SOUTH VIET NAM: Campaign of Brutality

More than a decade of large-scale fighting in Southeast Asia has left many Americans with the impression that the war-weary South Vietnamese, if given a free choice, would gladly exchange a military dictatorship in Saigon for a Communist regime if they could get peace in the bargain. To hear some antiwar activists tell it, Hanoi's forces are benevolent friends of the South Vietnamese population. Well, not quite. The fact is that the North Vietnamese have sometimes been shockingly brutal in their treatment of South Vietnamese who happened to be under their control.

During the 1968 Tet offensive, for instance, the...

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