A Magazine of Politics and Culture

MENU LOG IN

What We Did In
Vietnam

Reckoning with Vietnam, 50 years after My Lai…

Nathan J. Robinson
filed 08 July 2018 in H I S T O R Y

I
n any attempt to explain or tell the
story of “The Vietnam War” as a whole, the
people who should command most of the focus
are the Vietnamese. That should go without
saying, really. The United States lost 58,000
soldiers in the war, while multiple millions of
Vietnamese lives were lost, possibly nearly 4
million. This is 20 to 60 times as many deaths, almost half of
whom may have been civilians. Yet needless to say, in America’s
voluminous national literature about the war, including tens of
thousands books, dozens of Hollywood films, and numerous
documentaries, the Vietnamese experience is not treated as
being ten times as tragic and important as the American
experience. In fact, the ratio goes in the other direction: even in
antiwar depictions, the story of the Vietnam War is almost
always told from the perspective of American soldiers. The
Vietnamese are nameless fungible extras.
I am tempted to call this “understandable.” On the face
of it, it doesn’t sound crazy to say that Americans see the war
through American eyes. Ken Burns said that when he worked
on the epic documentary The Vietnam War (co-directed with
Lynn Novick), he included a number of Vietnamese voices
under pressure but wanted to “pull them back” because he was
making an “American film” to honor Vietnam veterans and heal
national wounds. If we actually consider what this means,
though, it’s not really “understandable” at all, or at least not
defensible. A documentary called The Vietnam War that isn’t
mostly about Vietnamese people isn’t about The Vietnam War
and it isn’t really a documentary. It might be a moving
collection of anecdotes, but a deliberately “American” film is
intentionally excluding most of the people affected by a
historical event, solely because of their nationality. (As
historian Christian Appy asks: “Is it possible to make a film for
one side’s combatants and still remain neutral?”) Yet Burns’ and
Novick’s film remains a drastic improvement over previous
efforts, in that Vietnamese people do actually show up in it
(though they are rarely humanized to the same degree).
There is a standard (infuriating) justification offered for
why domestic portrayals of historical events treat other
participants as scenery: the audience demands it. People don’t
want to watch films about Vietnamese peasants being blown
up, they want to watch films about the moral anguish of good-
hearted American boys who had to blow up Vietnamese
peasants. Oliver Stone made two Vietnam War films about
American soldiers, which made $150 million each and won
Oscars. Then he made one about a Vietnamese woman. It
flopped, earning $5 million on a $33 million budget. 1978’s The
Deer Hunter, a trashy melodrama in which the Vietnamese exist
as sadistic racists who are there to be shot, won five Oscars
including Best Picture. But the fact that it’s hard to make
Americans care about Vietnamese lives is the opposite of a
justification for ignoring those lives. It’s a disturbing caution
that we probably have deep-rooted nationalistic and racial
biases that will inhibit our ability to understand and empathize
with other people’s pain, and which continue to fashion the
prism through which we view our history.
The selective attention to suffering can occur
unconsciously, without anyone noticing they are doing it. I am
sure Ken Burns didn’t even think about the implications of
dwelling mostly on U.S. policymakers, troops, their families,
and antiwar activists. But this failure to afford equal status to
Vietnamese people in accounts of the war has allowed the
United States to avoid coming to terms with the full human
cost of its actions. Comforting national myths about the
Vietnam War as a “noble mistake” have let the country to make
peace with what happened, without ever having to seriously
probe what the war looked like from the other side. In fact, it
can be very difficult to find English-language studies of the
Vietnam War that prioritize Vietnamese sources. But when we
do try to examine the war fairly and neutrally, and give all lives
the same weight, we inevitably come to conclusions that should
be highly discomforting for Americans who would like to treat
the war as a well-intentioned tragedy rather than a lasting moral
stain on the country and a serious challenge to the idea of
America as a “force for good.”
The magnitude of devastation in Vietnam is difficult to
comprehend. To watch The Vietnam War, you would get the
general impression that the war largely consisted of soldiers
jumping out of helicopters and tramping through rice paddies
and up hills (to the tune of “Green Onions,” “Magic Carpet
Ride,” and, of course, “All Along The Watchtower”). But the
most damage was inflicted from the skies, in massive aerial
bombing campaigns that turned significant parts of the country
into moonscapes. Over a seven-year period, U.S. and South
Vietnamese aircraft flew 3.4 million combat sorties. From 1965
to 1968, the United States was dropping 32 tons of bombs per
hour on North Vietnam. 25 million acres of farmland were
subject to saturation bombing, and 7 million tons of bombs
including 400,000 tons of napalm were dropped in Southeast
Asia (including Laos and Cambodia) during the conflict. This
is more than three times as many tons of bombs than were
dropped in all of World War II, and the combined power of the
explosives amounted to more than 640 Hiroshimas. In Quang
Tri province, “only 11 of the province’s 3,500 villages went
unbombed,” and the province’s capital district was “saturated
with 3,000 bombs per square kilometer.” When Air Force Chief
of Staff Curtis LeMay promised to bomb North Vietnam “back
into the Stone Age,” he was not bluffing. (Laos, however, had
even more explosives dropped on it, and by the end of the U.S.’s
9 years of aerial attacks it was the most bombed country in the
history of the world. And since ⅓ of the bombs failed to
explode, 50,000 people were killed or maimed there in the
decades after the bombing stopped.) A North Vietnamese
soldier described what a U.S. bombing raid felt like from the
ground:
 From a kilometer away, the sonic roar of the B-52
explosions tore eardrums, leaving many of the jungle
dwellers permanently deaf. From a kilometer, the
shockwaves knocked their victims senseless. Any hit within
half a kilometer would collapse the walls of an unreinforced
bunker, burying alive the people cowering inside. Seen up
close, the bomb craters were gigantic—thirty feet across and
nearly as deep… The first few times I experienced a B-52
attack it seemed… that I had been caught in the Apocalypse.

