The South Vietnamese government, by contrast, would have crumbled without U.S. support. Its troops were battle-shy, outnumbered, and outgunned by a domestic (i.e., South Vietnamese) guerrilla insurgency, the so-called Viet Cong, which drew on local discontent as well as imported materiel. Eighty percent of the 5 or 6 million tons of American bombs dropped in the war fell on the South, not the North. The United States, in fact, would drop more bombs on the territory of its putative ally than it had dropped on all its World War II enemies. And then it would go on to do something from which
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