Duc Duc Refugee Village Massacre

Duc Duc Refugee Village Massacre
Veterans Living In Peasant-Farming Village
I served with Jack Cunningham in Vietnam (Written 11 years ago)
An Earlier Attack On Duc Duc
KEN BURN'S/PBS VIETNAM WAR DOCUMENTARY
SOME EXPERIENCES OF US MARINE FIGHTING VILLAGE TERRORISM
Why doesn't the news media condemn leftwing violence in America
Viet Vet: The media doesn't condemn today's Left violence for the same reason they didn't in the war
ISISs Atrocities In The Middle East Recall Viet Congs 1971 Duc Duc Massacre
John Kerry Lies About All Vietnam Vets
Original Duc Duc Massacre Website
Duc Duc Resettlement Village In Late 1967
Experiences Of A Combined Action Program Marine
The An Hoa Project
Eye witness report of the massacre by Marine Dennis Sherman, who was on the ground
Eye witness report from a Marine Corps helicopter gunship pilot
A TRAGIC STORY OF A FAILED COMMITMENT "TO KEEP A VILLAGE FREE"
Details about the Duc Duc massacre
ISISs Atrocities In The Middle East Recall Viet Congs 1971 Duc Duc Massacre
One of the Original Websites for the Duc Duc Massacre

Veterans Living In Peasant-Farming Village

 

   NEW JERSEY HERALD FRONT PAGE HEADINE STORY 

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Read the movie script about living and serving (24/7) in the Duc Duc Refugee Village
 ISIS’s Atrocities In The Middle East Recall Viet Cong’s 1971 Duc Duc Massacre
Reporter Richard Pollock
 
Were the brutal terror tactics unleashed by the North Vietnamese Communists and their Viet Cong allies during the Vietnam War a precursor to the tactics used today by the Islamic State in the Middle East?

A number of Vietnam veterans think so, and they’ve been waging a little-known campaign to get the U.S. government to recognize a March 29, 1971, atrocity committed by the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong guerrillas when they burned down 800 village homes, many with the inhabitants huddling inside. At least 250 men, women and children were wounded or killed.

The mass incineration of the village of Duc Duc was never recognized as a war crime like the My Lai massacre in which U.S. Army Lt. William Calley was convicted of killing 22 Vietnamese villagers. Calley’s life sentence was announced the same day the communists attacked Duc Duc.

“I thought Duc Duc represented My Lai. Everything was so one-sided in the media,” recalled former Marine Lance Cpl. Jack Cunningham to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group. He lived with the people of Duc Duc as part of the Combined Action Program, which was dubbed “the Peace Corps with Rifles.”

Cunningham has led a decades-long campaign for official recognition of the Duc Duc atrocity and has compiled a series of graphic, first-hand websites  that portray life before and after the massacre .

The fires that  burned the Duc Duc homes were so bright on the night of the attack, helicopter pilots 20 miles away in the city of Danang could see the flames.

“You can see there’s a big empty space where the houses had been. They were cardboard and tin houses. We called them hooches. They were gone. Just burned,” Cunningham said.

The Duc Duc village was a government-sponsored hamlet that housed refugees who had fled Viet Cong-held areas.

“There was no reason for them to set fire to the village,” recalled Marine Sgt. Dennis Sherman, who was stationed near Duc Duc.

“There was no military significance to the site. It was only refugees. But it was a way to ‘convince’ people to move back to their area. The message was: ‘See, the government can’t protect you from us,’” Sherman said. “The Viet Cong hated them. The Viet Cong’s attitude was ‘it’s us or you’re dead,’” he said.

“And that’s the way ISIS is today,” former Marine Lance Cpl. Richard Thomas told TheDCNF. Thomas was stationed three miles away from Duc Duc.

Both the American media and anti-war activists, however, largely ignored communist atrocities and even praised the communists as good people.

The late anti-war activist Tom Hayden  wrote in the Los Angeles Times in January 2013 that “far from being faceless fanatics, the Vietnamese I met struck me as patriotic.”

