On the Other Side: Terror as Policy

FOR shocked Americans, what happened at My Lai seems an awful aberration. For the Communists in Viet Nam, the murder of civilians is routine, purposeful policy. Terror is a part of the guerrillas' arsenal of intimidation, to be used whenever other methods of persuasion have failed to rally a village or province round the Viet Cong flag.

In a long war, no one knows just how many civilians have been attacked by the Communists. The U.S. has listed well over 100,000 separate incidents of terrorism against the South Vietnamese population since 1958. During the past eleven years, the Communists are known to have killed more than 26,000 South Vietnamese, injured hundreds of thousands, kidnaped at least 60,000 in their campaign of terror.

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Many of the Communists' civilian victims died singly or in small groups, as the Viet Cong sought to exterminate effective local leaders loyal to the government in Saigon. In 1960, Father Hoang Ngoc Minh, a popular Kontum parish priest, was ambushed by Viet Cong who drove bamboo spears through his body, then machine-gunned him to death. In 1961, the Viet Cong shot and killed two Vietnamese National Assemblymen near Da Lat.

Many other South Vietnamese have been killed in the random violence designed to paralyze South Viet Nam and frighten its people into abandoning the government. Forty-three were killed and 80 injured, most of them civilians, when terrorists dynamited the My Canh floating restaurant in Saigon in 1965. Forty-eight farm laborers were killed and seven others injured when Viet Cong mines exploded under a bus and another vehicle on a road near Tuy Hoa in 1966.

Not all Communist terrorism is carried out at random. Thousands of Vietnamese have died in well-planned massacres. In 1967, Montagnard tribesmen, who had fled the Communists a year earlier, were set upon in their new home at Dak Son 75 miles northeast of Saigon. Six hundred Viet Cong, 60 of them armed with flamethrowers, invaded the village, setting fire to the huts and shooting the inhabitants as they fled their burning homes, then executing 60 survivors of the assault. Altogether, 252 unarmed Montagnards, nearly all of them women and children, were murdered, 100 kidnaped, 500 listed as missing.

The Communist slaughter of civilians was wholesale while the Communists held the old imperial capital of Hue during their 1968 Tet offensive. Working from house to house with specially prepared "blood lists," they rounded up all officials and people suspected of working with the U.S. and Saigon governments. Some were arrested, others shot on the spot. The magnitude of the massacre did not begin to become fully evident until after government troops had retaken the city and uncovered a mass grave with 150 bodies. Their find led to the discovery of more grisly caches: 19 mass graves in and around Hue have so far yielded more than 2,300 bodies, almost all of them civilians, many with their hands tied behind their backs. Most had been shot or bludgeoned to death; others had been buried alive.

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