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The people of Quang Ngai, China have a history of rebellion dating back far into the sixteenth century. It was there that the Vietminh troops led revolts against and defeated the French in the 1930s and after World War II and where the Viet Cong fought the Saigon government in the 1950s and 1960s. When Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, Saigon officials estimated 90,000 southerners went north to join the Hanoi regime. More than 90 percent of them came from Quang Ngai. By the mid-1960s Quang Ngai’s population was estimated to be 640,000 making it South Vietnam’s third largest province. It was also considered to be the toughest Viet Cong stronghold in the country. Attempts to separate the Viet Cong from the people began in 1962, when the Saigon government launched the Strategic Hamlet Program (a.k.a. pacification or rural construction). Entire families were taken and moved into fortified hamlets (small villages) and those that refused to go had their homes and fields burned by the South Vietnamese army, but the program failed and embittered the peasants and did very little to drive out the Viet Cong. Those living inside of the hamlets, though, were still in contact with the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Viet Cong, and the gates and walls inside the hamlets were scribbled over with Viet Cong slogans of defiance. Quang Ngai became the target for the first major American combat operation of the Vietnam War. The mission, conducted in 1965 by the U. S. marines, was called “Operation Starlight” and more than 700 Viet Cong were reported killed. A new concept of pacification was devised in order that the marines are able to free Quang Ngai and its people from Communist control. The orders, as told by a senior officer in 1966, were to sanitize the region—kill the Viet Cong and get the civilians out. In guerrilla warfare the guerrillas are the fish and the people are the water; to catch the fish, you must remove the water, was a common reference to how the American military should go about getting rid of the Viet Cong. By this time much of Quang Ngai had been declared a free-fire zone, in which all inhabitants were assumed to be Viet Cong or Viet Cong sympathizers and U. S. forces needed no permission from Saigon or local officials for bombing missions or artillery attacks. This being said, soldiers took this opportunity to bomb and/or shoot at anything that looked like it may be a target, yet the Viet Cong continued their hold on Quang Ngai. In 1967, Task Force Oregon was formed to sanitize the Communists in the area. It included two infantry brigades, one airborne unit and a brigade of Korean marines. In four months, Task Force Oregon claimed 3,300 kills of Viet Cong, 800 captured weapons, and 5,000 arrested suspects in the area. By this time, as an indirect cause of U. S. operations in Quang Ngai, at least 138,000 civilians had been made homeless and brought into refugee camps, because 70 percent of the dwellings in the province had been destroyed by bombs or fire. By the fall of 1967, the only government hospital in the area was a 400-bed facility treating around 700 patients a month. In September a new unit, the Americal Division, took control of combat operations in Quang Ngai and was composed of three brigades—the 196th, which had served in part of Task Force Oregon, and two new units, the 11th Brigade from Hawaii, and the 198th Brigade from Texas. The new division was not an elite fighting force, and thus did not warrant having the helicopters and armored equipment of an airborne division. There was much competition between the three brigades of the division and each division ultimately came up with their own brigade patch instead of wearing the patch of the division.
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