Department of Defense Photo (USMC) A373324 After a government informant revealed the location of a hidden Viet Cong rice cache, local villagers and their children dig up the rice for their own use.

from being seized by the Viet Cong. Before the har­vest periods, which occurred in April and May and again in September and October, each regiment launched attacks on known enemy base camps and cache areas and arranged its daily patrols to block in­filtration routes into rice-growing areas. During the harvest, all units increased the number of patrols and ambushes around the rice paddies. After the harvest, Marines helped guard mills and storage facilities and with the Vietnamese used highway check points to control the movement of the foodstuffs. By 1970, Operation Golden Fleece had merged into the broader continuing campaign to disrupt the enemy's supply system, a campaign which Hoi Chanhs, POWs, and captured documents indicated was keeping the NVA and VC hungry and demoralized.4

The Republic of Vietnam held elections in June for village and hamlet officials and provincial and municipal councils. In August, the people went to the polls again, this time to choose members of the Na­tional Senate. In Quang Nam, the 1st Marine Divi­sion cooperated with provincial and district authorities to protect polling places and voters from VC terrorism. The Marines left actual guarding of the polls to the RFs, PFs, PSDF and national police. They deployed their own forces in the countryside to block likely ene­my paths of approach and to deny the Communists access to mortar and rocket launching sites. The Ma­rine regiments also kept platoons on alert for rapid helicopter movement to reinforce localities under at­tack. All Marine plans and orders for election security repeatedly instructed troops to avoid entering popu­lated areas unless an attack took place and to refrain from any action that could be construed as an Ameri­can attempt to influence the voting.5

Behind the shield thus provided, the elections went forward on schedule, almost unmarred by terrorism and with no major enemy interference. Voter turnouts in Quang Nam, as elsewhere in South Vietnam, were encouragingly large. In the June provincial and municipal elections, for example, 83 percent of the eligible voters in Quang Nam Province and 75 per­cent of those in Da Nang City cast ballots.6

The 7th Marines in mid-April put into effect an am­bitious pacification plan. The plan, developed by Colonel Derning after he took command of the regi­ment in February, was aimed at denying the VC ac­cess to the many Communist-dominated villages in the Que Son Valley. These villages had long furnish­ed supplies and recruits to main forces operating in the Que Son Mountains and had served as way sta­tions on infiltration routes between the enemy base areas and Da Nang. Derning's plan also recognized that conventional infantry operations were producing less and less contact.

Responding to what appeared to be a change in ene­my focus in the 7th Marines' area from conventional operations to guerrilla warfare, the 7th Marines also refocused, gearing their tactics to population control. The 7th Marines commander, in consultation with Que Son District Headquarters and its CORDS advi­sor, selected a target list of D- and C-rated hamlets for each of the participating battalions. Derning also arranged to attach a RF or PF platoon, three national policemen, and a team of CORDS advisors to each rifle company. Under the plan, each company was to devote its daylight operations to maintaining a per­manent cordon around one or more hamlets. The civilian inhabitants were to be allowed in and out through checkpoints manned by PFs and police who would examine GVN identification cards and search the people for food and other contraband. This was intended, according to Derning, to assure thai when