(Image: Metropolitan Books)When did the United States adopt, in the contemporary age, military standards of condoning a “kill anything that moves” doctrine of warfare, along with a widespread use of torture?

One need look no further than the Vietnam War, according to Nick Turse, an author and journalist who has documented the dark side of the US imposition of empire through armed intervention. In this assiduously documented book, Turse offers abundant evidence that My Lai was not an exception to military conduct, but rather, a not uncommon occurrence. In addition, the US slaughtered countless civilians in air and ground attacks without ever even seeing who was being killed.

In addition, the reader will also discover that Dick Cheney’s backing of torture had ample precedent during the Vietnam War.-MK

Support Truthout’s mission. Kill Anything That Moves (hardcover edition) is yours with a minimum donation to Truthout of $35 (which includes shipping and handling) or a monthly donation of $15.

The following excerpt is the introduction to Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

“An Operation, Not an Aberration”

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 advisors

have not clued you in,” he told the president, “but the atrocities that

were committed in My Lai 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 had 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 Americal Division’s

Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their

commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation

the next day in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member

Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the

village.’ ” 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 other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed

to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything

that moves.”

The next morning, the troops clambered aboard helicopters and

were airlifted into what they thought would be a “hot LZ”— a landing

zone where they’d be under hostile fire. As it happened, though,

instead of finding Vietnamese adversaries spoiling for a fight, the

Americans entering My Lai encountered only civilians: women, children,

and old men. Many were still cooking their breakfast rice. Nevertheless,

Medina’s orders were followed to a T. Soldiers of Charlie

Company killed. They killed everything. They killed everything that

moved.

Advancing in small squads, the men of the unit shot chickens as

they scurried about, pigs as they bolted, and cows and water buffalo

lowing among the thatch-roofed houses. They gunned down old

men sitting in their homes and children as they ran for cover. They

tossed grenades into homes without even bothering to look inside. An

officer grabbed a woman by the hair and shot her point-blank with a

pistol. A woman who came out of her home with a baby in her arms

was shot down on the spot. As the tiny child hit the ground, another

GI opened up on the infant with his M-16 automatic rifle.

Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically

slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some

in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more

in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground.

They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch

in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women

and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes,

and fouled the area’s drinking water.

There were scores of witnesses on the ground and still more overhead,

American officers and helicopter crewmen perfectly capable of

seeing the growing piles of civilian bodies. Yet when the military

released the first news of the assault, it was portrayed as a victory over

a formidable enemy force, a legitimate battle in which 128 enemy

troops were killed without the loss of a single American life. In a

routine congratulatory telegram, General William Westmoreland, the

commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, lauded the “heavy blows”

inflicted on the enemy. His protégé, the commander of the Americal

Division, added a special note praising Charlie Company’s “aggressiveness.”

Despite communiqués, radio reports, and English-language

accounts released by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the My

Lai massacre would remain, to the outside world, an American victory

for more than a year. And the truth might have remained hidden

forever if not for the perseverance of a single Vietnam veteran

named Ron Ridenhour. The twenty-two-year-old Ridenhour had not

been among the hundred American troops at My Lai, though he had

seen civilians murdered elsewhere in Vietnam; instead, he heard

about the slaughter from other soldiers who had been in Pinkville

that day. Unnerved, Ridenhour took the unprecedented step of carefully

gathering testimony from multiple American eyewitnesses. Then,

upon returning to the United States after his yearlong tour of duty,

he committed himself to doing what ever was necessary to expose

the incident to public scrutiny.

Ridenhour’s efforts were helped by the painstaking investigative

reporting of Seymour Hersh, who published newspaper articles about

the massacre; by the appearance in Life magazine of grisly full-color

images that army photographer Ron Haeberle captured in My Lai as

the slaughter was unfolding; and by a confessional interview that a

soldier from Charlie Company gave to CBS News. The Pentagon, for

its part, consistently fought to minimize what had happened, claiming

that reports by Vietnamese survivors were wildly exaggerated. At

the same time, the military focused its attention on the lowest ranking

officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame for such a

nightmare: Charlie Company’s Lieutenant William Calley.