The sheer numbers of bombs dropped may be staggering,

but the important fact is that they were dropped on people. Not
only were countless civilians killed, but the nonstop bombing
created an atmosphere of perpetual terror for large parts of the
population, along with the lifelong pain and trauma that comes
with being maimed, losing a loved one, or just suffering with
the inevitable nightmares produced by year upon year of
gigantic explosions.
In exhaustive, multi-decade research on the war ranging
from examining military archives to interviewing peasants in
remote Vietnamese villages, journalist Nick Turse has produced
strong evidence that the Vietnam War was far worse for the
country’s inhabitants than most Americans realize. Whole
cities were turned to rubble, farms were obliterated, children
incinerated. The United States deployed chemical weapons in
the form of thousands of tons of CS tear gas. 70 million liters
of toxic defoliants and herbicides, including Agent Orange and
the lesser-known Agent Blue, were deployed as part of a
deliberate strategy of killing Vietnamese farmers’ crops. As is by
now well-known, up to 5 million Vietnamese people were
sprayed with these toxic chemicals, but the crop destruction
strategy itself was perverse and cruel, attempting to starve
insurgents by ruining the lands of poor peasant farmers. (As the
RAND corporation noted in 1967, “the civilian population
seems to carry very nearly the full burden of the results of the
crop destruction program.”)
 PHOTOS FROM THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. SEE NOTE AT END OF
ARTICLE.

In South Vietnam, the United States often attempted to

save peasant villages from a guerrilla insurgency by flattening
the villages from the air. Turse quotes two South Vietnamese
generals saying that as a result of U.S. firepower, “Many villages
were completely obliterated… Houses were reduced to rubble,
innocent people were killed, untold numbers became displaced,
riceland was abandoned, and as much as one half of the
population of the countryside fled.” As early as 1962, villages in
certain zones were “subject to random bombardment by
artillery and aircraft so as to drive the inhabitants into the
safety of the strategic hamlets,” according to pro-war historian
Guenter Lewy. “Driving the inhabitants” into “safety” through
bombing may seem oxymoronic, but it resulted from a U.S.
theory that villagers in Viet Cong dominated areas could be
persuaded to relocate to friendly territory if bombing made it in
their self-interest to do so. As Turse writes:

To deprive their Vietnamese enemies of food, recruits,

intelligence, and other support, American command policy
turned large swathes of those provinces into “free fire zones,”
subject to intense bombing and artillery shelling, that was
expressly designed to “generate” refugees, driving people
from their homes in the name of “pacification.” Houses were
set ablaze, whole villages were bulldozed, and people were
forced into squalid refugee camps and filthy urban slums
short of water, food, and shelter.

Journalist Neil Sheehan confirms that the destruction of

villages in order to intentionally create homeless refugees was
policy rather than accident, sanctioned by U.S. commanding
general William Westmoreland. Eventually, U.S. evaluators
would conclude that “putting the people behind barbed wire
against their will is not the first step towards earning their
loyalty and support,” but Westmoreland publicly stated that
making villagers homeless or putting them in camps would
ensure that their villages could not be captured by guerrillas,
claiming that “in order to thwart the communists’ designs, it is
necessary to eliminate the ‘fish’ from the ‘water,’ or to dry up
the ‘water’ so that the ‘fish’ cannot survive.” The “water,” he said
were the villagers. By 1967 this policy had produced a million
refugees. As Sheehan explains:
 Te Americans called it ‘generating refugees’… Driving
people from their homes by bombing and shelling. I was out
with Westmoreland one day and I asked him, ‘General,
aren’t you disturbed by wounding all these civilians, the
bombing and shelling of hamlets?’ He said ‘Yes, Neil, it’s a
problem. But it does deprive the enemy of the population,
doesn’t it? And I thought to myself ‘You cold-blooded
bastard. You know exactly what you’re doing.’

