Hasn't the US tried this once before? Come to think of it yes it has

[NNN0LHI]

http://lrb.veriovps.co.uk/v24/n04/sayl01_.html

Why the bastards wouldn't stand and fight

<snip>Sharp at 6 a.m. I was airborne for War Zone C ('no shows', it was said, were listed on a giant computer in Washington and never flew by US Army helicopter again), following the winding Saigon River. Twenty minutes later door gunners on either side cocked their weapons as our helicopter dived to just above treetop height. I glimpsed scrub, dug-up dirt roads, palm-thatched huts, fleeing chickens - the First World overflying the Third. The door gunners opened up, hammering away at I knew not what. As far as I could tell, on that occasion anyway, no one fired back. The colonel in the seat beside me twisted round to yell in my ear: 'Been in the Zone before, son? No? Well, you're in it now!' We landed in a clearing where scores of Vietnamese villagers squatted listlessly, waiting for something to happen. More kept arriving in businesslike twin-rotor Chinook helicopters clutching babies, cooking pots and bundles of belongings. Other helicopters brought grey, mud-spattered water buffaloes, which were led to wallows the size of swimming-pools being excavated near the riverbank by American soldiers with bulldozers. Both people and livestock were coming, I was told, from a village called Ben Suc, a long-time VC stronghold which had just been taken by the US 1st/26th Infantry, airlifted into action in sixty helicopters. The people were leaving because their village was to be burned down.

The day passed in a blur, jump-cutting from scene to scene. I watched armoured bulldozers, 'Rome Ploughs', rooting up neat vegetable gardens. The name, I guessed, must be a reference to Carthage; later I learned they were made in Rome, Georgia. Ignorant in those distant days about booby-traps, I wandered into a deserted hut with a trench, perhaps a foot deep, dug under a rickety bamboo bed. A rifle pit? Hardly, given its position - more likely a simple bomb shelter for the owner and his family. On the beaten earth floor was a sickle for harvesting rice, its handle work-polished and shiny. I was pondering the family's political views when a First Division corporal came by, motioned me out, sloshed gasoline from an olive-drab jerrican on the house and lit it with a Zippo cigarette lighter. (Hence, 'zippo raids'.) I watched, open-mouthed, as combat engineers clambered down rope ladders from helicopters hovering over thick scrub, felled the trees with chainsaws, and in a few minutes cleared a serviceable landing zone. (The 7.5-ton BLU-82 cluster bombs, just coming in, risked no US casualties. Nicknamed 'daisy-cutters' in Vietnam, they cut down trees; later, in treeless Afghanistan, Afghans.) The US engineers, tall and trim, really looked like 'freedom's athletes', as Walt Whitman called their Civil War forebears, an army of film stars. Other American soldiers were clambering, pistol in one fist, flashlight in the other, into sinister-looking tunnels uncovered by the bulldozers. More tunnels, apparently empty, were being filled with some explosive or poisonous gas from portable generators and blown up, leaving hollows zigzagging over the broken ground.

Here and there were captured enemy, or 'suspects' at least, wiry young men in sandals and shabby black work-clothes (or uniforms?), some wounded and bandaged, others sullenly unhurt, their arms tied tightly behind their backs. The ones I saw were being guarded, not by Americans, but by brown-skinned ARVN soldiers, men of their own size and race, incongruous in alien boots and uniforms. From one of these groups an American officer, recognising me as a correspondent (I had a camera, a bush hat and carried no weapon), introduced himself as an adviser and said: 'Don't forget to write about the ARVN! It's their war, too!' I said I would, and indeed did, prophetically: 'It is on these little men in their oversize American helmets that the future of South Vietnam will ultimately depend.' As a battle, Attleboro was more of a hunt than a fight; but it seemed to be going according to plan.

After a dizzying day I spent the night with the headquarters company of the First Engineer Battalion of the First Division, US Army. It was, I suppose, inevitable that I should fall in with engineers; they were literally leaving their mark on Vietnam, carving out in the Zone forest the shape (visible only from the air, by friendlies) of a gigantic '1', the insignia of the division, with a crenellated castle, the badge of the US Army Corps of Engineers. Deep in the Zone, the engineers had made themselves a perimeter with barbed wire and, every few feet, Claymore mines marked with war's mindless simplifications: 'This Side towards Enemy' and, on the back, 'This Side towards Friendly'. I thought of the marching camps set up every night by the Roman legions but, where the eagles would have stood guard, the Stars and Stripes and the battalion standard flew instead. Embroidered in red and gold, the standard bore, like War Zone C itself, the crest of the First Engineers. From its staff dangled a skein of campaign streamers, blue and grey, with names like a skirl of fifes: Antietam, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Appomattox. Other ribbons remembered Vera Cruz, Manila, St Mihiel, the Argonne, Tunisia, Sicily, Normandy and many more. The battalion dates from 1846 and the campaign which expelled Mexico from Texas, and has been in the thick of every American war since. I was in the presence of history, America's military elite of elites.

Heh, heh, 'Don't forget to write about the ARVN! It's their war, too!'