Vietnam
How did the Gates of Hell open in Vietnam?
By Jonathan Schell
http://www.atimes.com
For half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible
that we didn't know what we were talking about? After all that has been written
(some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns
out, has literally been the case.
Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put
together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what
American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost
unspeakable truth.
Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information,
court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and first-hand interviews in Vietnam
and the United States, as well as
contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that
episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered
isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of
atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.
It has been Turse's great achievement to see that, thanks to the special
character of the war, its prime reality - an accurate overall picture of what
physically was occurring on the ground - had never been assembled; that with
imagination and years of dogged work this could be done; and that even a
half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done.
Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this picture
in statistical terms. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers - for instance the
mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some 2 million civilians
killed and some 5 million wounded, that the United States flew 3.4 million
aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion pounds of munitions, releasing
the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima bombs.
Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence of
abuses. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts, he has
supplemented this approach. Like a fabric, a social reality - a town, a
university, a revolution, a war - has a pattern and a texture. No fact is an
island. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak, reach out toward
the wider area of the surrounding facts. When some of these other facts are
confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and texture in question.
Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story
implies. For example, he writes:
If one man and his tiny team could claim more
KIAs [killed in action] than an entire battalion
without raising red flags among superiors; if a
brigade commander could up the body count by
picking off civilians from his helicopter with
impunity; if a top general could
institutionalize atrocities through the
profligate use of heavy firepower in areas
packed with civilians - then what could be
expected down the line, especially among heavily
armed young infantrymen operating in the field
for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often
unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly
pressed for kills?
Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources
coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war - a portrait that,
as an American, you do not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could
forget, but that you should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and
remember and take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has
done and been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is.
Scorched earth in I Corps
My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. In early August
1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military
operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New
Yorker on the "air war". The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of
course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no "war" of that
description.
There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the
fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These
ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and
several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with
much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3
equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the
ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies.
All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into "free-fire" zones and
naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.
By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the
removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion.
(However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to
indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I
witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh
provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes.
As we floated overhead day after day, I would watch long lines of houses burst
into flames one after another as troops moved through the area of operation. In
the meantime, the Forward Air Controllers were calling in air strikes as
requested by radio from troops on the ground. In past operations, the villagers
had been herded out of the area into the camps. But this time, no evacuation had
been ordered, and the population was being subjected to the full fury of a
ground and air assault. A rural society was being torn to pieces before my eyes.
The broad results of American actions in I Corps were thus visible and
measurable from the air. No scorched earth policy had been announced but
scorched earth had been the result.
Still, a huge piece was missing from the puzzle. I was not able to witness most
of the significant operations on the ground firsthand. I sought to interview
some soldiers but they would not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. "You
wouldn't believe it, so I'm not going to tell you," he said to me. "No one's
ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we've
all gone home, no one is ever going to know."
In other words, like so many reporters in Vietnam, I saw mainly one aspect of
one corner of the war. What I had seen was ghastly, but it was not enough to
serve as a basis for generalizations about the conduct of the war as a whole.
Just a few years later, in 1969, thanks to the determined efforts of a
courageous soldier, Ron Ridenhour, and the persistence of a reporter, Seymour
Hersh, one piece of the hidden truth about ground operations in I Corp came to
light.
It was the My Lai massacre, in which more than 500 civilians were murdered in
cold blood by Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, of the Americal
Division. In subsequent years, news of other atrocities in the area filtered
into the press, often many years after the fact. For example, in 2003 the Toledo
Blade disclosed a campaign of torture and murder over a period of months,
including the summary execution of two blind men by a "reconnaissance" squad
called Tiger Force. Still, no comprehensive picture of the generality of ground
operations in the area emerged.
It has not been until the publication of Turse's book that the everyday reality
of which these atrocities were a part has been brought so fully to light. Almost
immediately after the American troops arrived in I Corps, a pattern of savagery
was established. My Lai, it turns out, was exceptional only in the numbers
killed.
Turse offers a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967 as a
paradigm. A marine company suffered the loss of a man to a booby trap near the
village, which had in fact had been mostly burned down by other American forces
a few days earlier. Some villagers had, however, returned for their belongings.
Now, the Marine company, enraged by its loss but unable to find the enemy,
entered the village firing their M-16s, setting fire to any intact houses, and
tossing grenades into bomb shelters.