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 just forty months, most of it in the

comfort of his own quarters.

The public response generally followed the official one. Twenty five years later, Ridenhour would sum it up this way. At the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, they 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 this 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 that did result were

closed, quashed, or abandoned. Even on the rare occasions when the

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.

Until the My Lai revelations became front-page news, atrocity

stories were routinely disregarded by American journalists or excised

by stateside editors. The fate of civilians in rural South Vietnam did

not merit much examination; even the articles that did mention the

killing of noncombatants generally did so merely in passing, without

any indication that the acts described might be war crimes. Vietnamese revolutionary sources, for their part, detailed hundreds of massacres and large-scale operations that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, but those reports were dismissed out of hand as communist propaganda.

And then, in a stunning reversal, almost immediately after the

exposure of the My Lai massacre, war crime allegations became old

hat— so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking

into. In leaflets, pamphlets, small-press books, and “underground”

newspapers, the growing American antiwar movement repeatedly

pointed out that U.S. troops were committing atrocities on a regular

basis. But what had been previously brushed aside as propaganda

and leftist kookery suddenly started to be disregarded as yawn-worthy

common knowledge, with little but the My Lai massacre in between.

Such impulses only grew stronger in the years of the “culture wars,”

when the Republican Party and an emboldened right wing rose to

power. Until Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the Vietnam War was generally

seen as an American defeat, but even before taking office Reagan

began rebranding the conflict as “a noble cause.” In the same

spirit, scholars and veterans began, with significant success, to recast

the war in rosier terms. Even in the early years of the twenty-first

century, as newspapers and magazines published exposés of long hidden

U.S. atrocities, apologist historians continued to ignore much

of the evidence, portraying American war crimes as no more than

isolated incidents.

But 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. And as

Ridenhour put it, they were no aberration. Rather, they were the

inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels

of the military.

The first official American combat troops arrived in Vietnam in

1965, but the roots of the conflict go back many decades earlier. In

the nineteenth century, France expanded its colonial empire by taking

control of Vietnam as well as neighboring Cambodia and Laos,

rechristening the entire region as French Indochina. French rubber

production in Vietnam yielded such riches for the colonizers that

the latex oozing from rubber trees became known as “white gold.”

The ill-paid Vietnamese workers, laboring on the plantations in

harsh conditions, called it by a different name: “white blood.”

By the early twentieth century, anger at the French had developed

into a nationalist movement for independence. Its leaders found

inspiration in communism, specifically the example of Russian Bolshevism

and Lenin’s call for national revolutions in the colonial

world. During World War II, when Vietnam was occupied by the

imperial Japanese, the country’s main anti-colonial organization—

officially called the League for the Independence of Vietnam, but far

better known as the Viet Minh— launched a guerrilla war against

the Japanese forces and the French administrators running the country.

Under the leadership of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese guerrillas aided the American war effort. In return they received arms, training, and support from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1945, with the Japanese defeated, Ho proclaimed Vietnam’s

Independence, using the words of the U.S. Declaration of Independence

as his template. “All men are created equal,” he told a crowd of

half a million Vietnamese in Hanoi. “The Creator has given us certain

inviolable rights: the right to life, the right to be free, and the

right to achieve happiness.” As a young man Ho had spent some years

living in the West, reportedly including stretches in Boston and New

York City, and he hoped to obtain American support for his vision of

a free Vietnam. In the aftermath of World War II, however, the

United States was focused on rebuilding and strengthening a devastated

Europe, as the Cold War increasingly gripped the continent.

The Americans saw France as a strong ally against any Soviet designs

on Western Europe and thus had little interest in sanctioning a

communist-led independence movement in a former French colony.

Instead, U.S. ships helped transport French troops to Vietnam, and

the administration of President Harry Truman threw its support

behind a French reconquest of Indochina.

Soon, the United States was dispatching equipment and even

military advisers to Vietnam. By 1953, it was shouldering nearly 80

percent of the bill for an ever more bitter war against the Viet Minh.

The conflict progressed from guerrilla warfare to a conventional military

campaign, and in 1954 a Gallic garrison at the well-fortified

base of Dien Bien Phu was pounded into surrender by Viet Minh

forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap. The French had had enough.

At an international peace conference in Geneva, they agreed to a temporary

separation of Vietnam into two placeholder regions, the north

and the south, which were to be rejoined as one nation following a

reunification election in 1956.

That election never took place. Fearing that Ho Chi Minh, now

the head of the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the

north, was sure to sweep any nationwide vote, the United States picked

up where its French partners had left off. It promptly launched efforts

to thwart reunification by arming its allies in the southern part of

the country. In this way, it fostered the creation of what eventually

became the Republic of Vietnam, led by a Catholic autocrat named

Ngo Dinh Diem.

From the 1950s on, the United States would support an ever more

corrupt and repressive state in South Vietnam while steadily expanding

its presence in Southeast Asia. When President John Kennedy

took office there were around 800 U.S. military personnel in South

Vietnam. That number increased to 3,000 in 1961, and to more than

11,000 the following year. Officially listed as advisers involved in the

training of the South Vietnamese army, the Americans increasingly

took part in combat operations against southern guerrillas— both

communist and noncommunist— who were now waging war to unify

the country.

After Kennedy’s assassination, President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly

escalated the war with bombing raids on North Vietnam, and

unleashed an ever more furious onslaught on the South. In 1965 the

fiction of “advisers” was finally dropped, and the American War, as

it is known in Vietnam, began in earnest. In a televised speech, John-

son insisted that the United States was not inserting itself into a faraway

civil war but taking steps to contain a communist menace. The

war, he said, was “guided by North Vietnam . . . Its goal is to conquer

the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic

dominion of communism.” To counter this, the United States turned

huge swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside— where most of

South Vietnam’s population lived— into battered battlegrounds.

At the peak of U.S. operations, in 1969, the war involved more

than 540,000 American troops in Vietnam, plus some 100,000 to

200,000 U.S. troops participating in the effort from outside the

country. They were also aided by numerous CIA operatives, civilian

advisers, mercenaries, civilian contractors, and armed members of

the allied “Free World Forces”— South Korean, Australian, New

Zealand, Thai, Filipino, and other foreign troops. Over the entire

course of the conflict, the United States would deploy more than 3

million soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors to Southeast Asia.

(Fighting alongside them were hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese troops: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam would balloon to a force of nearly 1 million before the end of the war, to say nothing of South Vietnam’s air force, navy, marine corps, and national police.) Officially, the American military effort lasted until early 1973, when a cease-fire was signed and U.S. combat forces were formally withdrawn from the country, though American aid and other support

would continue to flow into the Republic of Vietnam until Saigon fell

to the revolutionary forces in 1975.

From the U.S. perspective, the enemy was composed of two distinct

groups: members of the North Vietnamese army and indigenous

South Vietnamese fighters loyal to the National Liberation Front, the

revolutionary organization that succeeded the Viet Minh and opposed

the U.S.-allied Saigon government. The NLF’s combatants, officially

known as the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), included guerrillas

in peasant clothing as well as uniformed troops organized into

professionalized units. The U.S. Information Service invented the

moniker “Viet Cong”— that is, Vietnamese Communists—as a derogatory

term that covered anyone fighting on the side of the NLF, though

many of the guerrillas themselves were driven more by nationalism

than by communist ideology. American soldiers, in turn, often shortened

this label to “the Cong” or “VC,” or, owing to the military’s phonetic

Alpha-Bravo-Charlie alphabet, to “Victor Charlie” or simply

“Charlie.”

By 1968 the U.S. forces and their allies in the South were opposed

by an estimated 50,000 North Vietnamese troops plus 60,000

uniformed PLAF soldiers, while the revolutionaries’ paramilitary

forces—part-time, local guerrillas— likely reached into the hundreds

of thousands. Americans often made hard-and-fast distinctions

between the well-armed, green- or khaki-uniformed North Vietnamese troops with their fabric-covered, pressed-cardboard pith style helmets; the khaki-clad main force PLAF soldiers, with their floppy cloth “boonie hats”; and the lightly armed, “black pajama”–clad guerrillas (all of whom actually wore a wide variety of types and

colors of clothing depending on the time and place). In reality,

though, they were very hard to disentangle, since North Vietnamese

troops reinforced PLAF units, “local” VC fought in tandem with

“hard-core” professionalized PLAF troops, and part-time farmer fighters assisted uniformed North Vietnamese forces.

The plethora of designations and the often hazy distinctions

between them underscore the fact that the Americans never really

grasped who the enemy was. On one hand, they claimed the VC had

little popular support and held sway over villages only through terror

tactics. On the other, American soldiers who were supposedly

engaged in countering communist aggression to protect the South

Vietnamese readily killed civilians because they assumed that most

villagers either were in league with the enemy or were guerrillas

themselves once the sun went down.

The United States never wanted to admit that the conflict might

be a true “people’s war,” and that Vietnamese were bound to the revolution because they saw it as a fight for their families, their land, and their country. In the villages of South Vietnam, Vietnamese nationalists had long organized themselves to resist foreign domination, and it was no different when the Americans came. By then, the local population was often inextricably joined to the liberation struggle.

Lacking advanced technology, financial resources, or significant firepower,

America’s Vietnamese enemies maximized assets like concealment,

local knowledge, popular support, and something less quantifiable— call it patriotism or nationalism, or perhaps a hope and a dream.

Of course, not every Vietnamese villager believed in the revolution

or saw it as the best expression of nationalist patriotism. Even

villages in revolutionary strongholds were home to some supporters

of the Saigon government. And many more farmers simply wanted

nothing to do with the conflict or abstract notions like nationalism

and communism. They worried mainly about their next rice crop,

their animals, their house and children. But bombs and napalm don’t

discriminate. As gunships and howitzers ravaged the landscape, as

soldiers with M-16 rifles and M-79 grenade launchers swept through

the countryside, Vietnamese villagers of every type— supporters of

the revolution, sympathizers of the Saigon regime, and those who

merely wanted to be left alone— all perished in vast numbers.

The war’s casualty figures are staggering indeed. From 1955 to

1975, the United States lost more than 58,000 military personnel in

Southeast Asia. Its troops were wounded around 304,000 times, with

153,000 cases serious enough to require hospitalization, and 75,000

veterans left severely disabled. While Americans who served in Vietnam

paid a grave price, an extremely conservative estimate of Vietnamese deaths found them to be “proportionally 100 times greater than those suffered by the United States.” The military forces of the U.S.-allied Republic of Vietnam reportedly lost more than 254,000 killed and more than 783,000 wounded. And the casualties of the revolutionary forces were evidently far graver— perhaps 1.7 million,

including 1 million killed in battle, plus some 300,000 personnel still

“missing” according to the official but incomplete Vietnamese government

figures.

Horrendous as these numbers may be, they pale in comparison to

the estimated civilian death toll during the war years. At least 65,000

North Vietnamese civilians were killed, mainly from U.S. air raids.

No one will ever know the exact number of South Vietnamese civilians

killed as a result of the American War. While the U.S. military

attempted to quantify almost every other aspect of the conflict— from

the number of helicopter sorties flown to the number of propaganda

leaflets dispersed— it quite deliberately never conducted a comprehensive

study of Vietnamese noncombatant casualties. What ever

civilian casualty statistics the United States did tally were generally

kept secret, and when released piecemeal they were invariably radical

undercounts.

Yet even the available flawed figures are startling, especially given

that the total population of South Vietnam was only about 19 million

people. Using fragmentary data and questionable extrapolations

that, for instance, relied heavily on hospital data yet all but ignored

the immense number of Vietnamese treated by the revolutionary

forces (and also failed to take into account the many civilians killed

by U.S. forces and claimed as enemies), one Department of Defense

statistical analyst came up with a postwar estimate of 1.2 million

civilian casualties, including 195,000 killed. In 1975, a U.S. Senate

subcommittee on refugees and war victims offered an estimate of

1.4 million civilian casualties in South Vietnam, including 415,000

killed. Or take the figures proffered by the political scientist Guenter

Lewy, the progenitor of a revisionist school of Vietnam War history

that invariably shines the best possible light on the U.S. war effort.

