Vietnam and Historical Forgetting

May I be pretentious here and quote from Marcuse?

(silence).

I’ll take that as a ‘yes’.

Anyway Marcuse tosses off at one point what seems to me to be an incredibly important observation:

“When a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report on the FBI, it fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity: however, the chances are that the positive wins because the image of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of the people. ”

To repeat this seems to me to be an incredibly important observation. Nick Turse’s book has not been suppressed, he has not been arrested, no one is prevented from reading it. But it hasn’t made much headway, either. Surely at least part of the explanation for this is, simply, the context in which it is read: a context in which Americans are taught (at school) a slanted and biased version of American history (some of them get something closer to the truth at university, but one has to wonder which version makes the deeper impression), a context in which the Army is venerated and posited as the (or at least a) site of political virtue in mass culture, a context in which the mass media (especially Hollywood and the TV networks), however ‘liberal’ they may be, generally speaking, refrain from asking really hard questions about the real aims and methods of American foreign policy, either now or in the past. Not to mention of course the constant barrage of more open propaganda from talk radio, Fox news, etc. The pre-existing context within which most Americans (and British) people evaluate and interpret any new piece of news is that ‘we’ are good, that ‘our’ motives are, generally, noble, and that although we might have made ‘mistakes’, essentially ‘our’ battles were the right ones. Therefore My Lai could more or less be accepted and acted upon. What cannot be faced is, as the OP states, the idea of systematic and deliberate cruelty, sadism, racism, and terrorism. Even if the facts become available they are interpreted within a pre-existing socio-cultural context which tends to minimise them, or suppress them, or ‘contextualise’ them in a politically convenient manner.

Thanks for pointing out this book.

The absence of discussion is remarkable but neither surprising nor hard to understand. The implications of the information are so incompatible with Americans’ self-image that the information is either rejected as too obviously untrue to warrant serious consideration, or ridiculed as liberal lies intended to weaken The Homeland.

One sees the same thing with regard to the invasion of Iraq – even the slightest suggestion that this was abominable behaviour that placed the USA on the same level as other nations that have waged aggressive war over the years was violently rejected as unthinkable. There is no need to make a reasoned rebuttal because the accusation is so self-evidently false. People Like Us just don’t do that sort of thing.

The frenzied reaction to Obama’s acknowledgement that America might have actually made some mistakes in its past foreign policy (“Apology tour!”) is a symptom of the same mindset, as is the refusal to concede that Islamic terrorism is anything but the irrational lashing out of a crazed religion hell-bent on murder and mayhem because jihad. When your sense of identity depends utterly on a sense of moral superiority – American exceptionalism! the last best hope of mankind! – any suggestion that really you are just like everyone else has to be met with either a furious response or ignored completely. Trying to engage with the threat in a reasoned way admits the possibility that there is some truth in it, and that opens such unthinkable consequences that it cannot be entertained.

If you were unfamiliar with US politics, you’d expect this to cause a major public scandal,

Ah, but were there any _American_ victims?

tossing grenades into crude home made bunkers crammed with civilians

Isn’t that a scene from a movie?

[googling]

Ah, at the start of the Vietnam sequence in The Deer Hunter, an enemy fighter does this before De Niro barbecues him with a flamethrower.

I was inclined to wonder where are the comments demanding more and better particulars, quibbling with minor semantic issues, asking for firmer forms of proof of intent, demolishing individual instances etc. Then I realised it wasn’t a post by Belle, or Maria, and all became clear. Carry on, nothing to see here.

After the war the bullets were bored so we capped the game
With cynical smiles we put them on trial to place the blame
Now what kind of beast would love such a feast
Have you no shame?
So we hung them by the feet
Oh, we shot them in the street
Oh, the victory was sweet
On victory day.
And all the high-born ladies
So lovely and so true,
Have been handed to the soldiers

Thinking about my own post on the vacuousness of so much of Jean Bethke Elshtain’s prose and the unreality of her realism, can’t help quoting this statement from her: “One of my persistent worries about our own time is that we may be squandering a good bit of rich heritage through processes of organized ‘forgetting,’ a climate of opinion that encourages presentism rather than a historical perspective that reminds us that we are always boats moving against the current, ‘borne back ceaselessly into the past,’ in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s memorable words from The Great Gatsby. ”

Yet somehow I don’t recall her ever worrying about our forgetting about Vietnam.

Zamfir, I am interested to hear about Dutch experience. I have spent time in Belgium, and found the people lovely and gentle, and have wondered how they make sense out of their earlier adventures in the (then) Belgian Congo, which rival any other colonial atrocities in their savagery. How do they think about it? How are they taught about it in schools?

Bertrand Russell’s suggestion that in every country, history should only be taught to children by natives of a different country, has always struck me as very wise.

Nope, it was built in 1941-3 to house the War Department, which FDR anticipated (correctly) would have to grow massively once America entered the war. Not as an archive. It’d be a terrible archive – it’s on a flood plain.

Sorry, but it was. That’s how it survived the plane crash on 9/11 without more serious damage.

After the war, it was to house paper records (if anyone remembers those….).

“Among the design requirements, Somervell required the structural design to accommodate floor loads of up to 150 pounds per square foot, which was done in case the building became a records storage facility at some time after the end of the current war.” (Yeah, it’s Wikipedia, but we’re on the intertoobs, and it’s an easy quote to grab.)

And if being on a flood plain makes it a terrible location for an archive, why is it still in use at all?

Henry,

Thanks for pointing out the book.

It’s interesting, there was some discussion of US massacres in Korea a few years ago, with No Gun Ri getting front page coverage in the NYT 50+ years after the fact. It’s hard to understand how this forgetting and remembering works.

I wonder how this aspect of the war is remembered in Vietnam. Are these killings an acknowledged part of history, or just subsumed in the larger catastrophe? or is there the kind of systematic forgetting that there was in Germany of the destruction of their own cities, after the war?

I also wonder, are there any differences we can identify, between wars where this kind of thing is prevalent and wars where it’s not?

@pedant, the Belgian and Dutch experience with respect to colonies is entirely different. The Netherlands had a wide range of colonies and outposts for centuries, really as part of the self-definition of the country. In the nineteenth century, the maritime power of the Netherlands had grown weak enough that these colonies were mostly held on conditional approval of the British navy, they were the lost glory from the days that the Netherlands were a power in themselves.

Belgium on the other hand was then a young country, and being granted a colony from the big powers was a fairly one-off, short lived experience. As far as I know, it never entered as deeply into Belgian society as it did in the Netherlands.

So basically, I can’t say much about Belgium. It’s just a few miles away, but in this respect it’s a completely different place.

“Belgium on the other hand was then a young country, and being granted a colony from the big powers was a fairly one-off, short lived experience.”

My, but they certainly did a lot in their short-lived experience! We should all give them a hand!

(for example, one incident after Four Tet in which a US officer ordered prisoners shot in cold blood to improve the kill count)

I didn’t realize that Kieran Hebden fought in Vietnam.

Pedant@17: In Brussels there are statues to the great heroes who colonized the Congo. The Congo museum there until very recently contained no reference at all to the atrocities. At the moment there is a small corner dedicated to them. A few years ago, a Belgian minister, I think it was Louis Michel, explained how the Belgians had bought civilisation to Congo. The worst colonial power seems to have the worst memory.

As for the Netherlands, Zamfir pretty much explained it. Everyone know colonisation ws bad, but the details remain vague. In the early 90’s, I asked my excellent secondary school history teacher why we were learning so little about the Indonesian war of independence. He explained that we would just have to wait until the soldiers who served there were dead, and then the curriculum would contain some good history. He might be right: recently, a Dutch newspaper carried a two page spread on a former soldier who wished to confess his participation in warcrimes before he died.

