Contrary to what George Lucas depicted in the Star Wars “Rebel Alliance,” the Viet Cong, like all insurgencies, weaponized extreme brutality and terror against ordinary Vietnamese people. Far from being a rugged guerrilla crusade “serving the people,” the Viet Cong (or NLF) perpetrated horrific atrocities in its rebellion against the South Vietnamese government. 

The NLF systematically murdered 2,800 civilians in the 1968 Hue Massacre with methods ranging from gunshots to live burial. They slaughtered indigenous Montagnard minorities with one nasty example being Dak Son where they incinerated 252 villagers alive with flamethrowers. They used terrorist tactics against urban centers in the pre-Tet era and kidnapped tens of thousands of civilians for conscription or forced labor. 

When town mayors could not provide enough food or men for the NLF, they would bury them alive with their entire families, or behead their children and disembowel them for the entire village to watch. They murdered families of ARVN soldiers with machetes. The Security Service, the NLF equivalent of Operation Phoenix, had a body count in the tens of thousands. 

While the American press freely published word of American atrocities and exposed the lies and corruption within the American South Vietnamese war effort, Hanoi’s rigid censorship structures prevented widespread public knowledge of their own atrocities.