A Marine marched a woman into a field and shot her. Another reported that there
were children in the shelters that were being blown up. His superior replied,
"Tough shit, they grow up to be VC [Vietcong]." Five or 10 people rushed out of
a shelter when a grenade was thrown into it. They were cut down in a hail of
fire. Turse comments:
In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually
the entire war writ small. Here was the repeated
aerial bombing and artillery fire... Here was
the deliberate burning of peasant homes and the
relocation of villagers to refugee camps...
Angry troops primed to lash out, often following
losses within the unit; civilians trapped in
their paths; and officers in the field issuing
ambiguous or illegal orders to young men
conditioned to obey - that was the basic recipe
for many of the mass killings carried out by
army soldiers and marines over the years.
The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing
for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape. Consider the
following all-too-typical actions of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th infantry
beginning in October 1967:
The company stumbled upon an unarmed young boy.
"Someone caught him up on a hill, and they
brought him down and the lieutenant asked who
wanted to kill him... " medic Jamie Henry later
told army investigators. A radioman and another
medic volunteered for the job. The radioman ...
"kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic
took him around behind a rock and I heard one
magazine go off complete on automatic... "
A few days after this incident, members of that
same unit brutalized an elderly man to the point
of collapse and then threw him off a cliff
without even knowing whether he was dead or
alive...
A couple of days after that, they used an
unarmed man for target practice...
And less than two weeks later, members of
Company B reportedly killed five unarmed
women...
Unit members rattled off a litany of other
brutal acts committed by the company...
[including] a living woman who had an ear cut
off while her baby was thrown to the ground and
stomped on...
Pumping up the body count
Turse's findings completed the picture of the war in I Corps for me. Whatever
the policy might have been in theory, the reality, on the ground as in the air,
was the scorched earth I had witnessed from the Forward Air Control planes.
Whatever the United States thought it was doing in I Corps, it was actually
waging systematic war against the people of the region.
And so it was, as Turse voluminously documents, throughout the country. Details
differed from area to area, but the broad picture was the same as the one in I
Corps. A case in point is the war in the Mekong Delta, home to some 5 to 6
million people in an area of less than 15,000 square miles (39,000 square
kilometers) laced with rivers and canals. In February 1968, General Julian
Ewell, soon to be known by Vietnamese and Americans alike as "the Butcher of the
Delta", was placed in charge of the 9th Infantry Division.
In December 1968, he launched Operation Speedy Express. His specialty, amounting
to obsession, was increasing "the body count", ordained by the high command as
the key measure of progress in defeating the enemy.
Theoretically, only slain soldiers were to be included in that count but - as
anyone, soldier or reporter, who spent a half-hour in the field quickly learned
- virtually all slain Vietnamese, most of them clearly civilians, were included
in the total. The higher an officer's body count, the more likely his promotion.
Privates who turned in high counts were rewarded with mini-vacations. Ewell set
out to increase the ratio of supposed enemy soldiers killed to American soldiers
killed. Pressure to do so was ratcheted up at all levels in the 9th Division.
One of his chiefs of staff "went berserk", in the words of a later chief of
staff.
The means were simple: immensely increase the already staggering firepower being
used and loosen the already highly permissive "rules of engagement" by, for
example, ordering more night raids. In a typical night episode, Cobra gunships
strafed a herd of water buffalo and seven children tending them. All died, and
the children were reported as enemy soldiers killed in action.
The kill ratios duly rose from an already suspiciously high 24 "Vietcong" for
every dead American to a completely surreal 134 Vietcong per American. The
unreality, however, did not simply lie in the inflated kill numbers but in the
identities of the corpses. Overwhelmingly, they were not enemy soldiers but
civilians. A "Concerned Sergeant" who protested the operation in an anonymous
letter to the high command at the time described the results as he witnessed
them:
A battalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day.
With 4 battalions in the Brigade that would be
maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 a month 1500, easy.
(One battalion claimed almost 1,000 body counts
one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe
me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you
about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay [My Lai] each
month for over a year.
This range of estimates was confirmed in later analyses. Operations in I Corp
perhaps depended more on infantry attacks supported by air strikes, while Speedy
Express depended more on helicopter raids and demands for high body counts, but
the results were the same: indiscriminate warfare, unrestrained by calculation
or humanity, on the population of South Vietnam.