As someone who just missed being drafted in 1972, was active in the anti-war movement beginning in 1967, and knew many people who had served in Vietnam, I am surprised that so many of the commentators were surprised by the conclusions of the book under discussion. The anti-war movement in the 60s knew in fact and in principle without all the evidence the author collects. Someone in the comments mentioned Bertrand Russell but apparently did not know of Russell’s involvement in the effort to hold war crimes trials of the US in I think Sweden in the late 60s. What is historically significant now is the sustained right wing and nationalist reaction in the late 70s and through the 80s to the military and political failure in Vietnam (along with the reaction to the Civil Rights movement) that recast the left and the anti-war movement as ‘spitting on veterans’ and as traitors e.g. ‘Hanoi Jane’. The reaction was planned and fanned by the white supremacist right, and paved the way for Reagan’s election.

I submit to the historians on this blog that the ferocious (and popular) denial of American behavior in Vietnam is deeply connected to America’s even more ferocious (and violent) denial of the facts of slavery in America (and of Jim Crow and continuing white supremacy. If you accept my premise, American denial of what we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan should not be surprising.

Of course, once the Dutch left the Indonesians did a pretty good job of enacting their very own homegrown atrocities against Communists and Timorese.

Bob McManus: I am likely older and fogier than you. What is Google the 13? I have no idea of the reference or the meaning.

DP @ 33–

Yes, I was in that last lottery draft too–and missed being drafted by two birthdays. This post gave me a renewed sense that that must have been the luckiest day of my life.

It also made me think of a conversation with a fellow grad student in the late 70s who also was a protestant minister. He seemed to me to be a very gentle and kind man. We started talking about Vietnam, and his service there. I can still recall how utterly calmly he spoke of killing VC– in firefights and never seemingly at close range–and how little it seemed to trouble him.

Then again there was my father-in-law who in WWII who piloted 35 B-24 missions (Ploesti, Hamburg, etc.) and dropped hundreds of bombs, knowing he likely killed civilians as well as destroying facilities, and yet he was at peace with that.

Which now makes me think: is there any empirical work on the psychological effects of warfare as a function of the literal range of killing (close versus long-range fire)? I ‘d think there must be some data on drone-operators, even if still classified. But does killing on the battlefield demonstrably produce different reactions as a function of proximity to the “targets”? I’d think so. . .and especially if they are “non-combatants”.

Thanks for the OP. I’m just as susceptible to forgetting as anyone, and needed this kick in the ass.

37: google the (text in comment) 13 is what was intended

Here

@Marcel, the plantation of the king was the earliest period, from 1885 to 1905 or so. Then the Belgian state took formally over, though in practice I think they didn’t do much at first except give out concessions to some companies for exploitation

Then over the decades it became a more general ‘Belgian’ effort. With a heavy retoric of a civilizing mission to the barbarians, and strong links to Catholic missionaries.

I think the truly worst atrocities were in the early period, with a gradual improvement over time to still-pretty-bad. Just as speculation, I suppose that many Belgians identified stronger with the mission than with the companies or the king. But I don’t know, i am not that much better read on this topic than Tintin in Congo.

Which now makes me think: is there any empirical work on the psychological effects of warfare as a function of the literal range of killing (close versus long-range fire)? I ‘d think there must be some data on drone-operators, even if still classified.

Drone operators have more psychological problems than manned aircraft pilots, but once you control for other factors (like number of deployments) it isn’t significant. And, interestingly, both have far fewer problems than other Air Force personnel like administrators, medics and ground crew…
http://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/drone-pilots-no-worse-off-than-those-who-actually-fly/

33: I submit to the historians on this blog that the ferocious (and popular) denial of American behavior in Vietnam is deeply connected to America’s even more ferocious (and violent) denial of the facts of slavery in America (and of Jim Crow and continuing white supremacy.

Still listing effects not causes, in order to find the bad guys. White Supremacists ain’t all that special.

Japanese Anniversary Aug 15

Japan’s prime minister sent an offering to a shrine for war dead on Thursday, the anniversary of Japan’s World War Two defeat, while cabinet members visited it in person, drawing harsh complaints from China and South Korea

The people who start and maintain wars should be held accountable.

Have we absolved the Universal Soldier already in this thread? That was quick.

Who starts wars? Who fights wars?

I blame sociality and shame, the comforts of association and the desire for approval. I think I will get picked last in the CT gender wars.

Britta,

I don’t suppose it occurred to your teacher to mention brown people murdering other brown people in India, or such civilizational glories such as sati, the caste system, and untouchability.

“an aid”

Uncle Kvetch,

It has to do with the fact that while the US certainly was responsible for a lot of savagery in Vietnam, it isn’t a race thing, it was an ideology thing.

The Japanese, Chinese and Cambodians killed a lot of Vietnamese too, very brutally (as did the Southern government), and none of then were white.

And more generally, that Britta’s remarks are an almost perfect parody of multiculturalist silliness. History isn’t, funnily enough, all about race.

Uncle Kvetch asked:

What does any of that have to do with US war in Vietnam?

It suggests that demonizing either the U.S. or European countries as unusually evil is no more useful or accurate than the “patriotic” view of the U.S. as unusually good, a light unto nations. The U.S. (and earlier the European powers) has had the power and the opportunity to commit awful crimes, and too often has. In that way, it is/they are not much different from other groups and societies that throughout history have found themselves in the same situation. Reducing the frequency and size of these crimes requires much more than condemnation, though that may be a useful first step.

So long as it is not used to excuse Vietnam (“Everybody does it”), it is useful to remind ourselves that both for good and for bad, the U.S. is not especially unusual, that much too often, humans are murderous primates. This is something to be changed. How? Beats me. People have been trying for millenia.

57: Ooooh, it’s The Human Condition

The British film critic David Shipman described the trilogy in his 1983 book, The Story of Cinema, as “unquestionably the greatest film ever made.”

I guess I should find it not surprising that those under 50 find this information new. Over the past 30 years when Vietnam is mentioned at all, is mentioned either as a “syndrome” that we have to get over or where “American” soldiers were martyred and left as forgotten prisoners (I guess during the Carter administration – somehow Nixon-Ford, Reagan, and the Bush administrations never get the blame in the Stallone movies). But as a 16 years old in 1971, I was aware of that this was what the Vietnam war meant (even with just a half hour a night along with prime time specials, people got far more foreign news on mass media then than what they get now.)

I am also interested in hearing about how the little imperial wars Britain fought in the 1950s in Kenya, Malaysia, Cyprus, Yemen, etc. were covered in the U.K. in the 1950s. Until Suez, and that was more an issue where the U.S. really put the financial squeeze on France and the U.K. to put them in their proper places as dependents, I am not sure of much domestic blowback or moral criticism occurred.

Finally, this is another point where I guess the political right has an advantage. They certainly turned half the country against the Vietnam war protestors in the 60s and 70s as “America Haters” which became “San Francisco Democrats” in the 1980s. They have almost Leninist willingness to break a few eggs to achieve their goals and I don’t think this book will make much impression on the Bill O’Reillys and Bill Kristols of the world or on their audience.
That these atrocities were occurring was well known and reported at the time. See the Senate hearings on Vietnam in 1971 and/or google “Winter Soldier.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulbright_Hearings‎

American “history” is great at forgetting and excising. Very few now are familiar with “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” or “Bloody Bill Anderson” – which reveals the nightmare of Missouri and Kentucky in the Civil War. Both Paul Fussell and E.B. Sledge describe atrocities and massacres committed by American soldiers in WWII in their books, which for the most part went unpunished. And when American or British soldiers are held accountable for war crimes by the higher ups, there is probably for the purpose of promoting a new and greater crime.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaker_Morant_%28film%29

War is after all state sanctioned murder, and the for those doing the murdering the fine print about who you can murder and when you can murder them can become confusing. I am not a pacifist in theory, but in practice only the Civil War and WWII would been the only wars I hope I would not have opposed the extremity of state sanctioned murder.