This is not seriously contested. Guenter Lewy, whose

America in Vietnam strongly defends the morality of American
actions and dismisses antiwar criticisms, reports instances like a
brigade that “reported evacuating 8,885 villagers and burning
their houses in order to deny the use of these facilities to
VC/NVA forces and to discourage the villagers from returning
to their homes.” Lewy says that “the extensive use of artillery
and air strikes with high explosives and napalm had helped
keep down American casualties but had also resulted in large-
scale destruction and the deaths of villagers and many refugees.”
In fact, while Lewy’s work is ostensibly a strong defense
of American policy, it contains shocking evidence about the
extent of U.S. destruction of Vietnam. He quotes an American
officer’s assessment that “the unparalleled, lavish use of
firepower as a substitute for manpower is an outstanding
characteristic of U.S. military tactics in the Vietnam war.” (In
fact, when Westmoreland was asked how he intended to win
the war, he did not reply with an actual military strategy.
Instead, he just said “firepower.”) This “lavish use of firepower”
was an application of a maxim that Lewy says the U.S. began
subscribing to after World War I: “Expend shells, not men.”
This meant minimizing U.S. casualties at all costs, by
maximizing the amount of destruction inflicted. But while a
philosophy of “risk minimization” can sound benign, it causes
horrifying results. Just as a police officer trying to “minimize
risk” at all costs will open fire on anyone who could potentially
be a threat, “expend shells not men” leads soldiers to blow up
villages rather than risk being attacked in them. It abandons any
“rules of engagement,” and concern for other lives, in favor of
the constant massive use of deadly force. Having a plane drop
napalm from the air, for instance, is an easy way to minimize
risk to Americans and “expend shells,” but it seriously amplifies
the risk of massacring civilians. As Ken Burns and Geoffrey
Ward say in The Vietnam War’s accompanying book, napalm
was “an effective weapon—a single 120-gallon aluminum tank
could engulf in flame an area 150 feet long and 50 feet wide,
and its use saved untold numbers of American and ARVN lives
—but it also killed or disfigured countless Vietnamese
civilians.” Lewy says the official Rules of Engagement allowed
napalm attacks on villages only in cases where it was “absolutely
necessary,” but admits that “in practice this rule does not appear
to have restricted the use of such weapons.” Efforts to restrain
firepower “ran head on against the mindset of the
conventionally-trained officer” who concentrated on “zapping
the Cong” and wanted to “minimize casualties among their
troops.”

Lewy’s work essentially concedes that war crimes were

sanctioned. “Training in the Geneva conventions and other
provisions of the law of war was often perfunctory,” he says, and
an inspection in May-June 1969 revealed that “almost 50
percent of all personnel had not received their required annual
training in the Geneva and Hague conventions.” At that time,
he says “the pressure for body count and the free use of heavy
weapons in populated areas probably made this kind of
instruction seem rather academic and irrelevant.” Surely it did:
if official policy is to pummel populated villages with artillery
shells, what good could it do to learn about the Hague’s
prohibition on terrorizing civilians? There were, Lewy says,
“severe problems of proper conduct toward the insurgents and
the civilian populations.” Rules largely existed on paper, and the
military justice system failed to deal with instances of war
crimes, since enlisted men were “not anxious to expose their
comrades to legal retribution for having killed Vietnamese
civilians who generally were perceived as unfriendly.” Again,
this is one of the war’s staunchest defenders speaking. In fact,
you can often get a sense of just how much is uncontested by
looking at the (often understated) admissions made by writers
supposedly justifying American actions. A writer for the
conservative Weekly Standard, for instance, in dismissing
certain allegations of widespread atrocities, still says: “make no
mistake: Americans committed war crimes in Vietnam, and
officers covered them up. General William Westmoreland’s
search-and-destroy policies and the profligate use of air and
artillery fire put Vietnamese peasants at risk, and far too many
died—though not all at our hands.” The same writer goes
further elsewhere:

No serious historian of the Vietnam War disputes that the

way American forces fought the war contributed to an
atmosphere of atrocity. None doubt that command at all
levels may have swept allegations under the rug or that
incidents went unreported. Few historians argue that [the
My Lai massacre], while an aberration in scale, was an
aberration in practice.
 This is remarkable. It essentially says “Well of course,
everybody knows there was an atmosphere of atrocity in which
commanders swept war crimes under the rug, and that the only
thing unusual about My Lai was its scale.” That may be the
consensus among serious scholars of the war, but it’s not the
dominant American perception, and My Lai is often seen as a
kind of “exception that proves the rule.” Here, for example, is
Sam Harris, talking about My Lai as evidence that American
culture has no tolerance for the “murder of innocents,” by
contrast with other cultures:

[My Lai was] about as bad as human beings are capable of

behaving. But what distinguishes us from many of our
enemies is that this indiscriminate violence appalls us. The
massacre at My Lai is remembered as a signature moment
of shame for the American military. Even at the time, U.S.
soldiers were dumbstruck with horror by the behavior of
their comrades. One helicopter pilot who arrived on the
scene ordered his subordinates to use their machine guns
against their own troops if they would not stop killing
villagers. As a culture, we have clearly outgrown our
tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of
innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the
world has not.