But the Vietnam vets continue to raise their politically incorrect message that the U.S. government should regard the burning of Duc Duc as an atrocity.

Many of the G.I.s see a similarity to the tactics used by ISIS, whose guerrillas have beheaded, burned alive and hacked to death civilians who don’t support them.

“The Viet Cong would hack people to death with machetes and bayonets. It’s kind of like the way ISIS is doing right now,” said Thomas.

“The Viet Cong were known for going into a village, grabbing somebody’s parents, shooting one in the head and saying, ‘if you want mom alive, cooperate with us,’” recalled Sherman. “That’s how they operated.”

On the night of March 29, 1971, between 1,500 to 2,400 North Vietnamese Army regulars and Viet Cong guerrillas launched their assault on Duc Duc and on the nearby military base called the Fifth Marine Combat Base.

The attackers poured through two perimeters and overwhelmed the defenders — 150 ill-trained South Vietnamese soldiers and 11 American soldiers.

“There were probably 150 people against a minimum of 1,500 enemy. We were greatly outnumbered,” recalled Sherman who was on the base when the attack started and later received a Bronze Star for bravery.

With the troops preoccupied, the Vietnamese communists turned their attention to the defenseless people of Duc Duc. When the fires ebbed, a Viet Cong flag flew on top of one standing building.

The village was destroyed and never rebuilt. The survivors retreated further toward U.S. lines, but their whereabouts after the fall of South Vietnam in 1975 are largely unknown.

Noted Vietnam historian Robert Turner told TheDCNF that for the Viet Cong, “brutality was a key to their strategy. They made no distinction between combatants and noncombatants.” The terror tactics were dictated by the North Vietnamese Communist Party, which controlled the Viet Cong.

“Most of the brutality that I saw was because of official party policy, that is they were doing something because this is something the party told them to do,” said Turner, who also served in Vietnam. He is now a distinguished fellow at the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.

Descriptions of ISIS operations against civilians in Iraq and Syria often recall the communist atrocity in Duc Duc.

“Survivors describe an ISIS killing rampage whose main objective was apparently to terrorize local residents,” wrote  Letta Tayler, a senior terrorism researcher at Human Rights Watch, of the June 20, 2015, assault on the Syrian City of Kobani. “By all accounts, this was a planned attack on the civilian population of this area.”

That narrative differs from actress Jane Fonda’s comments, who in a famous 1972 Radio Hanoi broadcast while the war was in progress, lavished praise on communist women fighters who sought to kill American pilots.

“I cherish the memory of the blushing militia girls on the roof of their factory, encouraging one of their sisters as she sang a song praising the blue sky of Vietnam — these women, who are so gentle and poetic, whose voices are so beautiful, but who, when American planes are bombing their city, become such good fighters,” Fonda said.  

READ  THE  WHOLE  STORY  AT:   http://dailycaller.com/2016/12/12/isiss-atrocities-in-the-middle-east-recall-viet-congs-1971-duc-duc-massacre/
 
 
 
  I found the following report from the 7th Marines Command Chronology dated March 4, 1968. Although the grid coordinates are incorrect the village names are the same as those where you served with CAP 2-9-2 (aka NOV 3).  It seems like the massacre in 1971 was  not the first time the villagers had been brutalized.
            Sandy              Another CAP Marine                                           
 
                     (d)      040500H:  Company I searched the area of (AT869571) and found 40  civilians KIA, 77  WIA, and 14 WIA  (at this point there are several letters   I can't read  ...Sandy ) 
The villages of  DUC DUC, PHU DA, and AN HOA  had been mortared, and the enemy had moved through the area burning huts  and throwing grenades at the civilians in their bomb shelters. The Viet Cong terrorists told  civilians that the reason for the raid was to force the people to return across  the river to the Arizona area and grow rice.
 

