In a highly regarded military history and moral tract in justification of the American war, Guenter Lewy describes the purpose of the U.S. air operations of the early 1960s, which involved “indiscriminate killing” and “took a heavy toll of essentially innocent men, women and children,” in a manner that Orwell would have appreciated: villages in “open zones” were “subjected to random bombardment by artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the safety of the strategic hamlets.”
