A base area close to Saigon
The Iron Triangle was a stretch of rural country northwest of Saigon, roughly 20 to 25 miles from the capital. It lay between the Saigon River and the Thi Tinh River, with the town of Ben Cat at its northern end, and it had been a Viet Cong stronghold for years. Its villages, rice fields and rubber plantations sat close enough to Saigon to threaten the city, and its network of tunnels and bunkers sheltered headquarters, supply stores and fighters. American and South Vietnamese commanders regarded it as a dagger pointed at the capital.
Earlier attempts to clear it had failed to hold. When General William Westmoreland and his staff planned the first major operation of 1967, this was an obvious target. The operation was called Cedar Falls, and it ran from 8 to 26 January 1967.
The plan
Cedar Falls was one of the largest American operations of the war to that date. Roughly 30,000 troops are usually cited as taking part, including units of the US 1st and 25th Infantry Divisions, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and South Vietnamese forces. The method was often described as hammer and anvil: some forces blocked the escape routes while others swept through the area to drive the enemy against them.
The operation opened with an attack on Ben Suc, a village on the Saigon River at the edge of the Triangle. Helicopters landed troops around the village at dawn on 8 January, after a short artillery preparation, and the village was sealed off. The aim was not only to capture a Viet Cong supporter base but to remove the people who lived in it.
Ben Suc and the removal of the villagers
Ben Suc had a population usually put at several thousand. The villagers were gathered, questioned, and then moved out. Reports commonly give around 6,000 people removed from the village and neighbouring hamlets, with their livestock and belongings taken separately, though the count varies by source. They were transported to a refugee centre near Phu Cuong, where conditions were poor and many resented the relocation. Once the area was empty, American engineers burned and bulldozed the village. It was destroyed to prevent the Viet Cong from using it again.
This was not a spur-of-the-moment decision. The purpose was to deny the guerrillas their supply of food, recruits and shelter by removing the population around them. The same logic lay behind the strategic hamlet programme earlier in the 1960s. It was also, in effect, an admission that persuading the villagers to side with the government had not worked. Journalists who accompanied the operation described the scene, and the American writer Jonathan Schell wrote a long account of Ben Suc that was published in The New Yorker and later as a book. It brought wide attention to the human cost of clearing operations.
Land clearing and the tunnels
Beyond Ben Suc, the troops worked through the Triangle. Engineers used large bulldozers fitted with heavy blades, known as Rome plows, to strip jungle and brush from large areas, so as to deprive the enemy of cover. Defoliants were also used in the Vietnam War, though accounts of Cedar Falls usually stress the bulldozing.
The troops found a far larger tunnel system than they had expected. Underground passages, rooms and storage chambers were discovered, and some of them were used as hospitals, workshops and headquarters. The tunnels were dangerous to enter, since they could be booby-trapped or occupied, and volunteer soldiers who went into them, later nicknamed tunnel rats, took heavy risks. Large quantities of rice and documents were seized. Some of the captured papers were considered valuable by American intelligence.
Results
The official figures from the operation claimed several hundred enemy dead, some hundreds of prisoners and suspects detained, and large amounts of rice, weapons and supplies captured or destroyed. American casualties were comparatively light. Westmoreland and his staff regarded the operation as a success, and in the following weeks they described it as an example of the kind of deep penetration into a base area that could be repeated elsewhere.
Yet most of the Viet Cong main force units had avoided battle, slipping away before the sweep reached them, or hiding in the tunnels and surrounding country. After the American units left, the Viet Cong began to return. Within a short time the area was again being used, and the Iron Triangle remained a problem for the rest of the war. This pattern, in which a large force cleared an area and then departed without holding it, was one of the central criticisms of the search-and-destroy approach.
Criticism and significance
Cedar Falls drew criticism for several reasons. The forced removal and destruction of a village raised ethical and legal questions, and critics saw it as undermining the claim that American forces were protecting the people. The relocation also created thousands of refugees whom the South Vietnamese government was poorly equipped to care for. Supporters argued that these measures were necessary in a war where civilians and guerrillas could not easily be separated, and that moving people out was safer for them than leaving them in a free-fire area.
For the wider story of 1967, the operation illustrated the logic of attrition, in which the capture of ground mattered less than killing enemy fighters and depriving them of resources, a strategy examined in the survey of the Vietnam War in 1967. It was followed within weeks by the larger Junction City operation near the Cambodian border, which tried to apply the same approach to a different enemy base. Together they showed both the reach of American firepower and its limits. The Iron Triangle was cleared on paper, but the political and social ground, as events during the Tet Offensive a year later showed, had not been won.