In fact, the helicopter pilot who intervened to stop the

My Lai massacre was widely vilified for turning on his fellow
soldiers, and public opinion was resolutely on the side of
William Calley, the lieutenant convicted of ordering the
massacre. But even more importantly, America has showed an
extraordinary capacity to ignore or justify “murder of
innocents” that occurred throughout the rest of the war. The
evidence is very clear that United States forces committed
major atrocities, including the widespread use of chemical
weapons on civilians, routine violations of the laws of war and
the rules of engagement, and the dehumanization and
terrorization of ordinary Vietnamese people. Yet there has been
much less national reflection on these outrages than on My Lai,
the one event that can be most easily classified as an aberration.
Perversely, as Harris’s statement shows, My Lai has actually
managed to make Americans feel better about themselves
rather than worse, by convincing them that the massacrewas the
crime rather than the war.
Understanding this fact is crucial to understanding the
war. Documenting and analyzing atrocities committed in
Vietnam is important, but above all else: the war itself was a
crime. The United States refused to recognize Vietnamese
independence after World War II, supported and then took
over the French effort at colonial reconquest, and finally
launched a large-scale invasion with 500,000 troops and the
unrestrained use of deadly force in order to keep an unpopular,
autocratic U.S.-friendly government in power. It was not a war
fought out of noble motives; U.S. leaders were fully aware that
they were not acting in the interests of the Vietnamese people
or defending anything that could reasonably be called
“democracy.” It was a war fought because the United States
feared the loss of influence and the humiliation of defeat.
 This is not the picture of the Vietnam War that has been
passed down. Instead, even liberal critics of the war have seen it
as a flawed but well-intended tragedy. As Daniel Ellsberg notes,
the received picture of the war has been as a foolhardy
American “intervention” in an internal conflict, rather than an
aggressive American attempt to subvert a national
independence movement:

It was no more a “civil war” after 1955 or 1960 than it had

been during the U.S.-supported French attempt at colonial
reconquest. A war in which one side was entirely equipped
and paid by a foreign power—which dictated the nature of
the local regime in its own interest—was not a civil war. To
say that we had “interfered” in what is “really a civil war,”
as most American academic writers and even liberal critics
of the war do to this day, simply screened a more painful
reality… In terms of the UN Charter and of our own
avowed ideals, it was a war of foreign aggression, American
aggression.

“War of aggression,” of course, is one of the most severe

international offenses, condemned by the Nuremberg Tribunal
“the supreme international crime, differing only from other war
crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of
the whole.” Yet many people critical of the war have shied away
from this kind of language, searching for softer descriptions
that will keep America from having to do the kind of hard
moral reflection required of countries that have committed
historic crimes. As Ken Burns frames it, the war was “begun in
good faith by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings.”
This is false. It was begun in bad faith by leaders who simply did
not care about the will of the Vietnamese or the suffering they
would undergo. As Ellsberg explained, the record shows that
every single president lied to the public about Vietnam:
 Truman lied from 1950 on, on the nature and purposes of
the French involvement, the colonial re-conquest of
Vietnam that we were financing, and encouraging.
Eisenhower lied about the reasons for and the nature of our
involvement with Diem and the fact that he was in power
essentially because of American support and American
money and for no other reason. Kennedy lied… about our
own combat involvement, and about the recommendations
that were being made to him for greater involvement [and]
lied about the degree of our participation in the overthrow
of Diem. Johnson of course lied and lied and lied; about the
provocations against the North Vietnamese prior to and
after the Tonkin Gulf incident; about the plans for
bombing North Vietnam, and the nature of the buildup of
American troops in Vietnam. Nixon as we now know, lied
to the American public from the first months of his [term
in] office, in terms of the bombing of Cambodia and Laos
[and] ground operations in Laos, the reasons for our
invasion of Cambodia and of Laos, and the prospects for
the mining of Haiphong that finally came about in 1972
but was envisioned as early as 1969.

Nor did these lies come from good motives. Nixon, of

course, sabotaged peace talks in order to get elected president,
which stands out as a moral low point even in the career of
Richard Nixon. But even Lyndon Johnson, who is often
portrayed sympathetically for “agonizing” over the war, was
often simply worried about being emasculated and seeming to
“back down.” As he described his own fears:

[If we left Vietnam] there would be Robert Kennedy…

telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s
commitment to South Vietnam… That I was a coward. An
unmanly man. A man without a spine… Every night when
I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the
middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear
 the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting
and running toward me: ‘Coward! Traitor! Weakling!’