It suggests that demonizing either the U.S. or European countries as unusually evil

There’s certainly not the slightest whiff of “unusually evil” in Henry’s post. Who are you referring to here?

No surprise at all about the level of atrocities. I lived in Bangkok 1966-68 and had daily contact with R&R (rest and relaxation) GIs from Vietnam. Discussion of killing civilians, torture of prisoners, and taking of body parts for trophies was common.

Americans are largely incapable of self-criticism in regard to our wars. The starting premise is that we are noble and self-sacrificing. Any wrong-doing therefore has to be the exception. Americans are also narcissistic. It’s common knowledge that about 50,000 US troops died in the Vietnam War. Ask how many Vietnamese died (I do this when the topic of Vietnam comes up) and almost no one has even a guess. It didn’t matter then and it certainly doesn’t now.

It’s also no mystery about why war crimes were so common. Race was a huge factor. If there had been photos of little blond girls burned by napalm the reaction would have been very different. But they weren’t like us, they were gooks without our own fine sensibilities. The famous Westmoreland interview, in which he justifies killing Vietnamese because they don’t share our respect for human life, should be mandatory viewing in every high school history class. Individual soldiers quickly figured out that the war had no defined purpose (saving South Vietnam from communism was gravely recited by that era’s pundits but nobody on the ground took that seriously) and the only thing that mattered was surviving your tour of duty. Add in the lack of a well-defined, uniformed enemy (excluding the NV regulars) and the rule was “when in doubt, kill.” Lack of cooperation by civilians was equated with being an enemy combatant. This encouraged retaliatory killings.

I haven’t looked at a US school history text in many years but suspect that Vietnam gets at best superficial treatment. Even now (maybe more so now with the rise of right-wing lunacy) my guess is that any teacher going beyond the meme that Vietnam was a well-intentioned mistake would quickly be out of a job.

About 20 years ago, there was a total eclipse of the sun in Mexico. I remember that I became very scared, terrified really, and the thought crossed my mind, “I understand the Aztecs now”. In the hours and days following the eclipse, I heard this realization repeated over and over: Now I understand.

Though children in Mexico are not taught all the details of human sacrifice and cannibalism (children taste better than adults, conquistadors tasted so bad their body parts never made it to the markets) everybody is aware of the religious and culinary practices in Mesoamerica. They have not been forgotten. They are not denied. I think the reason is that we are all confident that there is absolutely no chance of these practices returning nor do we want them to. In contrast, the war atrocities of the Western powers are whitewashed because they are ongoing and supported by most.

I understood during that eclipse that the horror of human sacrifice is second to the horror of the sun disappearing forever. Nowadays, the horror of war atrocities is considered secondary to the sun setting on Western supremacy.

” I think that “War is a terrible thing to be avoided” is a deeper and more important thing to communicate than “The US is uniquely evil”, which seems to be where you land if you only pay attention to what Americans did there.”

This is a decent point. However if we just stick to talking about broad generalities such as war is bad we will quickly run out of things to talk about. I can totally agree with you that war brings out the worst in everyone and still want to know some specifics about what American troops did in Vietnam.

It suggests that demonizing either the U.S. or European countries as unusually evil is no more useful or accurate than the “patriotic” view of the U.S. as unusually good, a light unto nations. The U.S. (and earlier the European powers) has had the power and the opportunity to commit awful crimes, and too often has. In that way, it is/they are not much different from other groups and societies that throughout history have found themselves in the same situation. Reducing the frequency and size of these crimes requires much more than condemnation, though that may be a useful first step.

Yes, except I am an American, not an Imperial Roman or a Medieval Mongolian. I also live in the present, not the past, and am thus incapable of preventing former atrocities. The best I can do is try my best to prevent future atrocities, or make amends for the current suffering which is a direct result of past sufferings. What “my best” is and how effective it is is up for debate, but trying is better than sinking into despair-based apathy, as Zizek notes.

If there had been photos of little blond girls burned by napalm the reaction would have been very different.

I’ve always wondered what the ratio is, in terms of how much Americans (or other white people) value lives. With little blonde girls the ratio seems almost infinite. I remember after 9/11 and there was the photo plastered everywhere of a blonde woman with two blond children whose husband was killed in 9/11, and I’m pretty sure it justified, in many people’s minds both wars and the torture and human rights abuses.

@64: We certainly think about the Allied firebombing campaigns differently because we were fighting against the Nazis. The French executed thousands of Nazi collaborators, for example, without anything approximating due process. You can’t separate what the troops did from the nature of the war that they were engaged in. Tit for tat is a powerful impulse.

And, no, this doesn’t excuse Dresden. But it does let you understand the world as it was when Dresden happened – and that world included things like the devastation of Coventry by indiscriminate Nazi bomb raids.

“This doesn’t excuse actions by US troops at all. But it does place them into context that is otherwise absent. ”

Yes, remind me what atrocities were committed by the Vietnamese resistance against American civilians on American soil again?

Uncle Kvetch,

Nonsense. I’m very far from being a patriot or a defender of America. If you’ll note, I’ve never denied that the US intervention killed millions of Vietnamese, many of them very brutally. What I do deny is that the crimes were motivated by racism. they were motivated by anti communist hysteria.

World War 2 would have ended differently if CNN and Wikileaks were around. Of course, it isn’t just “everyone does it”, it is “everyone has always done it”. War is bad, and bad wars are bad^2… become quaker and move on …

Um, Hector, there can be more than one motivation.

“The U.S. (and earlier the European powers) has had the power…..”

Remind me how they got that power again?

OK, so now we’re up to three: “unusually evil,” “uniquely evil,” and “having a bigger penchant for evil than other races.” None of which was stated or even remotely suggested anywhere on this thread.

If I wrote a textbook consisting solely of cataloging Muslim atrocities against Christians, Hindus and Zoroastrians, I doubt that you folks would be sagely nodding in approval.

However if someone else wrote it maybe it would be clear and honest and useful instead of exceedingly odd and full of blind spots.

If I wrote […] I doubt that you folks

Hector, you clearly get more than enough enjoyment creating and demolishing imaginary “liberals” in your head. Why you even bother attempting to engage with real people is a mystery.

Haven’t read thread yet but would note (immodestly) that I beat Henry to a mention of Turse, albeit a brief one:
http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2013/03/friday-evening-linkage.html

(post includes link to Turse on Moyers’ show)

Historical forgetting was a necessary condition of the founding of the post-60s political order in the US (As Machiavelli – and later Nietzsche – pointed out, there is a tight relationship between violence, forgetting, and regime creation). This authorized the backlash thesis about differentiated class support for the war, deftly refuted by Penny Lewis’s new book,’Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks.’ It also made way for the curious renewal of populist commitments to imperialism – even AS antistatism – through the victim narrative of the POW-MIA mvmt. By the late 70s, the majority of Americans who recalled the famous photo of a South Vietnamese officer shooting a VC fighter execution-style now believed that it was a VC officer shooting a south vietnamese soldier. A national example of what Melanie Klein called persecutory anxiety.

I haven’t read Turse’s book. A glance at one of his articles “Who Did You Rape in the War, Daddy?” effectively cut him from my “worth the time” list.

