ABSTRACT
The village is Hiep Hoa, eighty kilometres north of Hanoi. By mid-1967 the United States had officially admitted that Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, had been bombed heavily and repeatedly. But the United States was still insisting that even within Hanoi the targets were strictly military. The article went on to point out, however, that ‘the State Department said that in its view there had been no bombing of the city of Hanoi itself, because there had been no deliberate attacks on civilian areas of North Vietnam’s capital’. The story was topped by an incredible four-column headline reading ‘Hanoi Exploits Bombing of Civilians’, as if the rules of war demanded, as I. F. Stone quipped in his Weekly, that ‘civilian casualties should be quietly buried in unmarked graves’. The State Department capitulated—or so it seemed.