Of course, it is too simple to say that millions of

Vietnamese people died because Lyndon Johnson was afraid of
being called a wuss by imaginary dream-people. But we can see
that the psychological roots of U.S. decision-making went
deeper than a mere rational concern about communism.
Johnson didn’t want to look bad. There’s a resemblance here to
the words of Reginald Dyer, the British colonel who ordered
the Amritsar massacre in India. When asked if it was necessary
for him to open fire on the crowd, he said “I think it quite
possible that I could have dispersed the crowd without firing
but they would have come back again and laughed.” As George
Orwell explains in “Shooting an Elephant,” when he says that if
he hadn’t shot the elephant the natives would have thought less
of him, the fear of humiliation is a strong internal motivator in
imperial powers.
There is another feature that the U.S. occupation of
South Vietnam has in common with the ventures of prior
empires: racism and the dehumanization of the native
population. It is impossible to get around this. Numerous
testimonies from Americans who served in Vietnam confirm
that from basic training onward, “right away they told us not to
call them Vietnamese. Call everybody gooks, dinks.” As for the
Viet Cong themselves, “They were like animals. They wouldn’t
allow you to talk about them as if they were people… They told
us they’re not to be treated with any type of mercy or
apprehension.”William Westmoreland, whose strategy of
massive firepower and indiscriminate bombing killed countless
innocent Vietnamese, was openly racist, suggesting that the
“Oriental” mindset meant these killings didn’t matter very
much: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as
does the Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.
As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it, life is not
important.”
 Soliders were taught almost nothing of Vietnamese
language or culture, and because the locals all bled together
into a mob of “gooks,” distinctions between civilians and
combatants were often made haphazardly. Nick Turse explains
that the high civilian casualties in Vietnam resulted in part
from an informal (sometimes spoken, sometimes not) “mere
gook rule”: the rule that if corpses were “mere gooks,” nobody
would be held accountable for the killings, even if the dead
were civilians and the rules of engagement had been violated.
Turse quotes one marine telling another: “Shouldn’t bother you
at all, just some more dead gooks. The sooner they all die, the
sooner we go back to the world.” “Nobody cared about the
Vietnamese,” one anonymous soldier declared bluntly. Little
fuss was made if civilians were killed, because they were often
chalked up as enemy dead, with soldiers following the rule “if
it’s dead and it’s Vietnamese, it’s VC.” (Note the “it.”) Even
Lewy concedes that it is “clear that a steady percentage of those
reported as VC dead were in fact villagers not carrying
weapons.”
One of the most disturbing aspects of the war is the
American military leadership’s strategy of prioritizing “body
count” above all. Westmoreland deliberately waged a war of
attrition, attempting to weaken the Viet Cong and NVA’s
resolve by killing as many of them as possible. Commanders in
the field were obsessively pressured to produce as many dead
Vietnamese bodies as possible. “Body count was everything,”
and the “pressure to kill indiscriminately” was “practically
irresistible.” There were “kill count” competitions, with soldiers
being rewarded with leave or cases of beer for maximizing their
kills. Superior officers would say things like “Jack up that body
count or you’re gone, Colonel.” One West Point veteran
remembers hearing his commander explain his strategy, which
was that “he wanted to begin killing 4,000 of these little
bastards a month, and then by the end of the following month
wanted to kill 6,000.” Promotion in the officer corps could be
dependent on body count, and “many high-level officers
established ‘production quotas’ for their units.” As celebrated
war memoirist Philip Caputo recounted, it often seemed as if
there were no traditional strategic military objectives, such as
the capture of territory. The only objective was mass killing:

Your mission is to kill VC. Period. You’re not here to

capture a hill. You’re not here to capture a town. You’re not
here to move from Point A to Point B to Point C. You’re
here to kill Viet Cong. As many of ‘em as you can… [But]
there was also the question of how you distinguish a Viet
Cong from a civilian… There were, at times, very
convoluted rules of engagement given to us. If we were out
on an operation and see saw somebody running, that was
somehow prima facie evidence that he, or even she, was the
enemy. Presumably. I guess the idea was if they liked us
they wouldn’t run, and I remember an officer saying ‘The
rule is if he’s dead and Vietnamese, he’s VC.

We can see here a chain of logic leading almost

inexorably to genocide: take a series of teenagers, hand them
M-16s, and put them through a brutal basic training routine in
which they are called “maggots” and have their spirits broken,
and must learn to obey orders unquestioningly and kill without
mercy (even chanting “Kill! Kill! Kill!”). Drop them in a
country they know nothing about, and teach them no ways of
distinguishing between the inhabitants, who are all nameless
gooks. (And who do not value life.) Tell them that the country
is crawling with the enemy, and that even women and children
may be supporters and informers of the guerrillas. Teach them
nothing about the laws of war or the rules of engagement.
Impose no accountability for abuses. Make them terrified. Then
tell them their job is to maximize “enemy body count” and that
they will be rewarded for killing and punished for failing to kill.
Set them lose with more heavy firepower than any other war
ever fought in human history.
 Is it any wonder, given this process, that so many
Vietnamese civilians died? My Lai instantly ceases to become a
mystery when we understand just how the United States went
about prosecuting the war. It would be shocking if My Lai were
an aberration, because it’s hard to see how draftees in this
situation could produce anything other than a bloodbath. The
combined notions of “killing as success” and “civilians as
unimportant” are recipes for mass death. Then add the
euphemistic concepts of “free fire zones” (areas that had
supposedly—but not actually—been cleared of anyone except
the enemy, where one was free to “kill anything that moved”)
and “search and destroy missions” (which were supposedly
about searching a village and destroying the enemy, but quickly
morphed into searching the village and then destroying it). The
resulting horror was the unavoidable conclusion that followed
from the U.S. military’s premises.
I am not sure how much detail to go into on how this
horror unfolded on the ground. Turse’s book can be almost
unreadable, because its catalog of atrocities is so stomach-
churning that one can’t read more than a few pages at a time
without feeling the urge to throw up. A few brief notes on
various aspects of it will do. First, Vietnamese women were
routinely sexually abused, and Turse cites numerous instances
of female villagers being sadistically raped by U.S. soldiers,
quoting one who served in the 25th Infantry Division saying
that “rape was virtually standard operating procedure” in his
unit. (“All three grunts grabbed the gook chick and began
dragging her into the hootch… I learned to recognize the
sounds of rape at great distance. Over the next two months I
would hear this sound on the average of once every third day.”)
Prisoners of war were often tortured and killed. This was in part
the result of “body count” logic (“Damn it I don’t care about
prisoners, I want a body count,” one lieutenant quoted his
superior officer as saying) and partly the desire for vengeance
that came after U.S. soldiers watched their friends killed by
mines and heard reports of torture by North Vietnamese forces.
A marine, explaining why his unit never brought in any
prisoners, said: “If an enemy soldier fell into our hands he was
just one sorry fucker. I don’t know how to explain it that would
make sense to anyone who wasn’t there..” In Bloods: Black
Veterans of the Vietnam War, specialist Richard Ford of the
Army’s 25th Infantry Division sheds some more insight on
what this could look like:
(Warning: this passage is incredibly disturbing.)

