Many People 's Liberation Armed Forces of South Vietnam ( PLAF ) units operated at night , and employed terror as a standard tactic . Rice procured at gunpoint sustained the Việt Cộng . Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas . Government employees , especially village and district heads , were the most common targets . But there were a wide variety of targets , including clinics and medical personnel . Notable Việt Cộng atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế , 48 killed in the bombing of My Canh floating restaurant in Saigon in June 1965 and a massacre of 252 Montagnards in the village of Đắk Sơn in December 1967 using flamethrowers . Việt Cộng death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam ; the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967-72 . They also waged a mass murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps ; in the peak war years , nearly a third of all civilian deaths were the result of Việt Cộng atrocities . Ami Pedahzur has written that " the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century "
over 3,000 unarmed civilians
Massacre at Huế
Viet Cong