On Thu, 6 Nov 2003, Carroll Cox wrote: > I don't know as much as I should about details of the Philippine War > pursued by McKinley, Roosevelt, & Taft. Did they use anything like > strategic hamlets in that war?
Yes. They called them "protected zones." Comparatively, that is, in the sense that anything outside the zone was killed on sight. The Vietnam concept went through various permutations, but one of them was pretty much the same, where the outside of the strategic hamlets was the "free-fire zone." On top of everything else, in the Philippines, an estimated 50,000 natives died in epidemics that arose due to conditions in the "protected" zones. Michael