Turse reminds us that off the battlefield, too, casual violence - such as the
use of military trucks to run over Vietnamese on the roads, seemingly for
entertainment - was widespread. The commonest terms for Vietnamese were the
racist epithets "gooks", "dinks", and "slopes". And the US military machine was
supplemented by an equally brutal American-South Vietnamese prison system in
which torture was standard procedure and extrajudicial executions common.
How did it happen? How did a country that believes itself to be guided by
principles of decency permit such savagery to break out and then allow it to
continue for more than a decade?
Why, when the first Marines arrived in I Corps in early 1965, did so many of
them almost immediately cast aside the rules of war as well as all ordinary
scruples and sink to the lowest levels of barbarism? What chains of cause and
effect linked "the best and the brightest" of America's top universities and
corporations who were running the war with the murder of those buffalo boys in
the Mekong Delta?
How did the gates of hell open? This is a different question from the
often-asked one of how the United States got into the war. I cannot pretend to
begin to do it justice here. The moral and cognitive seasickness that has
attended the Vietnam War from the beginning afflicts us still. Yet Kill Anything
that Moves permits us, finally, to at least formulate the question in light of
the actual facts of the case.
Reflections would certainly seem in order for a country that, since Vietnam, has
done its best to unlearn even such lessons as were learned from that debacle in
preparation for other misbegotten wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here,
however, are a few thoughts, offered in a spirit of thinking aloud.
The fictitious war and the real one
Roughly since the massacre at My Lai was revealed, people have debated whether
the atrocities of the war were the product of decisions by troops on the ground
or of high policy, of orders issued from above - whether they were "aberrations"
or "operations". The first school obviously lends itself to
bad-apple-in-a-healthy-barrel thinking, blaming individual units for
unacceptable behavior while exonerating the higher ups; the second tends to
exonerate the troops while pinning the blame on their superiors.
Turse's book shows that the barrel was rotten through and through. It discredits
the "aberration" school once and for all. Yet it does not exactly offer support
for the orders-from-the-top school either. Perhaps the problem always was that
these alternatives framed the situation inaccurately. The relationship between
policy and practice in Vietnam was, it turns out, far more peculiar than the two
choices suggest.
It's often said that truth is the first casualty of war. In Vietnam, however, it
was not just that the United States was doing one thing while saying another
(for example, destroying villages while claiming to protect them), true as that
was. Rather, from its inception the war's structure was shaped by an attempt to
superimpose a false official narrative on a reality of a wholly different
character.
In the official war, the people of South Vietnam were resisting the attempts of
the North Vietnamese to conquer them in the name of world communism. The United
States was simply assisting them in their patriotic resistance.
In reality, most people in South Vietnam, insofar as they were politically
minded, were nationalists who sought to push out foreign conquerors: first, the
French, then the Japanese, and next the Americans, along with their client
state, the South Vietnamese government which was never able to develop any
independent strength in a land supposedly its own. This fictitious official
narrative was not added on later to disguise unpalatable facts; it was baked
into the enterprise from the outset.
Accordingly, the collision of policy and reality first took place on the ground
in Trieu Ai village and its like. The American forces, including their local
commanders, were confronted with a reality that the policymakers had not faced
and would not face for many long years. Expecting to be welcomed as saviors, the
troops found themselves in a sea of nearly universal hostility.
No manual was handed out in Washington to deal with the unexpected situation. It
was left to the soldiers to decide what to do. Throughout the country, they
started to improvise. To this extent, policy was indeed being made in the field.
Yet it was not within the troops' power to reverse basic policy; they could not,
for instance, have withdrawn themselves from the whole misconceived exercise.
They could only respond to the unexpected circumstances in which they found
themselves.
The result would combine an incomprehensible and impossible mission dictated
from above (to win the "hearts and minds" of a population already overwhelmingly
hostile, while pulverizing their society) and locally conceived illegal but
sometimes vague orders that left plenty of room for spontaneous, rage-driven
improvisation on the ground. In this gap between the fiction of high policy and
the actuality of the real war was born the futile, abhorrent assault on the
people of Vietnam.
The improvisatory character of all this, as Turse emphasizes, can be seen in the
fact that while the abuses of civilians were pervasive they were not consistent.