So at that time they had this game called Guts. Guts was
where they gave the prisoner to a company and everyone
would get in line and do something to him… So they took
the NVA’s clothes off and tied him to a tree. Everybody in
the unit got in line. At least 200 guys. The first guy took a
 bayonet and plucked his eye out. Put the bayonet in the
corner of the eye and popped it. And I was amazed how
large your eyeball was. Then he sliced his ear off. And he hit
him in the mouth with his .45. Loosened the teeth, pulled
them out. Then they sliced his tongue. They cut him all
over. And we put that insect repellent all over him. It
would just irritate his body, and his skin would turn
white…. I don’t know when he died. But most of the time he
was alive. He was hollering and cursing. They put water on
him and shaking him and bringin’ him back. Finally they
tortured him to death.

It is difficult, after the fact, for anyone to figure out just

how widespread this kind of behavior was. Certainly, stories of
U.S. soldiers cutting off ears recur in Vietnam memoirs, and
Turse’s examination of internal U.S. war crime records reveal
hundreds of incidents of abuse that went largely unpunished.
But Turse’s characterization that war crimes were perpetrated
throughout the armed forces has been disputed, and it is not
clear how one should proceed from anecdote to data. The
anecdotes alone, though, are enough to suggest that the moral
culture of the U.S. armed forces in Vietnam was severely
warped.
Specific people and units stand out. Roy Bumgarner, a
psychopathic sergeant who killed 1,500 people, was widely
known to be a mass murderer but was kept on active duty. The
“Tiger Force,” an elite reconnaissance unit, racked up “scores of
unarmed victims” including “two blind brothers, an elderly
Buddhist monk, women, children, and old people hiding in
underground shelters.” The infamous “Phoenix Program,”
sponsored by the CIA, tortured and assassinated tens of
thousands of people, and seems to have invented the
horrendous tactic of “rape with eels.”
The burning of villages was commonplace, and villagers
were baffled by the fact that U.S. soldiers would sometimes
show up and hand out candy, and sometimes show up to
destroy every building in town. One major general said that
when troops took casualties, “the instant reaction of the troops
[was] to burn the whole hamlet down.” (Many U.S. atrocities
seem to have occurred because soldiers were frightened and
angry after members of their units were killed.) There were,
according to a member of the First Cavalry Regiment,
“numerous burnings of villages for no apparent reason.” One
marine patrol received the instruction: “Burn the damn gooks
out. Burn it. Burn it and they can’t ever come back.” As a soldier
described the process:

Te flamethrowers came in and we burnt the hamlet.

Burnt up everything They had a lot of rice. We opened the
bags, just throw it all over the street. Look for tunnels.
Killing animals. Killing all the livestock. Guys would carry
chemicals that they would put in the well. Poison the
waster so they couldn’t use it… They killed some more people
here. Maybe 12 or 14 or more. Old people and little kids
that wouldn’t leave. I guess their grandparents. People that
were old in Vietnam couldn’t leave their village.

