Time, Dec 15,1967
The worst atrocity yet committed in the Viet Nam war (see pictures opposite) began its course last week when a handful of Viet Cong crawled up to the wall-and-wire perimeter of the hamlet of Dak Son, some 75 miles north east of Saigon. The V.C. called for the hamlet's inhabitants to surrender and come out. When they got no takers, they withdrew, hurling behind them their ultimate epithet: "Sons of Americans!" Earlier in the day, villagers had reported to their 140-man defense force that some Viet Cong were roaming through the surrounding fields. But that was hardly unusual, or cause for any particular alarm. The Viet Cong had steadily harassed Dak Son, and four times this year had mounted an attack and tried to overrun it; each time they had been stopped short of the defense perimeter and thrown back.
The reason for the Communists' in tense interest in Dak Son, a hamlet of 2,000 Montagnard people, was that it was the new home and sanctuary of some 800 Montagnard refugees who 14 months ago fled from life under the Viet Cong in the surrounding countryside, where they had been forced to work in virtual slavery as farmers and porters. The Montagnards are the innocents of Viet Nam: primitive, peaceful, sedentary hill tribesmen. The women go bare-breasted and the men, who scratch out a living by farming and hunting with crossbows and knives, wear loincloths. The Viet Cong not only missed the services of those Montagnards who had fled to government protection, but also feared that their lead might be followed by the 20,000 other Montagnards in the province of Phuoc Long, many of whom are still serfs of the V.C. Lest the others should get the idea of seeking government protection, the Communists decided to make an example of the refugees of Dak Son.
Yelling & Screaming. As in most Vietnamese villages, the people of Dak Son were completely unarmed, and most of them were women and chil dren. The Viet Cong began their attack at midnight, pouring machine-gun, mortar and rocket fire into Dak Son as they had in the past. This attack, however, was to be very different from the others. The 600 Viet Cong who assembled outside Dak Son were armed with 60 flamethrowers. Yelling and screaming, they attacked the town, shooting countless streams of liquid fire that lit up the night and terrified by its very sight a people who had only recently discovered the use of matches.
The Viet Cong first broke through the perimeter opposite the refugee quarter and forced the outmanned militia force to retreat aross the road into the town proper. There the militiamen were surrounded and isolated—and for the rest of the macabre night pointedly ignored by the marauders. The Viet Cong were not intent on a military victory but on the coldblooded, monumental massacre of the helpless Montagnards.
To that end, long ugly belches of flame lashed out from every direction, garishly illuminating the refugee hamlet and searing and scorching everything in their path. The shrieking refugees still inside their houses were incinerated. Many of those who had had time to get down into dogholes beneath the houses were asphyxiated. Spraying fire about in great whooshing arcs, the Viet Cong set everything afire: trees, fences, gardens, chickens, the careful piles of grain from the annual harvest. Huts that somehow survived the fiery holocaust were leveled with grenades. Then the hoses of fire were sprayed down inside the exposed burrows. Later, the Communists incinerated a patch of the main town just for good measure.
Night of Terror. One mile away, at the town of Song Be. Dak Son's intended defenders, a battalion of South Vietnamese soldiers, clenched their fists in helplessness as they watched the flames on the plateau mount higher and higher into the dark sky. Their small force of helicopters had earlier been sent out on another mission and could not be recalled. A march on foot to relieve Dak Son would lead through a wild and deep ravine separating the burning hamlet from Song Be. It meant three miles on a tortuous and twisting trail in the darkness—and an almost certain Viet Cong ambush. Dak Son's only outside help during its long night of terror and death was a single C-47 Dragonship that hovered over the hamlet, spraying the surrounding fields with its mini-guns. The grim gunners had no need of flares to spot their targets.
Only when they ran out of fuel for their flamethrowers did the Viet Cong resort to guns. Forcing 160 of the survivors out of their dogholes, they shot 60 of them to death on the spot. Then, finally abandoning the smoking ruins of Dak Son at dawn, they dragged away with them into the jungle another 100 of the survivors.
Ghastly Embrace. In numb horror, the other survivors stumbled out to look for wives, children and friends. They held handkerchiefs and cabbage leaves to their faces to ward off the smell of burnt flesh that hung over everything. One by one the dogholes were emptied, giving up the fire-red, bloated, peeling remains of human beings. Charred children were locked in ghastly embrace, infants welded to their mothers' breasts.
The victims were almost all women and children. The dead adults were covered with scorched mats and blankets salvaged from the ashes, the bodies of babies laid in bamboo baskets. One man lost 13 members of his family. All told, 252 of the unarmed Montagnards had been murdered and another 100 kidnaped; 500 were missing, either dead or fled into the hills. Nearly 50 were wounded, 33 with third-degree burns over up to 20% of their bodies. Three U.S. Army doctors treating them in Song Be's dispensary were sickened and appalled by the sight. One remarked that any hospital in the U.S. would be paralyzed by that many burn cases being brought in at once. The doctors did their best.
The Viet Cong's aim was clearly to frighten the rest of the Montagnards from seeking haven in government towns like Dak Son. But in this case, Communist terrorism had clearly overshot its mark. Chanting and weeping as they buried their dead, the Montagnard survivors resolved to stay in Dak Son and rebuild the hamlet. More than 100 men immediately volunteered for irregular-force training and a chance to defend Dak Son should the men with "the guns that shoot fire" ever show up again.
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