As he summarizes what a villager in one brutalized area told him decades later,
"Sometimes US troops handed out candies. Sometimes they shot at people.
Sometimes they passed through a village hardly touching a thing. Sometimes they
burned all the homes. 'We didn't understand the reasons why the acted in the way
they did.'"
Alongside the imaginary official war, then, there grew up the real war on the
ground, the one that Turse has, for the first time, adequately described. It is
no defense of what happened to point out that, for the troops, it was not so
much their orders from on high as their circumstances - what Robert J Lifton has
called "atrocity-producing situations" - that generated their degraded behavior.
Neither does such an account provide escape from accountability for the war's
architects without whose blind and misguided policies these infernal situations
never would have arisen.
In one further bitter irony, this real war came at a certain point to be
partially codified at ever higher levels of command into policies that did
translate into orders from the top. In effect, the generals gradually - if
absurdly, in light of the supposed goals of the war - sanctioned and promoted
the de facto war on the population. Enter General Ewell and his body counts.
In other words, the improvising moved up the chain of command until the soldiers
were following orders when they killed civilians, though, as in the case of
Ewell, those orders rarely took exactly that form. Nonetheless, the generals
sometimes went quite far in formulating these new rules, even when they
flagrantly contradicted official policies.
To give one example supplied by Turse, in 1965, General William Westmoreland,
who was made commander of US forces in Vietnam in 1964, implicitly declared war
on the peasantry of South Vietnam. He said:
Until now the war has been characterized by a
substantial majority of the population remaining
neutral. In the past year we have seen an
escalation to a higher intensity in the war.
This will bring about a moment of decision for
the peasant farmer. He will have to choose if he
stays alive.
Like his underlings, Westmoreland, was improvising. This new policy of, in
effect, terrorizing the peasantry into submission was utterly inconsistent with
the Washington narrative of winning hearts and minds, but it was fully
consistent with everything his forces were actually doing and about to do in I
Corps and throughout the country.
A skyscraper of lies
One more level of the conflict needs to be mentioned in this context. Documents
show that, as early as the mid-1960s, the key mistaken assumptions of the war -
that the Vietnamese foe was a tentacle of world communism, that the war was a
front in the Cold War rather than an episode in the long decolonization movement
of the 20th century, that the South Vietnamese were eager for rescue by the
United States - were widely suspected to be mistaken in official Washington. But
one other assumption was not found to be mistaken: that whichever administration
"lost" Vietnam would likely lose the next election.
Rightly or wrongly, presidents lived in terror of losing the war and so being
politically destroyed by a movement of the kind Senator Joe McCarthy launched
after the American "loss" of China in 1949. Later, McGeorge Bundy, Lyndon
Johnson's national security advisor, would describe his understanding of the
president's frame of mind at the time this way:
LBJ isn't deeply concerned about who governs
Laos, or who governs South Vietnam - he's deeply
concerned with what the average American voter
is going to think about how he did in the ball
game of the Cold War. The great Cold War
championship gets played in the largest stadium
in the United States and he, Lyndon Johnson, is
the quarterback, and if he loses, how does he do
in the next election? So don't lose. Now that's
too simple, but it's where he is. He's living
with his own political survival every time he
looks at these questions.
In this context, domestic political considerations trumped the substantive
reasoning that, once the futility and horror of the enterprise had been
revealed, might have led to an end to the war. More and more it was understood
to be a murderous farce, but politics dictated that it must continue. As long as
this remained the case, no news from Vietnam could lead to a reversal of the war
policies.
This was the top floor of the skyscraper of lies that was the Vietnam War.
Domestic politics was the largest and most fact-proof of the atrocity-producing
situations. Do we imagine that this has changed?
Jonathan Schell is a Fellow at The Nation Institute, and the peace and
disarmament correspondent for the Nation magazine. Among many other works, he is
the author of The Real War, a collection of his New Yorker reportage on
the Vietnam War.
Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse.
Metropolitan Books, 2013. ISBN-10: 0805086919. Price US$30, 384 pages.
Jonathan Schell's classic Vietnam books, The Village of Ben Suc
and The Military Half, are now collected in The Real War (Da Capo
Press).
This is a joint TomDispatch/Nation article and appears in print in the Nation
magazine.
Used with permission TomDispatch.
(Copyright 2013 Jonathan Schell)