tet Offensive and its aftermath, 40,000 KIA, 5,000 disabled, and 3,000 captured.

 

 

 

Bush Accepts Iraq-Vietnam Echoes

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6065050.stm

 

19 October 2006

 

President George W Bush has accepted that the surge in violence in Iraq may be equivalent to America's traumatic experience in the Vietnam War. Mr Bush told ABC News that it could be right to compare Iraq's situation to the 1968 Tet offensive, widely seen as a key turning point in the conflict.

During the Tet offensive, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese armies launched a combined assault on US positions. Militarily, the assault failed but it was a huge psychological blow for the Americans and their allies, and eroded political support for the then president, Lyndon Johnson.

Vietnam War Series

 

Fire in the Lake by Frances Fitzgerald, Excerpt

Once they had conquered Vietnam, the French looked to their new colony to become a source or raw materials for their burgeoning industrial plant and a buyer for their manufactured goods. But in the mid-nineteenth century Vietnam was only a potential source. To achieve the common aim of all colonialist countries, France first had to transform what was essentially a subsistence economy serving the Vietnamese peasants and landlords into an economy that produced surpluses for the international market. Given the particular geography of the country, the French enterprise consisted of the creation of large plantations and the development of mines to extract the rich deposits of coal, zinc, and tin. The restriction of Vietnamese trade to French markets came as a corollary. To encourage and support the establishment of French colonists and entrepreneurs, the French administration built roads, canals, railroads, and market cities linking the Vietnamese interior with the shipping routes. These public works benefited the French almost exclusively at the time, but the French officials financed them largely by an increase of taxes on the Vietnamese peasantry. Following metropolitan practice, they levied taxes in money instead of kind, and upon trade in commodities more than upon property values and capital. They also established a government monopoly on salt, alcohol, and opium, and raised the prices on these goods to six times what they had been before the occupation. The result was a sudden growth in the number of landless and impoverished people - people ready to accept employment in the French plantation and mines under the most exploitative of terms. The French, however, took this new work force for granted, understanding it to be the normal complement of poor people that existed in this "backward" country.

 

Last Phoenix by Carl Douglas, 1997

French Colonialism

 

Trade flourished throughout a colonial era that extended from the 1400s to the early nineteenth century and included increasing contact with China, India, Portugal, The Netherlands, England, and France. Increasingly the competing colonial powers took control of the countries of the Asian hemisphere, and France made a calculated decision to establish its own empire in Southeast Asia. They sought a pretext.

 

As many of the colonialists had done, the French had used as their entering wedge the Christian missionaries. The Vietnamese recognized the threat these foreigners posed – they would change the people’s philosophy to that of an alien set of beliefs, and they would usher in an unstoppable progress of foreign methods, peoples, attitudes, and controls. The nationalists threatened and at times harmed the priests and their followers. They drove them out and banned their practices.

 

When the French perceived a threat to their religious people, they used that threat as a pretext to begin conquest. The date of the modern era was September 1857 when the French navy laid siege to Danang. They conquered that first city in 1858, then took Saigon in 1861. The emperor in Hue formally accepted the French as the colonial power in 1862. In 1867 the foreigners gained full control of the Mekong Delta and in 1883, the Red River Delta in the north.

 

They did away with the name of Viet Nam and adopted the attitude that the three principle areas were semi-autonomous French protectorates under the general heading of French Indochina. After 1887 the French had so consolidated their position that they regarded Indochina, including Cambodia, as a French possession, French soil. Their influence was everywhere and in everything.

 

Many of the young people began to lose their Vietnamese ways in French schools. The most ambitious and affluent of them were educated in France. This proved to be a two-edged sword for the French. They learned to be radicals and revolutionaries from the French themselves. The struggle between radicalism and nationalism produced communists. Many in China and Viet Nam admired the Marxist revolution and the communist philosophy and saw it as a way to stem the tide of western civilization in this hemisphere.

 

Because of the anti-western feeling and the great desire on the part of a wide majority of Vietnamese to shake off the yoke of the foreigners, secret societies of nationalists of all sorts of persuasions were begun in the late 1920s and early 1930s, much like the radicals and anarchists of Europe and the Triads of China. The feelings were most intense in and around Hanoi. In 1930 an uprising north of Hanoi was savagely put down by the colonialists and the nationalist movement was decimated, nearly destroyed. The survivors had to go deep underground. The communist were the most dedicated and best organized; and the forced their way into the positions of leadership.

 

France fell to the Germans in 1940 and lost its hold on Indochina. Many embraced the coming of the Japanese as deliverers. They did wrest control from the French colonialists, but allowed them to remain in place with the appearance of having authority. The French became paper tigers. French troops stayed in their garrisons while the Japanese military consolidated its control throughout Southeast Asia. However, the Japanese soon proved to be terrible and cruel tyrants, much worse than the French. The Viet Minh joined western forces to undermine and to fight them.

 

To counteract the support being given the west, the Japanese granted independence to Viet Nam in 1944 in return for a fraternal relationship. Bao Dai, acting as emperor, proclaimed that Viet Nam was once more an independent and unified nation. He was unacceptable to the northerners who were strongly under communist influence; and finally, in 1945, the emperor abdicated to Ho Chi Minh who claimed the presidency of a new republic with approval of the vast majority of the people of Viet Nam.