As to American outrage about atrocities committed by American personnel in Vietnam, there was plenty. Plenty expressed in protests, hearings, prosecutions, newspaper and magazine articles, television and radio news reports, documentaries, and movies. And it’s hardly a dirty secret only recently exposed by Turse’s brave expedition into the archives. Hell, there is a book about the Son My Massacre on the US Army Chief of Staff’s recommended reading list (along with other books critical of Vietnam). I’m sure a book describing atrocities in detail makes for a grim reading experience. If there’s something new in it, though, then I haven’t seen it mentioned in the review or two I’ve read about the book.

Just imho, and emphasizing that I have not read Turse’s book, anything by Lewis Sorley, Andrew Krepinevich, H.R. McMaster, or Harry Summers, to name a few, seems likely to be far, far more enlightening on the roll of bodycounts, tactics, and attitudes towards the Vietnamese in the American war effort than Turse.

As to Kenya and American COIN doctrine, my understanding is that the inspiration is mostly Galula and Thompson as interpreted by Nagl and others. As I recall some have even criticized proponents of “population-centric” COIN as deliberately ignoring cases like Kenya, in which the tactics adopted were of a different nature (as noted in the post) than those recommended by Petraeus and others, and as expressed in US military doctrine.

Old Usenet post:

Body Count

{ G. G. Gordon wrote:
{ I remember hearing that the Vulcan was once used, briefly, in Vietnam
{ in a direct-fire mode at a firebase. Three of these guns were directed
{ at a human-wave attack…
{
{ It was discontinued not because it didn’t work, or because it was a
{ flagrant abuse of the Geneva Convention (n.b. we said we were shooting at
{ the weapons and equipment the men were carrying–not the men themselves–
{ the same dodge we use for the M-16 rifle et al); but because IT SCREWED
{ UP THE BODY COUNT. This statistic was far more important to the Pentagon.

Bird was sick. All last night’s warm beer was sloshing around in his belly
and the sun was glaring down. The paddy stank. He hated splashing through
the murky water of the paddies. He couldn’t get his pack settled on his
back. Sargeant Ott put him in middle with one of the FNGs.

“Hey, c’mon, Sarge. I’m short, man. Don’t be puttin’ me with no FNG.” Bird
pleaded.

But Ott wouldn’t listen. Bird looked at the endless paddies and dikes. “Oh,
man. I’m short, man. I don’t need this shit. Ol’ Ott he ain’t even gonna
cut me no slack.”

The FNG kept eyeballing him and that made Bird nervous. He started
switching his M-16 from shoulder to shoulder and tugged at his packstraps.
Finally Ott came splashing back down the line, just as Bird’s weapon went
off.

Ott and the rest of the squad assumed the low-crawl position right there in
the paddy, and Bird burst out laughing. Ott rose out of the muck, ready to
kill Bird. Bird’s single shot had dropped the only living thing in sight: a
mangy-looking water buffalo.

The RTO came double-timing back down the dripping line.”Sargeant Ott! It’s
Company!”

“Shit,” said Ott, taking the radiotelephone “Yeah, Tiger Six, this is
Tiger Three-Two.”

Ott listened to the phone and absently wiped paddymuck from his face. “Uh,
Tiger Six, be advised that we, uh, apparently had some hostile contact at
about map coordinates four niner one seven two eight. Uh, looks like one,
repeat one, hostile down, will recon the area to confirm body count. Tiger
Three-Two out.” He handed the phone back to the RTO and turned to Bird. “I swear
to God, I’m gonna kill your sorry ass…”

Bird stood at a mockery of attention and said, “No excuse, Sargeant!” The
FNG goggled from Bird to the water buffalo, kicking its last in the paddy’s
muddy water. Ott pulled off his helmet, swabbed the sweatband, and then
rammed the pot back on his head. He glared at the FNG, then turned back to
the direction of march. “All right you people. Git back to poundin’ RVN.
Move out!”

Two dikes away HQ Platoon had stopped and the First Sargeant was poring
over his map. He turned to the XO. “Looks like Third Squad had some
action. Ott says some charlie down about here ” He thumped the map with a
thick finger. “That’s what that shot was we heard. Ott says he’s gonna take
a look. You wanna tell the Old Man?”

The XO was a brand new 2LT named Leonard just out from Bien Hoa and eager.
He double-timed to the mudbank where Captain Malley was surveying the treeline
with his binoculars. “Sir, Second Platoon, Fire Team Three reports, uh,
hostile contact and, uh, some enemy down.”

Malley was a skinny little officer in tailored jungle fatigues with a big
cigar clamped between his teeth. “How many, Lieutenant Leonard? How many? That’s
what Battalion’s going to want to know! How many and where!”

“Two, sir! Definitely two! Maybe more.” Leonard’s hand began to wave away
from his side.

“Dammit Leonard, don’t salute me out here! I thought they taught you people
the rules before they let you out of Bien Hoa. Don’t salute. Just get on
the horn to Battalion S2 and tell ’em B Company has made contact with a
force of hostiles and has a body count of — of four. Tell ’em four. And
some possible hostile wounded. Uh — second platoon didn’t have any
casualties themselves did they?”

“Uh, nossir. I don’t think so sir.”

At Battalion Spec5 Lyons, the intelligence specialist, was on sick call and
Captain Brock the acting S2 was taking the action reports himself. He shared
an office tent with S1 and the Battalion XO. He scribbled B Company’s
coordinates onto an intelligence form and leaned back in his folding chair.
“Well, this is going to suit Brigade a lot better. They been on my ass
about how quiet it’s been around here. Now Malley reports he’s bumped into
a — ” He flipped the report. “A force of hostiles. And he’s
got…hmmm…” He frowned at the report. “He’s got eight dead VC. Yep.
That’s the ticket. Tell Brigade eight gone gooners.”

At Brigade HQ Major Kornstein was leaning over the teletype as the report
came in. He pulled it out of the machine himself. “At last. Something to
show the boss.”

He pulled a pen out of his fatigue pocket and scribbled a correction on the
report as he walked down the hall. “Twelve looks a lot better than eight.”
He was whistling as he opened Colonel Burton’s door.

Lieutenant Colonel Burton pushed aside the pile of quarterly fitness
reports and grabbed the intelligence digest out of Kornstein’s hand.
“Whaddaya got, Kornstein? You got anything good? Whaddaya got? What’s
this? Malley? Where’s he? Second Battalion? What’s he got? Twelve? That’s
not enough. Division’ll laugh us out of the shop if twelve dead
dinks is all we got to show for the whole dam’ Brigade.”

He smoothed the intelligence digest out on his desk and poised his pen over
it. “Now if that little sawed-off runt Malley’s got twelve slopes, that
must be like the company average, and whaddaya say Kornstein? How many
companies we got out pounding ground today?”

“Uh, four sir.”

“Four! There ya go. With twelve as a company average, that means Second
Screaming Brigade, my Second Screaming Brigade, musta got at least
forty-eight of those treacherous little charlies! Forty-eight in one day!
Not dam’ bad! Get on the horn to Division, Kornstein! Tell ’em!”

A PFC was buffing the floor in General Orson’s conference room when Colonel
Coolidge the Division G2 arrived with the daily action report. “First and
Third don’t have any reports yet, but Burton says he’s probing a big force
up in his patch and he’s got nearly fifty enemy confirmed dead. Unknown
number of wounded. None of our people hurt.”

“Fifty! Must be NVA regulars not Cong, if there are that many. We better
let Corps know there may be a major incursion on the way.” He took the
action report and flipped pages. “You know how Corps is.” The general
snorted. “We have to do all their thinking for them. What was it that CIA
guy was saying? If we have X number of dead NVAs on the ground there must
be at least three, no make that four times that many actual casualties, so
tell ’em we got a body count of 200. That’ll warm up those pussies at
Corps.”

At Corps HQ two Spec5s sat in the intelligence bullpen leafing through
reports. “Hey, hey, hey. This is lookin’ better and better. You know how I
was telling you that Army’s got that VIP coming in from the world and the
CG wanted some good stuff to show him? Well, those Airborne peckerheads
upcountry are reporting 200 confirmed NVA dead. I’ll just shoot this over
to Spec5 Tolbert in the COS’s office. He was bitching about how if he didn’t
come up with something he might not be able to get to the EM club until
after 1700.”

“Haw!” snorted the other enlisted man. “That’ll be the day — when Tolbert
works late. He’s never been any later than 1645 sitting tall at the EM
club with a drink in his hand. Tell you what though… nobody’s gonna
believe an even number like 200. Let’s make it 227. That sounds official,
don’t it?”

The lights burned late at USARV HQ. The general looked at his chief of
staff and his G2, deputy chief of staff for intelligence. “Well,
gentlemen, it looks as if we can take the Assistant Secretary up country
and show him how our pacification program is working. A major NVA force
repelled and 227 confirmed enemy dead.” He pulled his glasses down his nose
and peered at the report. “Nearly two hundred and fifty. When the Assistant
Secretary gets in we’ll airmobile up there and have a look at the ground.”

Bird sat on a stack of C-rations and gouged some of the mud off his boots
with a stick. Ott looked out toward the perimeter. “What’s all those
papa-sans doing outside the wire?”

“I heard some big cheese from back in the world was comin’ up from Bien Hoa
and wanted to meet some locals, hear about hearts and minds.” Bird threw
down his stick. “Sure hope they frisked those papa-sans for grenades.”

Malley came around the latrines. “All right you men. The CG seems to think
this outfit’s been doing a good job up here and I want you to look like it.
Stand up straight, soldier. Get down to the perimeter and get those
village elders up here. Find the interpreter. Move it, soldier!”

One of the papa-sans seemed pretty pissed off about something, Bird
thought. He was talking a mile a minute and waving his hands around. Bird
shooed the whole group up to the LZ as the general and the big cheese were
getting out of the Huey.

“…250 confirmed NVA killed just out in those paddies,” the general was
telling the cheese. “And these are the village locals.”

The old papa-san was still rattling off as the interpreter came up. The
civilian smiled down at her and moved toward the group of village elders.
“Wonder if he’s gonna ask ’em to vote for him,” Bird thought. Now what the
hell? The papa-san was pointing at Bird and jabbering at the interpreter.

They finally got far enough away from the LZ so that Bird could hear what
the civilian was saying: “… think one water buffalo is a small price to
pay for cleaning this area of hundreds of enemy troops …” but the
papa-san just looked disgusted and pulled his straw hat down over his eyes.

Bird stood at attention in the hot sun. Short as he was, Ott still
wouldn’t cut him any slack.

The only thing in all of this that gives me pause is the idea, which I think is at least implicit in a lot of the comments, that US behavior during Vietnam was unique, compared either to US behavior in, say, World War II, or to other countries’ behavior during wars in the 20th century. The civilian population of Germany was not treated gently by the Americans or British during World War II, either before or after D-Day; to say nothing of how the Japanese behaved while fighting World War II in China.

This doesn’t excuse anything, at all, but I guess it makes it seem to me that trying to sift through the various causes of murderous psychopathy in war is a little bit pointless. It doesn’t matter if Americans in 1939 had racist views of the Germans or Japanese; after a few months of war, there was more than enough murderous racism on hand in the US Army to go around.

posting fail – that should be “Few American’s complain about a white guy whose last name is Kurtz, but growing up I heard variations on ‘we fought a war against them and what business do they have living here’ over 2nd or 3rd generation Asians who weren’t even Japanese.

See also the attacks against Sikhs after 9/11.

…David Galula being a key source on French COIN rather than one of Petraeus’s “warrior-intellectuals”.

“…who too often did not…” Just to be clear. Apologies to the ones who did better.

“Should the Holocaust Museum have a section about the firebombing of Dresden? You know, to even things out?

Jesus.”

Just when we thought an OP name representing testicles was enough to derailing the derailment…

But apparently we are hitting that third rail again, where the absolute moral rightness of Real American White People[tm] is questioned. Suddenly it becomes *VERY IMPORTANT* to remind everyone how just awful, and terrible war is, and how all countries do awful, terrible things in war, so it’s not like we’re actually evil, or even actually quite as bad as those guys over there.

And of course, God forbid we ever seriously consider the whole awfulness and terribleness of war problem when we’re thinking about whether to wage a new one, instead of just when we’re papering over the atrocities committed in the last.

@92: It certainly did; I doubt that we would have used the atom bomb on Germany in WW II.

” I doubt that we would have used the atom bomb on Germany in WW II.”

Why, why, why do people say this?

The entire reason the U.S. developed the A-bomb was to use it on Germany (before they used it on us, we feared). The Allies burned Hamburg and Dresden to the ground – why would the U.S. have hesitated to use the Bomb on Germany?

Suppose that Japan, not Germany, had surrendered in May 1945, and the Allies were struggling on the borders of Germany against fanatical resistance (this requires one to imagine Stalin’s reaching a truce, but it’s a hypo, bear with me). The U.S. was going to take the product of the most expensive research program in history and let it sit on a shelf, while American soldiers continued to die in the field?

Bullshit. Berlin would’ve been radioactive toast.

There was next to no deliberation about *whether* to use the Bomb. It didn’t strike anyone but a few scientists, and to some degree Henry Stimson, as a big moral issue. It was a bigger bang for the buck, period. Sure, there were huge casualty estimates for Operation Olympic or whatever the invasion of Japan was called – not unreasonably (the Japanese were tough defenders) – but it’s not like anyone was “gosh, we don’t want to use this terrible weapon, but the bestial Japs leave us no choice.”

Had the Bomb been ready in late 1944, when the western offensive had petered out, there is no reason to imagine it wouldn’t have been used against Germany.

Anti-racism appears to be the Universal Get-Out-Of-Moral-Responsibility Card, doesn’t it? Even better than anti-patriarchy. We had our own back in the 60s, it was the anti-communism card. All bourgeois bullshit. You work for the school that researches electronics that guide the drones that kill the newlyweds. And you are very comfortable, and very proud of yourselves.

Chris Hedges Murdering the Wretched of the Earth. Wait, Wretched what, are we recycling the 60s?

Mblockquote>What is happening in Egypt is a precursor to a wider global war between the world’s elites** and the world’s poor, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices. Thirty-three percent of Egypt’s 80 million people are 14 or younger, and millions live under or just above the poverty line, which the World Bank sets at a daily income of $2 in that nation. The poor in Egypt spend more than half their income on food—often food that has little nutritional value. An estimated 13.7 million Egyptians, or 17 percent of the population, suffered from food insecurity in 2011, compared with 14 percent in 2009, according to a report by the U.N. World Food Program and the Egyptian Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Malnutrition is endemic among poor children, with 31 percent under 5 years old stunted in growth. Illiteracy runs at more than 70 percent.

In “Les Misérables” Victor Hugo described war with the poor as one between the “egoists” and the “outcasts.” The egoists, Hugo wrote, had “the bemusement of prosperity, which blunts the sense, the fear of suffering which is some cases goes so far as to hate all sufferers, and unshakable complacency, the ego so inflated that is stifles the soul.” The outcasts, who were ignored until their persecution and deprivation morphed into violence, had “greed and envy, resentment at the happiness of others, the turmoil of the human element in search of personal fulfillment, hearts filled with fog, misery, needs, and fatalism, and simple, impure ignorance.”

