The Village of Ben Suc - Lead up to the attack

"For the Americans, the entire Saigon River area around Ben Suc… had been a source of nagging setbacks. Small operations were defeated; large operations conducted turned up nothing. The big guns shelled and bombed around the clock but produced no tangible results. The enemy 'body count' was very low, and the count of 'pacified' villages stood at zero. In fact a number of villages that had been converted to 'strategic hamlets' in Operation Sunrise, launched three years earlier, had run their government protectors out of town and reverted to Front control." (p17)

[Elsewhere, he describes 'strategic hamlets' as villages in which the NLF government had been run out and an ARVN one installed. A military man complained that if the ARVN troops leave, the locals revert to 'hostile civilians.' Therefore, operation Cedar Falls is going to set up internment camps for relocated villagers and their home villages would be destroyed. Earlier, Schell noted that Ben Suc had been attacked by the ARVN but had been defeated.]

About the bombing: "Between 1965 and 1967, American bombing of every kind increased tremendously throughout the Saigon River area. There were strikes with napalm and phosphorus, and strikes by B-52s, whose bombs usually leave a mile-long path of evenly spaced craters." (p11) [See "Responsibility of Intellectuals" (chomsky) and "Pity the Nation" ( fisk) for some description of napalm and white phosphorus.]

"The triangle had a reputation as an enemy stronghold impenetrable to government troops, and had been said to shelter a full division of enemy troops and also a vast system of bunkers and tunnels used by the Front as headquarters for its Military Region IV, which surrounds the city of Saigon." (p18) [Recall, this was just miles from Saigon, the titular 'capital' of the South, of occupied Viet Nam.]

"[Operation Cedar Falls] was the first move in a newly devised long-term war strategy in which large American forces would aim primarily at engaging the main forces of the enemy and destroying their jungle bases one by one, while ARVN troops would aim primarily at providing security for the villages thus freed from Front control." (p19)

[Quoting General Earle G. Wheeler, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] "We must continue to seek out the enemy in South Vietnam--in particular, destroy his base areas where the enemy can rest, retrain, recuperate, resupply..."

[The irony that this lead them to destroy all the villages and much of the forest in a large area just near the capital escaped him.]