On February 7, 1968, after American military forces rained rockets, napalm, and bombs on the village of Ben Tre in South Vietnam, killing hundreds of civilians, Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett quoted a military officer’s justification of the event.
“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,” a US major was quoted as saying.
Arnett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who’d go on to become one of the last western journalists in Saigon until its capture in 1975, never revealed the source of the quote, which some US officials doubted was authentic. Nevertheless, the quote—which eventually morphed into the pithier "We had to destroy the village in order to save it”—became a symbol of an absurd military strategy in a failed war.
