Ben Tre

Bến Tre is the capital city and municipality of Bến Tre Province, located in the Mekong Delta area of southern Vietnam. From town level, it was upgraded to city on August 11, 2009.

One of the most famous quotes of the Vietnam War was a statement attributed to an unnamed U.S. officer by AP correspondent Peter Arnett. Writing about the provincial capital, Bến Tre, on February 7, 1968, Arnett said: "'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,' a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong."[1] The quote was distorted in subsequent publications, eventually becoming the more familiar, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."[2] The accuracy of the original quote, and its source, have often been called into question.[3] Arnett never revealed his source, except to say that it was one of four officers he interviewed that day. US Army major Phil Cannella, the senior officer present at Bến Tre, suggested that the quote might have been a distortion of something he said to Arnett.[2] The New Republic at the time attributed the quote to US Air Force major Chester L. Brown.[4] In Walter Cronkite's 1971 book, Eye on the World, Arnett reasserted that the quote was something "one American major said to me in a moment of revelation."[5] However, one American veteran of the campaign, Captain Michael Miller, has written that he heard the comment being made by one Major Booris in a press briefing.[6]