Search and Destroy, My Lai and Protest
Search and Destroy
By 1966 General Westmoreland had committed US ground forces to a strategy he called search and destroy. American units were helicoptered into rural areas, swept the terrain to draw the Vietcong into combat, and called in artillery and air strikes when contact was made. The aim was not to hold ground but to inflict more casualties than Hanoi could replace — a strategy of attrition. The metric chosen to measure progress was the body count: the number of Vietcong reported killed.
Search-and-destroy missions did not aim to hold ground. They aimed to inflict casualties beyond Hanoi’s capacity to replace them. Progress was measured by ‘body count’ — a metric that incentivised inflated kill claims and made every Vietnamese corpse, civilian or fighter, count the same.
Why Search and Destroy Failed
The strategy faced three structural problems. First, the Vietcong chose when and where to fight; an estimated 80 per cent of engagements were initiated by the enemy. Second, ground that was ‘cleared’ was simply re-occupied as soon as US units helicoptered out, since the operations did not aim to hold it. Third, the body-count metric corrupted reporting: officers competed for high counts, dead civilians were often counted as Vietcong, and the figures grew detached from any real measure of progress.
The human cost was extreme. Free-fire zones designated entire areas as legitimate targets for unrestricted fire. Villages were burned by units who suspected they had been used by the Vietcong — often correctly, but with little distinction between fighters and farmers. Helicopters strafed rice paddies. Napalm and Agent Orange poisoned land that had been farmed for centuries. By 1968 large parts of the South Vietnamese countryside that the United States was supposedly defending had been physically destroyed.
Officers competed on body counts because promotion depended on them. Anyone killed in a free-fire zone could be classified as Vietcong by default. Pentagon analysts later concluded that perhaps a third of recorded enemy dead were uninvolved civilians. The metric also drove escalating optimism: Westmoreland’s reports in 1967 spoke of an approaching ‘crossover point’ at which kill rates would exceed enemy replacement — the Tet Offensive in January 1968 would expose how misleading those numbers had been.
My Lai, March 1968
On 16 March 1968, less than two months after Tet, Charlie Company of the US 23rd Infantry Division entered the hamlet of My Lai in Quang Ngai province. They had been told the village was a Vietcong stronghold. They found no Vietcong fighters. Over four hours, the company murdered between 350 and 504 unarmed civilians — mostly women, children and the elderly. Houses were burned, livestock killed, several women raped before being shot. The killing was stopped only when warrant officer Hugh Thompson Jr, piloting an observation helicopter, landed between US soldiers and a group of villagers and threatened to open fire on his own side.
The army initially recorded the operation as a Vietcong battle with 128 enemy dead. The truth emerged a year later, when soldier Ronald Ridenhour wrote letters to Congress and journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969. Photographs taken by army photographer Ronald Haeberle — pits of murdered civilians — were published worldwide. Of the soldiers involved only Lieutenant William Calley was convicted; he was sentenced to life imprisonment but released after three and a half years of house arrest, mostly under a presidential intervention by Nixon.
On 16 March 1968 Charlie Company killed between 350 and 504 unarmed civilians at My Lai. The massacre was concealed for over a year before journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story in November 1969. The photographs — taken by army photographer Ronald Haeberle — transformed American public opinion on the war.
The Anti-War Movement
Opposition to the war began on US university campuses in 1965 with ‘teach-ins’ on Vietnam history. By 1967, mass demonstrations were drawing hundreds of thousands. The October 1967 march on the Pentagon brought 100,000 people to Washington. The draft made the war personal: young men of military age, disproportionately working-class and African American, were called up while wealthier students could defer through college. By 1969 over 33,000 US dead and the My Lai revelations had broken the consensus.
The anti-war movement linked Vietnam to civil rights and class. Martin Luther King Jr declared his opposition in April 1967. Boxer Muhammad Ali refused induction in 1967, saying ‘no Vietcong ever called me a [racial slur].’ Vietnam Veterans Against the War, founded in 1967, gave returning soldiers a powerful public platform — in 1971 hundreds threw their medals onto the steps of the Capitol.
Vietnam was the first ‘living-room war’. Television crews followed combat units; CBS, NBC and ABC ran nightly footage of body bags, burning villages and wounded marines. The Tet Offensive in January 1968 contradicted official optimism on the front page of every newspaper. The release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 — a leaked Defense Department history showing the government had repeatedly lied about progress — convinced many uncommitted Americans that the war could not be trusted in any official version. By the early 1970s a clear majority of Americans favoured withdrawal regardless of victory.