How did the Gates of Hell open in Vietnam? [View all]

[unhappycamper]

http://atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/OA19Ae01.html



How did the Gates of Hell open in Vietnam?
By Jonathan Schell
Jan 19, 2013

~snip~

My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the "air war". The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no "war" of that description.

There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies.

All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into "free-fire" zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.

By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes.