Was My Lai just one of
many massacres in Vietnam War?
·
28 August 2013
arIn 1968 US soldiers murdered several hundred Vietnamese
civilians in the single most infamous incident of the Vietnam War. The My Lai
massacre is often held to have been an aberration but investigative journalist
Nick Turse has uncovered evidence that war crimes were committed by the US
military on a far bigger scale.
In a war in which lip service was often paid to winning
"hearts and minds", the US military had an almost singular focus on
one defining measure of success in Vietnam: the body count - the number of
enemy killed in action.
Vietnamese forces, outgunned by their adversaries, relied
heavily on mines and other booby traps as well as sniper fire and ambushes.
Their methods were to strike and immediately withdraw.
Unable to deal with an enemy that dictated the time and place of
combat, US forces took to destroying whatever they could manage. If the
Americans could kill more enemies - known as Viet Cong or VC - than the
Vietnamese could replace, the thinking went, they would naturally give up the
fight.
To motivate troops to aim for a high body count, competitions
were held between units to see who could kill the most. Rewards for the highest
tally, displayed on "kill boards" included days off or an extra case
of beer. Their commanders meanwhile stood to win rapid promotion.
Very quickly the phrase - "If it's dead and Vietnamese,
it's VC" - became a defining dictum of the war and civilian corpses were
regularly tallied as slain enemies or Viet Cong.
Civilians, including women and children, were killed for running
from soldiers or helicopter gunships that had fired warning shots, or being in
a village suspected of sheltering Viet Cong.
At the time, much of this activity went unreported - but not
unnoticed.
Researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam
veterans, in 2001 I stumbled across a collection of war crimes investigations
carried out by the military at the US National Archives.
Box after box of criminal investigation reports and day-to-day
paperwork had been long buried away and almost totally forgotten. Some detailed
the most nightmarish descriptions. Others hinted at terrible events that had
not been followed up.
At that time the US military had at its disposal more killing
power, destructive force, and advanced technology than any military in the
history of the world.
The amount of ammunition fired per soldier was 26 times greater
in Vietnam than during World War II. By the end of the conflict, America had
unleashed the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam.
Vast areas dotted with villages were blasted with artillery,
bombed from the air and strafed by helicopter gunships before ground troops
went in on search-and-destroy missions.
The phrase "kill anything that moves" became an order
on the lips of some American commanders whose troops carried out massacres
across their area of operations.
While the US suffered more than 58,000 dead in the war, an
estimated two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, another 5.3 million
injured and about 11 million, by US government figures, became refugees in
their own country.
Today, if people remember anything about American atrocities in
Vietnam, they recall the March 1968 My Lai massacre in which more than 500
civilians were killed over the course of four hours, during which US troops
even took time out to eat lunch.
Far bloodier operations, like one codenamed Speedy Express,
should be remembered as well, but thanks to cover-ups at the highest levels of
the US military, few are.
Industrial-scale slaughter
In late 1968, the 9th Infantry Division, under the command of
Gen Julian Ewell, kicked off a large-scale operation in the Mekong Delta, the
densely populated deep south of Vietnam.
In an already body count-obsessed environment, Ewell, who became
known as the Butcher of the Delta, was especially notorious. He sacked
subordinates who killed insufficient numbers and unleashed heavy firepower on a
countryside packed with civilians.
A whistle-blower in the division wrote to the US Army Chief of
Staff William Westmoreland, pleading for an investigation. Artillery called in
on villages, he reported, had killed women and children. Helicopter gunships
had frightened farmers into running and then cut them down. Troops on the
ground had done the same thing.
The result was industrial-scale slaughter, the equivalent, he
said, to a "My Lai each month".
Just look at the ratio of Viet Cong reportedly killed to weapons
captured, he told Westmoreland.
Indeed, by the end of the operation Ewell's division claimed an
enemy body count of close to 11,000, but turned in fewer than 750 captured
weapons.
Westmoreland ignored the whistle-blower, scuttled a nascent
inquiry, and buried the files, but not before an internal Pentagon report
endorsed some of the whistle-blower's most damning allegations.
The secret investigation into Speedy Express remained classified
for decades before I found it in buried in the National Archives.
The military estimated that as many as 7,000 civilians were
killed during the operation. More damning still, the analysis admitted that the
"US command, in its extensive experience with large-scale combat
operations in South East Asia, appreciated the inevitability of significant
civilian casualties in the conduct of large operations in densely populated
areas such as the Delta."
Indeed, what the military admitted in this long secret report
confirmed exactly what I also discovered in hundreds of talks and formal
interviews with American veterans, in tens of thousands of pages of formerly
classified military documents, and, most of all, in the heavily populated areas
of Vietnam where Americans expended massive firepower.
Survivors of a massacre by US Marines in Quang Tri Province told
me what it was like to huddle together in an underground bomb shelter as shots
rang out and grenades exploded above.
Fearing that one of those grenades would soon roll into their
bunker, a mother grabbed her young children, took a chance and bolted.
"Racing from our bunker, we saw the shelter opposite ours
being shot up," Nguyen Van Phuoc, one of those youngsters, told me. One of
the Americans then wheeled around and fired at his mother, killing her.
Many more were killed on that October day in 1967. Two of the
soldiers involved were later court martialled but cleared of murder.
Commemoration
Last year, the Pentagon kicked off a 13-year programme to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the war. An entry on the official Vietnam
War Commemoration website for My Lai describes it as an "incident"
and the number killed is listed as "200" not 500.
Speedy Express is referred to as "an operation that would
eventually yield an enemy body count of 11,000".
There is almost no mention of Vietnamese civilians.
In a presidential proclamation on the website, Barack Obama
distils the conflict down to troops slogging "through jungles and rice
paddies… fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans…
through more than a decade of combat".
Despite what the president might believe, combat was just a
fraction of that war.
The real war in Vietnam was typified by millions of men, women,
and children driven into slums and refugee camps; by homes, hamlets, and whole
villages burnt to the ground; by millions killed or wounded when war showed up
on their doorstep.
President Obama called the Vietnam War "a chapter in our
nation's history that must never be forgotten". But thanks to cover-ups
like that of Speedy Express, few know the truth to begin with.
About the author: Nick Turse
has been researching US military atrocities in the Vietnam War for more than a
decade and has detailed his findings in a book Kill Anything That Moves: The
Real American War in Vietnam.
A Pentagon spokesman, when
asked for a statement about the evidence presented, said he doubted that more
than 50 years after the US went to war in Vietnam, it would be possible for the
military to provide an official statement in "a timely manner."
Vietnam war
§
US, South Vietnam failed to stop communist-led unification
§
In 1970 US used 128,400 tonnes of munitions each month
§
Quang Tri province was saturated with 3,000 bombs per square km
§
58,000 Americans died
§
3.8 million Vietnamese died including 2m civilians between
1955-1975
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-23427726
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