How
did the Gates of Hell open in
Vietnam? By Jonathan Schell
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.
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