”The architects of the Vietnam War became near pariahs as they spent the remainder of their lives in the futile quest to explain away their decisions at the time.”
Graydon Carter, 2013
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War and known in Vietnam as Resistance War Against America or simply the American War, was a war that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and the government of South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese army was supported by the Soviet Union, China and other communist allies and the South Vietnamese army was supported by the United States, South Korea, Australia, Thailand and other anti-communist allies. The war is therefore considered a Cold War era proxy war.
It was actually a lot easier than I expected to find witnesses and survivors of these particular incidents [war crimes]. Generally because the Vietnamese are so tied to their land, even people who were bombed out of the countryside into the shantytowns and slums and refugee camps, after the war they returned to their home villages, and were living there when I got there. But it really transformed my project, because I went to talk to Vietnamese about this one spasm of violence that I had in the records but what they would talk to me about was ten years of living under bombs and shells and helicopter gunships, and what it took to negotiate every aspect of their lives around the American war.
What I was told in the countryside was beyond my ability to grasp, something that I could have never have gotten from the records. And I would talk to Vietnamese who would tell me about what it was like just to try and eke out an existence in the war zone. About having their home burned down five, six, seven times. And then finally giving up rebuilding and starting to live a semi-subterranean life in their bomb shelter. About how they figured out ways to get out of that shelter, to get water or food or relieve themselves.
And how their entire lives were just predicated on figuring out a way not to get killed. They would talk about artillery called down on a hamlet, and they would run into the bomb shelter. And stay there. And then this whole calculus would begin where they would try and figure out exactly when the right time to leave that shelter was. You had to wait until the artillery shelling stopped, but you couldn’t leave too soon or you were apt to be cut down by a helicopter gunship that was flying overhead. You had to make sure you weren’t caught in a crossfire between departing guerrillas and the onrushing Americans. But you couldn’t stay down there too long because the Americans were coming, and they would start rolling grenades into the bomb shelters because they saw them as possible enemy bunkers, fighting positions. There all of these decisions to be made, and it wasn’t just your life that depended on making it, but maybe your entire family. The whole family could get wiped out if you left a second too early or a second too late.
There was a shorthand in Vietnam: the MGR, or Mere Gook Rule. The idea is that the Vietnamese weren’t real people. They were subhumans. Mere gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them. They were told by their superiors that all Vietnamese were likely the enemy. Children might carry grenades, women were probably the wives or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps. And even if there were rules of engagement on paper, or little cards handed out saying to treat the Vietnamese properly, the message that they were really given was that it was a lot safer to shoot first because no one was going to ask questions later.
They were searching for some metric, some measure to show that they were winning a war. They settled on the attrition strategy which was used during the second half of the Korean War, and the main measure was body count. You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment,
the enemy would give up the fight. Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way the Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. And once the debits outweighed the credits, then they would end the war. They didn’t think the way the Vietnamese did, that this was a revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese saw it as a continuation of their anti-colonial fight against the French.
The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese bodies, and if you didn’t you were going to stay out in the field longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn’t discerning about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies would do.
This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy dead.This coupled with the much higher level of strategic thinking like the use of “free fire zones,” which was basically a legal fiction that the US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside to unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling. This caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in the country side. And it opened it up to all this heavy firepower and made it inevitable that large numbers of civilians would be killed or wounded.
Ewell was one of the most notorious commanders who served in Vietnam. He was body count obsessed in a military world where body count was king. Even in the military he was known as the Butcher of the Delta.What Ewell did was unleash heavy fire power across the Mekong Delta, which was the rice bowl of Vietnam and the most densely populated area. He opened the countryside to unrestrained artillery fire, bombing, and pushed his troops hard. His subordinates, the colonels under his command, were constantly badgered about body count. He demanded it, and if you didn’t produce body count you were going to be sacked, and somebody else would be brought in until he got it.
A lot of the places, they were what the US called “hardcore revolutionary areas” because of strong nationalist revolutionary support. They and their allies in Saigon were never able to win over the population in that countryside. The governments that had ruled these areas for years, that represented the people, that provided the services: this was the revolutionary government. They were inextricably tied to the population. So they’re unable to win them over, and they really couldn’t break that bond.