The belief systems the oppressed embrace can be intolerant, but these belief systems are a response to the injustice, state violence and cruelty inflicted on them by the global elites. Our enemy is not radical Islam. It is global capitalism. It is a world where the wretched of the earth are forced to bow before the dictates of the marketplace, where children go hungry as global corporate elites siphon away the world’s wealth and natural resources and where our troops and U.S.-backed militaries carry out massacres on city streets. Egypt offers a window into the coming dystopia. The wars of survival will mark the final stage of human habitation of the planet. And if you want to know what they will look like, visit any city morgue in Cairo.

**That’s y’all, folks. The elites. That’s me.

I thought it was neat to create a tension by leaving the punchline of the Ochs out. Maybe I’ll go get “Love Me, I’m a Liberal”

When in Rome, act like the Romans do.

You are Roman, you can’t run or hide, you don’t get a pass or absolution. The Vandals and Huns won’t give you a break for being a little nicer to your servants. You don’t deserve one.

WWII was so much easier to swallow because the Yanks were the ones “drum, drum drummin’ over there” to save the world (sorry, just saw Yankee Doodle Dandy.) “Greatest Generation” and all…

Harry Patch, one of the last survivors of WWI who died in August 2009, once said “war is the condoned slaughter of human beings.” He was wounded at the Battle of Passchendaele, where something like 70,000 soldiers died; he knows what he’s talking about.

Like pain, we forget the details of war, the sharpness of it, the doubled-over agony of it. People are not now talking about Viet Nam; other wars have replaced it. But what happened in Viet Nam transformed this country in ways we are still reeling from today.

While I have no doubt American free fire tactics and indiscriminate bombing led to large numbers of civilian casualties in Vietnam, as they also did in WWII and Korea, I’m frankly surpised that there isn’t at least some wariness fully accepting the conclusions of an author on the record as praising the Columbine killers as insurgents against the “American machine”:

http://www.49thparallel.bham.ac.uk/back/issue4/forumturse.htm

I think the response that “the evidence is the evidence” is a bit naive, given how much readers have to trust an author’s presentation of historical sources. I have zero doubt that an author expressing right wing opinions as extreme as Turse’s left wing ones would be considered untrustworthy.

Yeah, that essay from when Turse was a grad student is pretty sophomoric, aka stupid.

The best one can say on his behalf is, “I hope he has grown up a lot in the last decade.”

It complicates the job of reading his book, but then no one was advocating that we read it as an impartial view from nowhere (were they?)

Andrew F. @94
1) in yr list of bks about US mil. conduct in Vietnam you left off the one of a yr or two ago about the so-called Tiger Squadron — appeared to be a long and heavily researched tome. I hope I’m correctly remembering the name of the squadron (of special forces engaged in a fair amt of gratuitous killing, iirc) — but I may not be.

2) Galula and Thompson as major inspirations for Petraeus’ version of COIN: that is my understanding, and accords w the one (not-so-great, imo) bk I’ve read recently on the general subject, namely G. Sitaraman’s The Counterinsurgent’s Constitution. And see also Fred Kaplan’s recent bk on Petraeus.

LFC @ 121:
about the so-called Tiger Squadron…

Are you thinking of the Tiger Force? I remember reading the 2003 Toledo Blade articles (which received the Pulitzer Prize, apparently), and the Wikipedia article mentions a subsequent book from 2006, Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War.

Peter Erwin @122
Yes, must have been Tiger Force I was thinking of. Thanks.

119: We can’t expect a “view from nowhere” without perspective, but we can certainly question whether an author’s perspective is so extreme that it leaves him incapable of considering contradictory or qualifying evidence. If Turse has recanted or qualified his praise of the Columbine killers since 2000, I have not seen it, and I would be glad to be corrected. We would certainly dismiss out of hand a study of immigration to Europe by an author who had praised Anders Brevik as an insurgent against creeping sharia. I’m not sure why Turse isn’t a due a large share of the same suspicion. Can we really imagine the author of the Columbine essay reaching any other conclusion about Vietnam than a pervasive American strategy of atrocity, no matter what the evidence?

Here’s a link to an academic review that doesn’t mention Turse’s Columbine views but still sees some serious problems of objectivity and evidence with the book, while still giving it some praise:
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38666

“The result is a strange form of historical forgetting, where there’s a general sense that bad things happened, but no understanding of how general these bad things were, nor desire to hold people accountable for them.”

I get the feeling that the some on the Crooked Timber team are quite young. Is it news that US troops committed atrocities in Viet Nam? Are there people in America who believe that for the most part, things went well in Viet Nam, only occasional bad behavior observed? We were the Yankee Doodle Dandies of Asia? Somehow I doubt it.

The mistakes made by the US in the Viet Nam War have been a weight around American foreign policy for a half-decade. Errol Morris’ Fog of War is an outstanding resource on the “fog” surrounding this war. (NYTimes review here: http://nyti.ms/14HEqz9)

During the war, the actions of American troops were the focus of protests across the country – Kent State is one example (“four dead in Ohio…”)

And is there any war in any time in history in which a particular army does not demonize the “enemy?” If so, please let me know…

from the OP

Latterday liberals acknowledge that bad things happened, but mostly don’t want to open up the can of worms, for fear that they’d be accused of being unpatriotic and hating the troops or something. The result is a strange form of historical forgetting, where there’s a general sense that bad things happened, but no understanding of how general these bad things were, nor desire to hold people accountable for them.

I think that’s largely right, but one partial exception to this generalization about lack of public discussion/acknowledgement of Vietnam — partial b.c not focused specifically on atrocities — was the widespread public debates that surrounded McNamara’s apologetic memoir In Retrospect. McNamara was either a war criminal or a tragic figure or both (I lean to “both”) who became increasingly uneasy with, and eventually opposed to, the massive bombing but couldn’t bring himself to leave the Johnson administration until it was too late for his departure to have much of any political (or moral) significance. (Contrast McNamara with Walt Rostow, who remained entirely unapologetic about his role to the end of his life and criticized McNamara after In Retrospect was published. On Rostow, see David Milne’s excellent America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War.)

Also, as other commenters have already mentioned, publicly dealing with atrocities committed by soldiers in an unpopular war is difficult: the OP mentions that the UK is just now starting to confront the Kenya crimes. Calley and Mylai could be seen as stand-ins, as it were, for a larger category of crimes/atrocities, with the public sentiment being: ok, we dealt with that, now we don’t have to bother any more.

Omega Centauri @76

The thing that really struck me from Turse’s book, was that the treatment of villagers varied tremendously from unit to unit. He interviews a Vietnamese who said they could never figure out the Americans. They didn’t know if the next patrol would try to win hearts and minds by giving villagers treats, or if they were coming to massacre them. I suspect getting at the truth requires hearing from all sorts of soldiers, not just from those who experienced one or the other of the behavioral extremes.

This resonates with my impressions gleaned from occasional reading on the Vietnam War. (Have not read Turse’s bk.)

Aren’t war criminals typically found among the losers? From Ebert’s review of Fog of War:

“After the war, [McNamara] says, in one of the film’s most astonishing moments, LeMay observed to him that if America had lost [WWII], they would have been tried as war criminals. Thinking of the 100,000 burned alive in Tokyo, McNamara finds lesson No. 5: ‘Proportionality should be a guideline in war.’ In other words, I suppose, kill enough of the enemy but don’t go overboard. Lesson No. 9: ‘In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.'” http://bit.ly/1bF5xki

Which war has no war criminals?

What we call “forgetting” is the limit of imagination, that lies behind what we sometimes call our “worldviews”. Whatever is happening in the contemporary moment illuminates the past, by relieving us of the need to imagine aspects of the past, and we experience this as a “remembering”.

