“They know they don’t have to win the war, they just have to outlast the United States,” says Meredith Lair, associate professor of history at George Madison University. High causalities resulted, in part, from a shift in the North Vietnamese fighting strategy. The hill and the battle got its infamous nickname thanks to the intensity of the fighting there, in what soldiers dubbed a “human meat grinder.” Sergeant James Spears, a 19 year old who fought in the battle, told reporters, “Have you ever been inside a hamburger machine? We just got cut to pieces by extremely accurate machine-gun fire.” The name “Hamburger Hill” caught on quickly, in part, because so many journalists flocked to the area to report on the battle. US troops became very unpopular.How the Battle of Hamburger Hill Got Its Name Vietnamese civilians were constantly caught in the crossfire and began to question whether the US army was really on their side. In 1968, a mission to the village of My Lai ended with the massacre of many innocent civilians, including women and children. They would drop in by helicopter and kill those they thought were Vietcong.
Working on intelligence, the Americans tried to weed out the Vietcong in the Southern hamlets. There were not many industrial targets in the North so this was ineffective - bombs often missed targets and hit schools and hospitals. The Amercians bombed strategic targets in North Vietnam to stop the supply of troops and weapons to the South. The peasants were opposed to this as they were far from their ancestral burial grounds and their farms, which they had tended for generations. These were surrounded by barbed wire and controlled by the Americans. To prevent the Vietcong from hiding in southern villages, the South Vietnamese peasants were taken from their villages and settled in ‘strategic hamlets’.
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