The Strategic Village: Insurgency, Counterinsurgency and Landscape in Central Vietnam, 1945–60

The American Vietnam War (1960-1975) is one of the most famous conflicts for studies of communal or village-level violence producing such terms as "strategic hamlets" and "agrovilles" to describe counterinsurgency strategies. However, many if not most villages in Vietnam were strategic long before American CIA and special ops advisors arrived. Drawing on a wider array of Vietnamese, French, American and local records, this presentation examines the central roles that the Viet Minh played in establishing "resistance zone" villages in the foothills of Central Vietnam from late 1945. Conflicts with French and pro-French Vietnamese forces further cemented battle lines in the hills and Viet Minh re-inforcements hardened the perimeters around key, strategic villages. After the 1954 cease-fire, President Ngo Dinh Diem's younger brother led special military police with bulldozers and settlers to these areas and razed them before establishing their own agricultural settlements on the ashes of the cleared "strategic villages." American military and CIA observers only reached these areas in 1958. After 1960 as the conflict resumed, Viet Minh veterans and their children returned to reclaim abandoned "strategic zones" (khu chiến thuật) in force. The Cold War did not reconfigure communal violence so much as it escalated violence in long-contested landscapes.