It is happening in economics, as we live the Great Depression Redux, and learn that the Cliff Notes version put together by Paul Samuelson, Milton Friedman and others, 1946-1970, is wrong — as Krugman noted recently — and the Austrians, of all people economists, start to look comparatively smart, if still cruel.

And, the same thing goes on with war and atrocity. Most people don’t know much history: a few dates and headlines with little foundation, and often cockamamie counterfactuals (“slavery would have ended anyway”; “Wilson’s intervention knocking out the Kaiser created Hitler and WWII” etc.) They may learn the outline of some potted history, which serves mythic purposes, and are continually surprised by some factoid floated about by a manipulative fool with a tendentious argument.

There’s something to the idea that war, itself, is an atrocity. It is a context, in which killing, maiming, wanton destruction, and seizure by force is the general practice, so instances of killing, maiming, wanton destruction and seizure can be distinguished as atrocity only by differences, which do not touch only the killing, maiming, etc.

If you are going to make moral distinctions, and vindicate some conduct of war, as in all moral analysis, you are forced to confront purpose and intention. The clever moralist of war will say that the purpose of war is peace, that war is policy by other means, and seeks cooperation on favorable terms. War — “good war” seeks to persuade others to cooperate on terms that can be justified in the absence of war — in peace in other words.

So, a war of extermination, a war to enslave, killing, maiming, etc. for their own sake and not to bring about a peace — these form a context for moral atrocities.

Vietnam, in its “purpose” straddles the era of WWII and the era of the American Imperium.

The mass protests were not against the war; they were against the draft. Even then, in their idyll of youthful idealism, my fellow baby boomers were selfish aholes at the core. It is no accident that multiple draft exemptions bred later war mongers. It was the war, in which the military began its step-wise transformation from a foundation of popular politicians directing professionals leading citizen-soldiers into our present mode, of corrupt politicians covering for a military-industrial complex sending mercenaries.

The “body count” mentality reflected the absence of strategic purpose: peace on terms respectful of the legitimate interests of others was no longer an aim. Without an achievable strategic goal, there were no relevant strategic means, available to the generals.

We know now that it was also a war without provocation, an aggressive war, initiated by the U.S., just like GWB’s Iraq War. Many thought that they were demonstrating that they had learned the lessons of Nuremberg and appeasement. With time to regret his folly, Johnson, I’m sure, genuinely wanted to reach a peace accord in Paris. But, having started a war for no particular purpose achievable in peace, it was soon all about signaling “determination” and other such crap. Whenever a signaling argument is offered as a reason to do some irrational thing — and notice, please, that signaling arguments are always, always about rationalizing the doing of an irrational thing — common sense and moral sensibility have left the building.

You can say that the Allies were not particularly gentle with, say, the Germans, after the Second World War, and that’s true in some material senses. But, when the war was over, the war was over. For both sides. The war had been fought with distinct and achievable aims, at least by the side that won, and so, they could reach a peace on terms, however harsh in some respects, which could be accepted. Vietnam was the first war, which America fought on terms of perpetuity, that is, with the strategic aim of keeping the war going, forever if possible. It was the first war, in which peace was American defeat. That purposelessness is the mother of all atrocity in war, as the means of war are horrible in themselves, and when war becomes its own aim, it’s all atrocity all the time.

Bruce Wilder @ 134

The mass protests were not against the war; they were against the draft. Even then, in their idyll of youthful idealism, my fellow baby boomers were selfish aholes at the core.

It may be unfair to pick on two sentences abstracted from a very thoughtful comment, but still…

Even in the service of self-deprecation, rhetorical excess can sometimes dishonor things that ought to be respected. I was there too, and I say it wasn’t always and everywhere as you’ve described it here. It probably doesn’t matter to those young enough to be in the process of fabricating their own memories, but it matters to me.

As someone who licked a lot of envelopes in the anti-Vietnam cause, I can say that the backbone of the movement in Australia (the ones who started the movement, the local organisers and many of the wealthier backers) were middle-aged middle class veterans of World War II.

William Timberman @ 139: it wasn’t always and everywhere as you’ve described it

History is not describing the past as it was; it’s telling a story, that gives the past the meaning it acquires, when you find out later how the story “ends”. My sentiments at the time are not the same as my re-sentiments, now. Subsequent events, unfortunately, selected some of the less flattering aspects of antiwar (and reactionary) politics, and gave them salience and weight that they may not have seemed to have in contemporary experience.

For example, how could Hitler win the “battle of Britain” without committing mass atrocities?

“I think part of the “Vietnam syndrome” is the military resolving to never let the media have unfettered access ever again.”

Yes. It also ended the draft. With a purely volunteer army, there is no need for widespread protests. Most are never going to see combat, unless they’ve signed up for this challenge.

B. Wilder writes:
The mass protests were not against the war; they were against the draft.

Bruce Wilder can be thoughtful but he can also be pompous, irritating, and wrong. As others have already pointed out, this statement (treated, as it must be given the way it’s phrased, as a sweeping generalization) is wrong, and BW’s mealy-mouthed response to W. Timberman, above, doesn’t help matters. Someone who inveighs against the dangers of “potted history” should be more careful.

I was born in ’57 and marched in the Vietnam Moratorium in ’69 at the age of 12 (I don’t have good memories of it but I know I was there). Obviously I had no prospect of being drafted at 12. I can assure BW that I was not primarily protesting the draft (as opposed to protesting the war).

Btw the year 1957 was the statistical peak of the baby boom, so Bruce Wilder is also wrong to imply that all his “fellow baby-boomers” were facing the draft. A great many “baby boomers” were too young to have that as a personal worry. Many people seem to think that “baby boomers” refers to those born in the relatively immediate aftermath of WW2. In fact, by conventional usage the “baby boom” runs from 1946 to 1964, with 1957 the statistical peak, so the demographic impression left by Bruce Wilder’s reference to his “fellow baby boomers” is incorrect.

@Main Street Muse
I remember a picture of the last helicopter leaving the US embassy (I believe it was the embassy)

In fact that famous picture, though often referred to as being taken of the embassy rooftop, was not the U.S. embassy; it was another bldg in Saigon. Btw the photographer who took that photo died quite recently — his name is escaping me at the moment.

I suspect prospect of being drafted, or your friends/relatives being drafted, will make a miracle in amplifying moral outrage at imperialism and war crimes.

It will amplify outrage and no doubt the draft did motivate some or even a lot of the protest but that’s not what BW wrote. What he wrote was “The mass protests were not against the war; they were against the draft” and that statement, as a generalization to cover the motives of all participants in the anti-war mvt, is flat-out wrong. And no amount of Mao Cheng Ji’s typical [fill in the blank ’cause I can’t even think of the right word right now] is going to alter that.

Bruce Wilder @ 143

As long as we were honest then, and remains so now, the fact that our personal — often internal — moral wrestles can have a rubber nose put on them by the forces of history shouldn’t be a matter of shame. Regret yes, but not shame. It’s probably also worth saying that we’re no more omniscient now than we were then. That’s something we ought to take into account even when we’re convinced that we have come to the end, and that it doesn’t flatter us.

Objecting to rhetorical flourish and romanticizing, and cynicism are different things. If you are really against wars, it’s useful to understand what’s going on. But if you’re just shooting off your mouth to feel good, that’s fine too, please ignore my comments.

Rebellion became commodified in the seventies and selfishness came in in the 1980s with the victory of Ronald Reagan and the “you can have it all” advertising campaigns. Before that there was:

I taught Allen Ginsberg how to write a poem
I was on the road when Kerouac lived at home
I write faster and harder than Cassady can
And like Popeye I live in a garbage can
Dook, Dook, Dook of the beatnicks,
Dook of the beatniks, yeah!