Even he posits that there were more than 1.1 million South Vietnamese

civilian casualties, including almost 250,000 killed, as a result of

the conflict.

In recent years, careful surveys, analyses, and official estimates

have consistently pointed toward a significantly higher number of

civilian deaths. The most sophisticated analysis yet of wartime

mortality in Vietnam, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard

Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation

at the University of Washington, suggested that a reasonable estimate

might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combatant and civilian. Given the limitations of the study’s methodology, there are good reasons to believe that even this staggering figure may be an underestimate. Still, the findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than 3 million deaths in total— including 2 million civilian deaths— for the years when the Americans were

involved in the conflict.

The sheer number of civilian war wounded, too, has long been a

point of contention. The best numbers currently available, though,

begin to give some sense of the suffering. A brief accounting shows

8,000 to 16,000 South Vietnamese paraplegics; 30,000 to 60,000

South Vietnamese left blind; and some 83,000 to 166,000 South Vietnamese amputees. As far as the total number of the civilian war wounded goes, Guenter Lewy approaches the question by using a ratio derived from South Vietnamese data on military casualties, which shows 2.65 soldiers seriously wounded for every one killed. Such a proportion is distinctly low when applied to the civilian population;

still, even this multiplier, if applied to the Vietnamese government estimate of 2 million civilian dead, yields a figure of 5.3 million civilian wounded, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. Notably, official South Vietnamese hospital records indicate that approximately one-third of those wounded were

women and about one-quarter were children under thirteen years of age.

What explains these staggering figures? Because the My Lai massacre

has entered the popular American consciousness as an exceptional,

one-of-a-kind event, the deaths of other civilians during the

Vietnam War tend to be vaguely thought of as a matter of mistakes

or (to use a phrase that would come into common use after the war)

of “collateral damage.” But as I came to see, the indiscriminate killing

of South Vietnamese noncombatants— the endless slaughter that

wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year

throughout the Vietnam War— was neither accidental nor unforeseeable.

I stumbled upon the first clues to this hidden history almost by accident,

in June 2001, when I was a graduate student researching posttraumatic

stress disorder among Vietnam veterans. One afternoon, I

was looking through documents at the U.S. National Archives when

a friendly archivist asked me, “Could witnessing war crimes cause

post-traumatic stress?” I had no idea at the time that the archives

might have any records on Vietnam-era war crimes, so the prospect

had never dawned on me. Within an hour or so, though, I held in my

hands the yellowing records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working

Group, a secret Pentagon task force that had been assembled after

the My Lai massacre to ensure that the army would never again be

caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.

To call the records a “treasure trove” feels strange, given the nature

of the material. But that’s how the collection struck me then, box

after box of criminal investigation reports and day-to-day paperwork

long buried away and almost totally forgotten. There were some

files as thick as a phonebook, with the most detailed and nightmarish

descriptions; other files, paper-thin, hinting at terrible events

that had received no follow-up attention; and just about everything

in between. As I leafed through them that day, I knew one thing

almost instantly: they documented a nightmare war that is essentially

missing from our understanding of the Vietnam conflict.

The War Crimes Working Group files included more than 300 allegations

of massacres, murders, rapes, torture, assaults, mutilations, and other atrocities that were substantiated by army investigators. They detailed the deaths of 137 civilians in mass killings, and 78 smaller-scale attacks in which Vietnamese civilians were killed, wounded, and sexually assaulted. They identified 141 instances in which U.S. troops

used fists, sticks, bats, water torture, and electrical torture on noncombatants. The files also contained 500 allegations that weren’t proven at the time— like the murders of scores, perhaps hundreds, of Vietnamese civilians by the 101st Airborne Division’s Tiger Force, which would be confirmed and made public only in 2003.