Of course, things would go to an even greater extreme at

My Lai itself, “where American troops murdered an entire
village of 300–500 unarmed South Vietnamese, in addition to
raping civilians, killing their livestock, mutilating corpses,
burning down houses, and fouling drinking water.”
What are we to make of this catalog of evils, 50 years
after a date on which U.S. soldiers executed an entire village,
and the military covered it up? First, I think it’s important to
deal with the “both sides” question. I am sure any list of
atrocities committed by the United States in Vietnam can be
met with a corresponding list of North Vietnamese atrocities,
and the torture suffered by U.S. prisoners of war in North
Vietnam is well-documented. A few points should be kept in
mind, though. First, what was done by the United States is
uniquely morally blameworthy because it was done to civilians.
The U.S. civilian population never suffered, and the laws of war
rightly single out unarmed people for special protection.
Second, there are major differences in scale: the United States
was bringing the mightiest fighting force in world history to a
country full of rice-growing peasants. The colossal damage
inflicted by U.S. bombing campaigns was unmatched by
anything done by the other side. Finally, the United States’
objectives in the war were fundamentally indefensible. It could
not win, because it did not have popular support in the
country, so all it could do was inflict devastation. It is worth
thinking about what our attitude would be if the war had
occurred in reverse: the Vietnamese had invaded and occupied
America, propping up a Vietnam-sympathetic regime and
dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of napalm on all of our
cities and causing tens of millions of deaths (the U.S.
population equivalent to the number of deaths in Vietnam). It
would not be possible for us to look at such an occupying
power as having made a “tragic but well-intended mistake.”
They would rightly be seen as having committed an
international crime of the severest magnitude.
I understand why the United States does not want to
think of the Vietnam War this way. For one thing, it seems to
blame the soldiers themselves, to portray them as monsters and
criminals. This seems very unfair, because we know how much
they themselves suffered, and has thus contributed to the idea
that the war should be conceived of as honorable. But it is
possible to separate the soldiers from the conflict, the same way
we do with “child soldiers” generally. (And many who served in
Vietnam were essentially children.) It is difficult to keep one’s
humanity in such a situation, and to see the war’s consequences
as the product of individual depravity on behalf of front-line
troops is a serious mistake that exonerates U.S. political and
military leadership.
But there are deeper reasons why it’s difficult to
acknowledge that the Vietnam War was worse than is admitted.
As Christian Appy notes, it challenges American
exceptionalism, “the belief that the United States is the greatest
nation on earth, unrivaled not only in its wealth and power, but
in the quality of its institutions and values, and the character of
its people.” If we did commit a terrible crime, our treasured
moral authority collapses. Nobody wants to think of themselves
as a “bad person,” and no country wants to think of itself as a
bad country. Hence the Ken Burns view: Vietnam was an
honorable mistake, the kind a good country might reasonably
be expected to make from time to time.
If we are to avoid conflicts like this in the future, though,
we must understand what this one was like. Whenever we hear
rumblings of some new war, we would do well to keep in mind
how the lives of the civilians who will be affected by U.S.
decision-making can easily be swept from view, and to
recommit ourselves to valuing those lives equally. We should
remember how simple and benign-sounding euphemisms can
mask atrocious realities, and how easily our country can lapse
into unthinkingly adopting policies like “maximizing enemy
body count” without considering the murderous catastrophe
this might cause. Vietnam offers a series of important lessons,
ones that a country that considers itself humane and virtuous
must learn. But it is yet to be seen whether we are sincere
enough about our stated values to learn them, or whether we
will continue to convince ourselves that the war was a sincere
failure rather than an irresponsible crime against humanity.

A NOTE ON SOURCES: With over 30,000 books on the

Vietnam War in print, unless one is a serious scholar it is
impossible to look at anything but a fraction of the material
available. The books I drew from the most are: Ken Burns and
Geoffrey C. Ward’s “The Vietnam War” (the book adaptation of
the television documentary), Guenter Lewy’s “America in
Vietnam,” Christian Appy’s “Patriots” and “American Reckoning,”
Tim O’Brien’s “If I Die In A Combat Zone,” Karl Marlantes’
“What It Is Like To Go To War,” Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,”
Wallace Terry’s “Bloods,” Deborah Nelson’s “The War Behind Me,”
the Winter Soldier report, and Nick Turse’s “Kill Anything That
Moves.” These sources offer a variety of perspectives on the
legitimacy of the war from Lewy’s defense to Marlantes’ lament to
Turse’s harsh criticism. I also recommend Noam Chomsky’s review
of Lewy’s book, “On The Aggression of South Vietnamese Peasants
Against The United States,” which can be found in his Towards A
New Cold War and is a good example of how two people can look
at the same sources and come to completely different conclusions,
with Chomsky seeing barbarism where Lewy sees moral and
lawful conduct. Where a factual source is not linked above, it is
from one of these books.

A NOTE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHS: Often, photos are

just decoration. Nobody actually looks at them, or at least not
closely. Vietnam was a heavily photographed war, and has its share
of highly-recognized images: the monk on fire, the Vietnamese
officer shooting the prisoner, the naked girl running from her
napalmed village, the My Lai bodies in a drainage ditch. Yet even
though all of these are powerful and disturbing, over time they
have become almost “iconic.” Anything looked at enough times will
cease to have much of an emotional impact.
In presenting Vietnam visually, there is an unconscious
inclination to lapse into what has been done before, or what it feels
like you “should” do. That partly explains why Ken Burns has the
“hits of the 60s” soundtrack: you can’t have a movie about the
Vietnam war without the “something’s happening here” song. It
means, though, that with Vietnam images, so often we get The
Vietnam Panorama, which is dominated by soldiers jumping out
of helicopters and villagers crying or dying. As I started trying to
find visuals for this article, I found myself defaulting unthinkingly
to the usual pictures: soldiers traipsing through rice paddies,
Lyndon Johnson in consternation, a marine standing over his
dead friend, looking up at the jungle canopy with an expression
that asks “Why?” These images are important parts of the story of
the Vietnam War. But I tried to put together a few pictures that
actually convey the point: the Vietnam War is mostly about
Vietnamese people, and should be imagined from their point of
view.
The photos are all licensed from the Associated Press. The
AP captions are as follows (starting with the featured article image
at the top):

Young Vietnamese on motorbikes stop to look at a Viet

Cong killed in the western section of Saigon, Cholon,
during day-long fighting on May 5, 1968. A group of
Viet Cong moved into the area following an mortar
barrage on different parts of the city. The fighting which
took place in Cholon was near a heavily-hit area during
the Tet Offensive. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