All the US really had was firepower. They tried to drive the people out of the countryside, to drive them into refugee camps. When people would get driven into refugee camps, most didn’t have adequate housing, there wasn’t potable water, there wasn’t sufficient food. And they would filter back to the countryside. It was easier to take your chance even amidst the firepower and free fire zones than to try to eke out a living in one of these camps.
This was seen as the one means to break Vietnamese support for the guerillas, to physically move the Vietnamese population. But the Vietnamese were so tied to their land, tied to their rice fields.
This is where their ancestors were buried. And it’s very important to Vietnamese to venerate their ancestors. So people were very reluctant to move. The only thing they [the americans] had at their disposal was destructive force.
[dismembering of vietnamese corpses]
This was a practice in some units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a beach resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges. In other cases, troops had this belief that Vietnamese spirituality said that if the corpse wasn’t intact, they wouldn’t be able to move into the afterlife. A lot of Americans would call it “Buddha heaven.” So they had this belief that dismembering Vietnamese would be a form of psychological warfare. They would leave a “death card,” either an ace of spades playing card or a specially made up, like a business card, with the unit’s name on it and generally some sort of grim motto attached. There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam. Ears were worn on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some guys wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit they were cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it to the commander got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had cut off a head and he boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull for a radio.
[rape and prostitution]
They were forced into catering to the US war machine one way or another, and one of the prime ways was prostitution. A lot of girls who were sent to it, their villages had been destroyed and they were forced into the cities. And this was a way to provide for their families. The Americans had lots of money to spend and these were young guys, 18, 19, 20 years old. So it was this flourishing sex trade and then out in the countryside there was what seems to be a tremendous amount of rape and sexual assault. What I found was extremely disturbing. I recount a few cases where the sexual violence is really shocking. A lot of times I felt I didn’t have the language to describe exactly what I found in the cases, because rape or even gang rape didn’t seem to convey the level of sexual sadism. These are extremely violent gang rapes, or raping women with inanimate objects like bottles or even rifles.
[tiger cages and imprisonment]
The most infamous were at a prison island called Con Son. There were men and women who were imprisoned for sometimes years on end without ever being charged, let alone tried. And these were people who spoke out against the government or spoke up for peace. They were sent to Con Son as political prisoners and chained in these very tiny cells that had been built by the French in the 19th century. There had been for years rumors about what had gone on at Con Son, and it was only in the 1970s a US aid worker turned activist was able to sneak a couple of American congressmen in to get a first-hand look at these tremendously deplorable conditions. When some tiger cage prisoners were released, a Time magazine report said ‘you can’t really call them men anymore. They’re more like shapes.’ They talk about them scuttling on the floor like crabs. If you watch the video of it, that’s really the case. It happened to women too. Lower-limb paralysis from being chained so long in stress positions. They can no longer stand and they had to crawl in a very unnatural way. There were US advisors inside the entire prison system. Con Son was the most infamous, but there were around 500 South Vietnamese detention centers around the country, mostly set up by the Americans, paid for by the Americans. The US also operated its own detention system on bases, where there were military intelligence units that held prisoners for varying lengths of time before they sent them on to joint American and South Vietnamese facilities, and most of them ended up in strictly South Vietnamese facilities. The anecdotal reports, and the few comprehensive investigations, show that torture was widespread. Things like electrical torture, water torture, what we now call waterboarding and routine beatings.
I’ve studied today’s wars closely, and I have to say that I don’t think that the scale of killing of civilians by US forces is anything near the scale of the carnage in Vietnam.
I think specifically the ways that artillery and airpower are used are radically different. That said, civilians still die on a regular basis in our war zones, be it Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of them due to violence set off by America’s invasions and occupations and the resulting civil strife. Then of course others have been killed directly from US bombing, from helicopter gunships, troops on the ground. And still more have been wounded and still more made refugees. And I think that even despite the best efforts of the United Nations and some other NGOs, we still don’t have good numbers on the civilian toll. And I’m afraid that if history is any guide it might be decades before someone is able to really put together the real stories of these wars, let alone the semi-covert campaigns in places like Pakistan and Yemen. So while I don’t think it’s as bad as it was in Vietnam, I think it remains to be seen exactly what the toll of these wars has been.
Nick Turse, 2013