In hundreds of incident summaries and sworn statements in the

War Crimes Working Group files, veterans laid bare what had

occurred in the backlands of rural Vietnam— the war that Americans

back home didn’t see nightly on their televisions or read about

over morning coffee. A sergeant told investigators how he had put a

bullet, point-blank, into the brain of an unarmed boy after gunning

down the youngster’s brother; an army ranger matter-of-factly

described slicing the ears off a dead Vietnamese and said that he

planned to continue mutilating corpses. Other files documented

the killing of farmers in their fields and the rape of a child carried

out by an interrogator at an army base. Reading case after case— like

the incident in which a lieutenant “captured two unarmed and unidentified Vietnamese males, estimated ages 2– 3 and 7– 8 years . . . and

killed them for no reason”— I began to get a sense of the ubiquity of

atrocity during the American War.

In the years that followed, with the War Crimes Working Group

documents as an initial guide, I began to track down more information

about little-known or never-revealed Vietnam War crimes. I

located other investigation files at the National Archives, submitted

requests under the Freedom of Information Act, interviewed generals

and top civilian officials, and talked to former military war

crimes investigators. I also spoke with more than one hundred American

veterans across the country, both those who had witnessed

atrocities and others who had personally committed terrible acts.

From them I learned something of what it was like to be twenty years

old, with few life experiences beyond adolescence in a small town or

an inner-city neighborhood, and to be suddenly thrust into villages

of thatch and bamboo homes that seemed ripped straight from the

pages of National Geographic, the paddies around them such a vibrant

green that they almost burned the eye. Veteran after veteran told me

about days of shattering fatigue and the confusion of contradictory

orders, about being placed in situations so alien and unnerving that

even with their automatic rifles and grenades they felt scared walking

through hamlets of unarmed women and children.

Some of the veterans I tried to contact wanted nothing to do with

my questions, almost instantaneously slamming down the phone

receiver. But most were willing to speak to me, and many even seemed

glad to talk to someone who had a sense of the true nature of the war.

In homes from Maryland to California, across kitchen tables and in

marathon four-hour telephone calls, scores of former soldiers and

marines opened up about their experiences. Some had little remorse;

an interrogator who’d tortured prisoners, for instance, told me that

his actions were merely standard operating procedure. Another

veteran, whispering so that his family wouldn’t overhear, adamantly

insisted that, though he’d been present at a massacre of civilians, he

hadn’t pulled the trigger, no matter what his fellow unit members

said. Then there was the veteran who swore that he knew nothing

about civilians being killed, only to later recount an incident in

which someone in his unit shot an unarmed woman in the back.

And yet another former GI ruefully recounted how, walking through

a Vietnamese village, he had spun around when a local woman chattered

angrily at him (probably complaining about the commotion

that the troops were causing) and driven the butt of his rifle into her

nose. He remembered walking away, laughing, as blood poured from

the woman’s face. Decades later, he could no longer imagine how his

nineteen-year-old self had done such a thing, nor could I easily connect

this jovial man to that angry adolescent with a brutal streak.

My conversations with the veterans gave nuance to my under-

standing of the war, bringing human emotion to the sometimes dry

language of military records, and added context to investigation

files that often focused on a single incident. These men also repeatedly

showed me just how incomplete the archives I’d come upon

really were, even though the files detailed hundreds of atrocity allegations.

In one case, for instance, I called a veteran seeking more

information about a sexual assault carried out by members of his

unit, which I found mentioned in one of the files. He offered me

more details about that particular incident but also said that it was

no anomaly. Men from his unit had raped numerous other women as

well, he told me. But neither those assaults nor the random shootings

of farmers by his fellow soldiers had ever been formally investigated.

Among the most poignant of the interviews I conducted was with

Jamie Henry, a former army medic with whom I eventually forged a

friendship. Henry was a whistle-blower in the Ron Ridenhour mold—

the type of man that many want to be but few actually are, a courageous

veteran who spent several years after his return to America

trying to bring to light a series of atrocities committed by his unit.

While many others had kept silent, Henry stepped forward and

reported the crimes he’d seen, taking significant risks for what he

believed was right. He talked to the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation

Command (known as CID), he wrote a detailed article, he spoke

out in public again and again. But the army left him to twist in the

wind, a lone voice repeatedly recounting apparently uncorroborated

tales of shocking violence, while most Americans paid little attention.

