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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.