A Vietnamese mother and her children are framed by the

legs of a soldier from the U.S. First Cavalry Division in
Bong Son, Vietnam, September 28, 1966. (AP
Photo/Henri Huet)

A U.S. 1st Air Cavalry Division soldier throws a rice

basket into flames after a peasant woman retrieved it
from the burning house in background. American troops
destroyed everything of value to the enemy after
overrunning the village near Tam Ky, 350 miles
northeast of Saigon, during the Vietnam War on Oct.
27, 1967. (AP Photo/Dang Van Phuoc)

A Vietnamese mother huddles over her youngest child

while her other daughter crawls on the ground during a
battle between U.S. Marines and Viet Cong snipers in
the village of Ngoc Kinh, 25 miles southwest of Danang,
April 7, 1966. Civilians, finding themselves in the middle
of fighting, took cover in shelters or huddled close to the
ground. (AP Photo/George Esper)
 A Vietnamese man carries his lightly wounded wife out
of a threatened area in Southern Saigon, Vietnam on
May 8, 1968. Daylong fighting in the area erupted at
dawn with a daring Viet Cong attack on a police station.
As they did during the Tet Offensive, residents
abandoned their homes escaping to safer parts of the
city. (AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

Most of the photos I have selected show ordinary

Vietnamese people struggling through the war. They are variously
pensive, frightened, confused, and heroic. I particularly value the
shot of a husband carrying his wife away from the flames, because
I think it very poignantly shows love persisting under incredible
pressure. I also think the view of children through the legs of a U.S.
soldier is a good reminder of the “child’s eye view” of war.
I think the photograph of the American soldier may be seen
as the most controversial choice. I could have presented a picture of
an American soldier saving a child from a burning village rather
than burning the village. One can complain that this presents a
one-sided view of the war. But all selections must be selective. Bad
acts are not outweighed or canceled out by good ones, and it is on
the bad ones we must dwell. A murderer cannot be exonerated by
having saved a life at some other point in time. Those of us who
seem to talk about the U.S.’ wrongdoing much more than its virtue
are not “America-haters,” but simply want to draw attention to
what matters most. Even as I selected pictures designed to draw
attention to Vietnamese suffering, though, I also avoided the most
disturbing or graphic images. In doing so, I actually reduced
exposure to the full consequences of American military force. A
realistic and representative look at the human cost of war would
be far more upsetting than what I have chosen to present. In fact,
photos themselves inherently sanitize and soften war by necessarily
portraying it in two dimensions rather than three.
 WILL YOU SUPPORT
CURRENT AFFAIRS
AS WE BUILD INDEPENDENT MEDIA?

Independent media is needed now more than ever, and our work is entirely
made possible by our readers. We don’t have any ads. We’re a 501c3
nonprofit without any corporate sponsors. We just have a committed base
of subscribers and donors who understand the importance of the work we
do. The money we raise goes to paying writers, editors, artists, and
researchers to produce excellent work. Please consider purchasing a
subscription or making a donation today.

SUPPORT US

MORE FROM NATHAN J. ROBINSON

H I S T O R Y
 How Empires Think What ‘Tintin’ Tells Us About Imperialism

N AT H A N J . R O B I N S O N A N D R E W A N C H E TA

Why the Right Constantly Panics Over On MLK Day, Always Remember the
Societal ‘Decadence’ Radical King

K. WILSON L I LY S Á N C H E Z
 announcing our

NEWEST
ISSUE
featuring

A superb summer issue containing our "defense of graffiti," a dive into British
imperialism, a look at the politics of privacy, the life of Lula, and a review of
"the Capitalist Manifesto." Plus: see the Police Cruiser of the Future, read our
list of the summer's top songs, and find out what to fill your water balloons
with. It's packed with delights!

SHOW ME MORE
 T H E L A T E S T F R O M
C U R R E N T A F F A I R S

Why People Feel Rotten About The Economy An Encouraging Sign

C U R R E N T A F FA I R S N AT H A N J . R O B I N S O N

The Pain of Diaspora It's a Bad Idea for Harris to Abandon

Progressive Policies

H A N E E N S H AT
A L E X S K O P I C & N AT H A N J . R O B I N S O N

w h y,
y o u ’ d h av e
 to be an
u n c u lt u r e d
rube to not
sign
up for

Th

CURRENT
AFFAIRS
N E W S ­L E T T E R

Email Address*

[email protected] SUBSCRIBE
 BO OK: WELC O ME
T O THIS STRA N GE
THING CALLE D
LIF E

A charming monologue to introduce newborn infants to

the human world. Illustrated by Ellen Burch, words by
Nathan Robinson.

B U Y N O W
POD CAST SHOP D ONATE

Every other week our An excellent way to We have two missions: to

editorial team brings you a demonstrate to passersby produce the world's first
mixture of discussion, that you are an individual of readable political publication
analysis, and whimsy. unusually well-cultivated and to make life joyful again.
taste.

SUBSCRIBE
 A Current Affairs subscription is one of the best known ways to improve your life in a
hurry. Our print magazine is released six times a year, in a beautiful full-color edition
full of elegant design, sophisticated prose, and satirical advertisements.

TELL M E M ORE

© 2024 Current Affairs About Us

FAQ Policies

/curaffairs /curaffairs

/currentaffairsmag