Until I sought him out and showed him the documents I’d

found, Henry had no idea that in the early 1970s military investigators

had in fact tracked down and interviewed his fellow unit members,

proving his allegations beyond any doubt — and that the army

had then hidden away this information, never telling him or anyone

else. When he looked over my stacks of photocopies, he was astounded.

Over time, following leads from the veterans I’d spoken to and

from other sources, I discovered additional long-forgotten court-martial

records, investigation files, and related documents in assorted

archives and sometimes in private homes across the country. Paging

through one of these case files, I found myself virtually inhaling

decades-old dust from half a world away. The year was 1970, and a

small U.S. Army patrol had set up an ambush in the jungle near the

Minh Thanh rubber plantation in Binh Long Province, north of Saigon.

Almost immediately the soldiers heard chopping noises, then

branches snapping and Vietnamese voices coming toward them.

Next, a man broke through the brush— he was in uniform, they

would later say, as was the entire group of Vietnamese following

behind him. In an instant, the Americans sprang the ambush, setting

off two Claymore mines— each sending seven hundred small

steel pellets flying more than 150 feet in a lethal sixty-degree arc —

and firing an M-60 machine gun. All but one of the Vietnamese in

the clearing were killed instantly. The unit’s radioman immediately

got on his field telephone and called in ten “enemy KIA”— killed in

action.

Later, however, something didn’t ring right at headquarters. Despite the claim of ten enemy dead, the Americans had no weapons to show for it. With the My Lai trials garnering headlines back in the United States, the commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division did something unusual: he asked the division’s Office of the

Inspector General, whose job it was to probe instances of alleged

misconduct, to investigate. The next day, a lieutenant colonel and his

team arrived at the site of the ambush, where they found the corpses

of five men, three women, and two children scattered on the forest

floor. None was wearing enemy uniforms, and civilian identification

cards were found on the bodies. The closest thing to a weapon was a

piece of paper with “a small drawing of a rifle and of an airplane.”

The soldiers who sprang the ambush claimed it was evidence that the

dead were enemy fighters, but the lieutenant colonel noted that it

looked like “something a child would do.” Similarly, “the makings of

booby traps” found on the bodies, and cited by the soldiers as evidence

of hostile intent, turned out to be a harmless agricultural tool.

As the American investigators photographed the corpses, it was apparent

that the Vietnamese had been civilians carrying bags of bamboo

shoots and a couple of handfuls of limes— regular people simply trying

to eke out an existence in a war-ravaged landscape.

The lime gatherers’ deaths were typical of the kind of operation

that repeatedly wiped out civilians during the Vietnam War. Most of

the time, the noncombatants who died were not herded into a ditch

and gunned down as at My Lai. Instead, the full range of the American

arsenal— from M-16s and Claymore mines to grenades, bombs,

mortars, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells— was unleashed on

forested areas, villages, and homes where perfectly ordinary Vietnamese just happened to live and work.

As the inspector general’s report concluded in this particular

incident, the “Vietnamese victims were innocent civilians loyal to

the Republic of Vietnam.” Yet, as so often happened, no disciplinary

action of any type was taken against any member of the unit. In fact,

their battalion commander stated that the team performed “exactly

as he expected them to.” The battalion’s operations officer explained

that the civilians had been in an “off-limits” or free-fire zone, one of

many swaths of the country where everyone was assumed to be the

enemy. Therefore, the soldiers had behaved in accordance with

the U.S. military’s directives on the use of lethal force.

It made no difference that the lime gatherers happened to live there,

as their ancestors undoubtedly had for decades, if not centuries,

before them. It made no difference that, as the local province chief of

the U.S.-allied South Vietnamese government told the army, “the

civilians in the area were poor, uneducated and went wherever they

could get food.” The inspector general’s report pointed out that there

was no written documentation regarding the establishment of a free-fire zone in the area, noting with bureaucratic understatement that “doubt exists” that the program to warn Vietnamese civilians about off-limits areas was “either effective or thorough.” But that, too, made no difference. As the final investigation report put it, the platoon

had operated “within its orders which had been given and/or sanctioned by competent authority . . . The rules of engagement were not violated.”

