On January 21, 1971, a Vietnam veteran named Charles McDuff
wrote a letter to President Richard Nixon
to voice his disgust with the American war in Southeast Asia. McDuff had
witnessed multiple cases of Vietnamese civilians being abused and killed by
American soldiers and their allies, and he had found the U.S. military justice system
to be woefully ineffective in punishing wrongdoers. “Maybe your advisers have
not clued you in,” he told the president, “but the atrocities that were
committed in Mylai are eclipsed by similar American actions throughout the
country.” His three-page handwritten missive concluded with an impassioned plea
to Nixon to end American participation in the war.
The White House forwarded the note to the Department of
Defense for a reply, and within a few weeks Major General Franklin Davis Jr.,
the army’s director of military personnel policies, wrote back to McDuff. It was “indeed unfortunate,” said Davis, “that
some incidents occur within combat zones.” He then shifted the burden of
responsibility for what happened firmly back onto the veteran. “I presume,” he
wrote,” that you promptly reported such actions to the proper authorities.”
Other than a paragraph of information on how to contact the U.S. Army criminal
investigators, the reply was only four sentences long and included a matter-of-fact
reassurance: “The United States Army has never condoned wanton killing or
disregard for human life.”
This was, and remains, the American military’s official
position. In many ways, it remains the popular understanding in the United
States as a whole. Today, histories of
the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the
context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre cited by McDuff. Even as that one event has become the subject
of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by U.S.
soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory
The visceral horror of what happened at My Lai is
undeniable. On the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the American Division’s
Charlie Company, q1st Battalion, 20th Infrantry, were briefed by
their commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation the
next daty in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member Harry Stanley recalled,
Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the villager.’” Infantryman Salvatore
LaMartina remembered Medina’s words only slightly differently: they were to “kill
everything that breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s
mind was a question one of the soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill; women
and children?” and Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.”
They killed everything. They killed everything that moved.
Over the course of four hours, facing no opposition, the methodically killed
more than five hundred unarmed victims.
Along they way they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the
dead, systematically burned homes and fouled the area’s drinking water.
An army inquiry into the killings eventually determined that
thirty individuals were involved in criminal misconduct during the massacre or
its cover-up. Twenty-eight of them were officers, including two generals, and the
inquiry concluded they had committed a total of 224 serious offenses. But only
Calley was ever convicted of any wrongdoing. He was sentenced to life in prison
for the premeditated murder of twenty-two civilians, but President Nixon freed
him from prison and allowed him to remain under house arrest. He was eventually
paroled after serving forty months, most of it in the comfort of his own quarters.
The public response generally followed the official one. At
the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, the would say: “Oh
yeah, isn’t that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those
people?” No, that was not what happened.
Lieutenant Calley was one of the people who went crazy and killed a lot
of people at My Lai, but it was an operation, not an aberration.
Looking back, it’s clear that the real aberration was the
unprecedented and unparalleled investigation and exposure of My Lai. No other American atrocity committed during
the war – and there were so many – was ever afforded anything approaching the
same attention. Most, of course, weren’t photographed, and many were not
documented in any way. The great majority were never known outside the
offending unit, and most investigations were closed ,quashed, or abandoned.
Even on the rare occasions when allegations were seriously investigated within
the military, the reports were soon buried in classified files without ever seeing
the light of day. Whistle-blowers within
the ranks or recently out of the army were threatened, intimidated, smeared, or
–if they were lucky –simply marginalized and ignored.
The stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond
anything that can be explained as merely the work of some “bad apples,” however
numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings,
specious arrests, imprisonment without due process –such occurrences were
virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in
Vietnam. They were no aberration. They were the outcome of deliberate policies
dictated at the highest levels of the military.
The hundreds of previous buried and now de-classified reports
that I gathered and the hundreds of witnessed that I interviewed in the United
States and Southeast Asia made it clear that killings of civilians –whether cold-blooded
slaughter like the massacre at My Lai or the routinely indifferent, wanton
bloodshed like the lime-gatherers’ ambush in Binh Long – were widespread, routine,
and directly attributable to U.S. command policies.
And such massacres by soldiers and marines, my research showed,
were themselves just a tiny part of the story.
For every mass killing by ground troops that left piles of civilian
corpses in a forest clearing or a drainage ditch, there were exponentially more
victims killed by the everyday exercise of the American way of war from the air.
Throughout South Vietnam, women and children were asphyxiated or crushed to
death when their bunkers collapsed on them, burying them alive after direct
hits from jets’ 500-pound bombs or 1,900 pound shells launched from offshore
ships. Countless others, , crazed with
fear, bolted for safety, when helicopters swooped towards their villages, only
to have a door gunner cut them in half with bursts from an M-60 machine gun –
and may others, who froze in place, suffered the same fate.
There is only so much killing a squad, a platoon, or a
company can do. Face-to face atrocities were responsible for just a fraction of
the millions of civilian casualties in South Vietnam. Matter-of-fact mass killing that dwarfed the
slaughter at My Lai normally involved heavier firepower and command policies allowed it to be unleashed with impunity.
This was the real war – the one in which My Lai was and
operation, not an aberration. This was the war in which the American military and
successive administrations in Washington produced not a few random massacred or
even discrete strings of atrocities, but something on the order of thousands of
days of relentless misery – a veritable system of suffering. That system, that
machinery of suffering and what in meant for the Vietnamese people, is what
this book is meant to explain.
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