As you know from Apocalypse Now and, to a lesser extent, Platoon, one problem was that the regular farm folk who we were trying to liberate in South Vietnam, and the commie bad guys we were fighting, were often the same guys.

So we launched the Strategic Hamlet Program to try to separate the bad guys from the good, so we could then kill that first group. Makes sense.

The idea was to set up villages that would be provided with supplies and protection by the non-commie South Vietnam government. The rural folk would all move there and would be so grateful they would support the good guys. This was all based on the scientific principle that, "If you force millions of people to pack up their shit and move to a new place that they have to build themselves with a bunch of strangers, they will love you for it."

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How could that shit not work?

How It Backfired:

These "hamlet" and "village" words don't really do this program justice. Protecting and supplying a couple of small towns would have been no big deal. But in all, the Strategic Hamlet Program ended up relocating 8.5 million people. The government had no ability to supply and protect that many. Basically, they had a plan in place to take control of the area, but no plan in place to tell them what to do when they took control.

Who does that?



We do!

With millions of newly pissed-off South Vietnamese villagers now condensed in small areas, the communist insurgents were able to come in and recruit support at an impressive rate. In some cases there were as many insurgent recruits inside the villages as there were outside.

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This posed an all new problem for U.S. and South Vietnam forces. Take a look at these two pictures of people who, according to the professionals at ratethisasian.com, are both Vietnamese.

Would you be able to tell which one is the communist insurgent? Yeah, neither could we (although the sunflowers indicate possible hippie activity). At any rate, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces faced this same problem, albeit at a presumably much less sexy level, with the Strategic Hamlet Program. Ordinary non-combatant citizens were now living amongst just as many enemy fighters. And nobody could tell the difference.