Seeking to connect such formal military records with the actual

experience of the ordinary Vietnamese people who had lived through

these events, I made several trips to Vietnam, making my way to

remote rural villages with an interpreter at my side. The jigsaw-puzzle

pieces were not always easy to align. In the files of the War Crimes

Working Group, for example, I located an exceptionally detailed

investigation of a massacre of nearly twenty women and children by

a U.S. Army unit in a tiny hamlet in Quang Nam Province on February

8, 1968. It was clear that the ranking officer there had ordered his

men to “kill anything that moves,” and that some of the soldiers had

obeyed. What was less than clear was exactly where “there” was.

With only a general location to go by— fifteen miles west of an old

port town known as Hoi An— we embarked on a shoe-leather search.

Inquiries with locals led us to An Truong, a small hamlet with a

monument to a 1968 massacre. But this particular mass killing took

place on January 9, 1968, rather than in February, and was carried

out by South Korean forces allied to the Americans rather than

by U.S. soldiers themselves. It was not the place we had been looking

for.

After we explained the situation, one of the residents led us to

another village not very far away. It, too, had a memorial— this one

commemorating thirty-three locals who died in three separate massacres

between 1967 and 1970. However, none of these massacres

had taken place on February 8, 1968, either. After interviewing villagers

about these atrocities, we asked if they knew of any other mass

killings in the area. Yes, they said: not the next hamlet down the

road but a little bit beyond it. So on we went. Daylight was rapidly

fading when we arrived in that hamlet and found a monument that

spelled out the basics of the grim story in spare terms: U.S. troops

had killed dozens of Vietnamese there in 1968. Conversations with

the farmers made it clear, though, that these Americans were marines,

not army soldiers, and the massacre had taken place in August. Such

is the nature of investigating war crimes in Vietnam. I’d thought that

I was looking for a needle in a haystack; what I found was a veritable

haystack of needles.

In the United States, meanwhile, the situation in the archives was

often frustratingly the opposite. At one point, a Vietnam veteran

passed on to me a few pages of documents from an investigation into

the killing of civilians by U.S. marines in a small village in the extreme

north of South Vietnam. Those pages provided just enough information

for me to file a Freedom of Information Act request for court-martial

transcripts related to American crimes there. The military’s

response to my request was an all too common one: the documents

were inexplicably missing. But the government file was not entirely

empty. Hundreds of pages of trial transcripts, sworn testimony, supporting

documents, and the like had vanished into thin air, but the

military could offer me something in consolation: a copy of the

protective jacket that was once wrapped around the documents. I

declined.

Indeed, an astonishing number of marine court-martial records

of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing. Most air

force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed

seem to have met the same fate. Even before this, the formal investigation

records were an incomplete sample at best; as one veteran of

the secret Pentagon task force told me, knowledge of most cases

never left the battlefield. Still, the War Crimes Working Group files

alone demonstrated that atrocities were committed by members of

every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate

brigade that deployed without the rest of its division— that is, every

major army unit in Vietnam.

The scattered, fragmentary nature of the case files makes them

essentially useless for gauging the precise number of war crimes committed

by U.S. personnel in Vietnam. But the hundreds of reports

that I gathered and the hundreds of witnesses 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 off-shore ships. Countless others, crazed

with fear, bolted for safety when helicopters swooped toward their

villages, only to have a door gunner cut them in half with bursts from

an M-60 machine gun — and many others, who froze in place, suffered

the same fate. There’s 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 that allowed

it to be unleashed with impunity.

This was the real war, the one that barely appears at all in the tens

of thousands of volumes written about Vietnam. This was the war

that Ron Ridenhour spoke about— the one in which My Lai was an

operation, not an aberration. This was the war in which the American

military and successive administrations in Washington produced

not a few random massacres 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 it meant for the Vietnamese people, is what this book

is meant to explain.

Published by Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2013 by Nick Turse. Not to be reprinted without permission.