 

 Team of proud American Marine veterans honor their lost buddies, and all Americans, who died in Vietnam, by having a Vietnamese peasant-farming refugee village 'Duc Duc' remembered.
(Don Eiferd, Dennis Sherman, George Dros, Fred Peterson, Richard Thomas, Bill Nimmo, Ronnie Armando Ponton, Jon Jones, Mike Smith, John "Jack" Cunningham, Auxiliary Supporter Alan Waugh [England]) 
 
Congressman Scott Garrett's of New Jersey is reviewing a request for a Congressional Resolution to remember the sacrifices of the Duc Duc Refugee Village in their supporting U.S. Marines during the Vietnam.
 
Recently, a special congressional investigation committee reviewed the details of the Duc Duc Resettlement Village massacre.  Although the massacre happened over 45 years ago, the details found out about this massacre by this special congressional investigation committee can not be released to the general public.
 
Although the details of this committee investigation of the Duc Duc Resettlement Village massacre can not be released to the general public, Congress Scott Garrett's staff are still reviewing, if a Congressional Resolution dedicated to the People of Duc Duc can be made.
 
 
 
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
John Kerry  April 22, 1971
-   At the time of his statements before the United States Congress, television news reporters and cameras, and Vietnamese Communist Negotiators in Paris, France, John Kerry was still in the United States Navy.
 
 

 

Less than a month after the massacre of the Duc Duc Refugee Village,  Senator John Kerry became a spokesperson and negotiator for the communist government in Vietnam.   At the time, John Kerry was an officer in the United States Navy.
 

Sen. Kerry met with the Viet Cong government to negotiate a peace settlement without the authorization of our government:

"I have been to Paris. I have talked with both delegations at the peace talks, that is to say the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government and of all eight of Madam Binh's points it has been stated time and time again, and was stated by Senator Vance Hartke when he returned from Paris, and it has been stated by many other officials of this Government, if the United States were to set a date for withdrawal the prisoners of war would be returned." (Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement by John Kerry to the Senate Committee of Foreign Relations, April 23, 1971.)

 

Additional details, and EYE-WITNESS REPORTS of the massacre can be found by pressing the narratives at the top left of this webpage.

 

The below picture is U.S. Marine John "Jack" Cunningham in the village of Duc Duc, less than a year before the near 2,000 Vietnamese peasant homes were burned to ash.
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Below is a picture of the last Americans to live and serve in this village.  About eight months after this picture was taken near 2,000 homes were ash.   (Don Eiferd, George Dros and John "Jack" Cunningham are among the Marines in this picture taken on August 13, 1970.)

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                                            QUANG NAM, VIETNAM 

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                                      Military Map of the An Hoa Valley 

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                                         The 'Other War' in Vietnam

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PLEASE  PRESS  THE  NEXT  LINK  TO  READ  THE  STORY  BEHIND  THE  ABOVE  LIFE  MAGAZINE  COVER:   http://home.earthlink.net/~life_magazine_67

 

 

                                                            THE  CHINESE  WARLORDS

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As the USMC Combined Action Platoons (CAP Teams) went fully mobile, many changes occurred. They lived out in the villages on a 24/7 basis and as such had less reason to worry about stiff barracks types checking them out. They didn't have a compound or a base to operate from, they selected a different spot every day in one of the hamlets to hunker down for the day. At night they split up and snuck into tactical positions around known VC routes. These were effective rugged combat teams that lived "in and behind enemy lines all the time." As such they developed individual and independent "looks" of identity. One time a Marine general commented that these teams looked like a bunch of Chinese Warlords. This team, from CAP 2-2-2, in the area west of Dai Loc obviously put on a show for this photos. But this is real and the men in there are serious combat veterans of many ambush and patrols where contact with the enemy occurred. This photo is from a well known CAP combat veteran Jack Cunningham whose combat reputation is beyond question. Jack is on the top row and is second from the right.     Semper Fi

By Bill Nimmo ‎ to VietnamWarHistoryOrg

 

 More Details About The Combined Action Program (CAP) at    http://www.capmarine.com/  and http://www.cap-assoc.org/