I dig Diz, and Bird, and Monk,
And I dig wine, and weed, and junk.
I got an orgone box, a blue guitar;
Not a beret, cause I’m not a cliché, hey!
Dook, Dook, Dook of the beatnicks
Dook of the beatniks, yeah!

I don’t like Ike, I don’t watch TV,
I ain’t no goddam bourgeoisie!
I ain’t no chump, I ain’t no fool,
I’m the total [??] of solid cool, you betcha!
D-O-O-K, Dook of the beatniks!
Da-da-da-da, Dook of the Beatniks!
Hey-oo, hey-oo, heyoo, heyoo
Ai-yi-ai!

I love to slip, I love to slide
From Old North Beach to the Lower East Side
I live for kicks, I live for fun,
I fought the fifties and I won!
D-O-O-K, Dook of the beatniks!
Dook of the beatniks, yea—aaaah! –Peter Stampfel

“Ending the Draft” or “Ending the Vietnam War” was not exactly the spirit of 1968. Not even if you add ending racism and misogyny and colonialism do you complete an explanation. As if moving 10 divisions from Vietnam to Egypt would have made us happy.

At least some of us wanted to end all wars. And a smaller portion of those understood very well what it would take.

Revolution is not reform.

LFC: “Indeed, it stands to reason that the spitting-on-returned-soldiers-from-Vietnam theme could not have achieved the cultural permanence it did had it not been rooted, in however small a way, in fact.”

Actually, it doesn’t.

Or, if you prefer, “I’ve squandered.”

“Objecting to rhetorical flourish and romanticizing, and cynicism are different things. If you are really against wars, it’s useful to understand what’s going on. But if you’re just shooting off your mouth to feel good, that’s fine too, please ignore my comments.”

Stop being a jerk Mao.

On race and US FP, Paul Kramer has written a good bit, here’s some links to his work

http://paulkrameronline.com/Kramer/writing.html

@Anderson 162

So Hitler destroys radar infrastructure and lands soldiers in Dover.

Does the queen say: ok, let’s have a reasonable armistice ?
Does Churchill say: Ok, we were joking, now we are going to help you against Stalin?

The only two big nations that actually acted this way were France and, on the other side, Italy, and anyway both had shadow governments and “partisans”.

Not so fast everyone.

I believe that Turse first published his charges in the Nation. Unless I am mistaken, that was the same journal that published Chomsky and Herman’s apologetics for Pol Pot and denial of the stories of genocide coming out of Cambodia. Talk about a “credibility gap”!

Yes, you can make this stuff up.

And if you make it up, people will come. Take one of the big lies about the Vietnam War, namely that Lyndon Johnson fabricated the second Gulf of Tonkin attack in order to stampede the Tonkin Gulf Resolution through Congress. (Predictably the charge was made by Noam Chomsky). There is no evidence that Johnson did not believe that the attack had happened when he introduced the Resolution into Congress.

I hope we will wait until critics have had a chance to scrutinize Turse’s charges before we jump to conclusions. But I guess these comments have already dashed ny hopes.

@174: The reviewer does NOT subscribe to the proposition that it was a “fair fight,” rather, he writes that, “[t]o fully appreciate the Vietnam War, we must first clear up any misperception that it was some kind of fair fight between Vietnamese, with the US helping one side and the Soviet Union and China helping the other. Turse’s book does so in many ways….” To disabuse folks of such a silly belief is a goal the reviewer wants us to endorse, so perhaps one shouldn’t comment on the qualifications of a reviewer until one is capable of comprehending what is clearly transparent in meaning.

J. Lowndes @93: very interesting re that photo.

Also meant to thank rf @140 for mentioning the Walcott poem, which I hadn’t seen — somewhat more relevant to the Kenya reference than Vietnam though(?).

LFC, yeah I was thinking more in the context of Kenya than Vietnam..though if I was to get melodramatic I guess it could be extended..
enjoyed your comments above vis a vis the peace movement, btw

I’m sorry.

Oh, OK. Sorry about that.

@173
oops!

I think Dr. Hilarius above is on target.

In lieu of my bibliography (one CT commenter did request it), I’ll proffer some titles directly related to some comments on this thread (yes, I know, the Lewis book was already mentioned).

• Foley, Michael S. Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance during the Vietnam War. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
• Franklin, H. Bruce. M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
• Franklin, H. Bruce. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.
• Hunt, Andrew E. The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. New York: New York University Press, 1999.
• Lembcke, Jerry. The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: New York University Press, 1998.
• Lewis, Penny. Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and Memory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013.
• Moser, Richard R. The New Winter Soldiers: GI and Veteran Dissent During the Vietnam Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.
• Nicosia, Gerald. Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans’ Movement. New York: Crown Publishers, 2001.
• Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (John Duffett, ed.). Against the Crime of Silence. New York: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation/Flanders, NJ: O’Hare Books, 1968.
• Russell, Bertrand. War Crimes in Vietnam. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
• Small, Melvin. Covering Dissent: The Media and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
• Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The Winter Soldier Investigation: An Inquiry into American War Crimes. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1972.

I started teaching courses on the Vietnam War in the mid-1970s, at the University of Michigan. It was already ancient history to many of the undergraduates, who remembered it having been on TV, but had little idea of who was fighting whom and for what. Instead of beginning (as I first tried) “Here is what you think about Vietnam, and why it is wrong, or at least needs modification . . .” I found it was better to begin “Once upon a time there was a place called Vietnam . . .”

And that was before the poisonous lies of The Deer Hunter and other revisionist crap (Rambo II? Chuck Norris??) hit the screens. Those who opposed the war on principle – and there were those, along with the opportunists any movement collects – had about 48 hours after the end of the war to rejoice before the revisionists started fighting back, arguing simultaneously that (1) we never lost, only quit due to hippies, liberals in Congress, and the moral weakening of America and (2) we were Right in the first place, and still are, and always will be, because AMERICA!!

So there’s really not much new here, and I don’t have a whole lot of interest in fighting (intellectual) battles now more than a third of a century old. Although if anyone still believes the USA was blameless in Tonkin Gulf (and Noam Chomsky was wrong) . . . well, they’re probably beyond hope of redemption anyway.

In discussions like this, responses to past horrors often swing between despair and calls for criminal prosecution of individuals. In most instances, it would seem far more productive to call for a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_reconciliation_commission&quot; truth and reconciliation commission “tasked with discovering and revealing past wrongdoing by a government (or, depending on the circumstances, non-state actors also), in the hope of resolving conflict left over from the past.”

The advantages of the truth and reconciliation process begin with the problems of legal prosecution. For good reasons, prosecutions engage a cumbersome apparatus of law. Criminal prosecutions apply stringent rules of evidence and must attempt to establish facts (and sometimes motivations) beyond reasonable doubt. Prosecution of specific government figures is therefore hard to initiate and apt to fail, with failure to convict then widely trumpeted as proof of innocence. The very idea of prosecuting specific individuals for crimes invites the few-bad-apples excuse, drawing attention away from systemic problems.

Truth and reconciliation commissions are better suited to changing opinions and the political climate. The process itself is less cumbersome and divisive, requiring no up-front set of specific, debatable, legalistic charges and avoiding the cross-currents stirred by a focus on individuals and punishment. Results can be obtained more quickly, shades of grey can be respected, and the results amount to a narrative rather than a sentence. Unlike calls for individual prosecutions, calls for a truth and reconciliation commission can begin with a sense of a broad and profound problem, and the calls themselves raise the right kinds of questions.

Truth and reconciliation processes, both in their inception and substance, focus on what actually matters to politics, culture, and historical memory. And as for their political feasibility, factions that feel themselves wrongly accused are more likely to call for truth than for prosecuting their leaders.

Is there any net benefit to focusing on prosecutable crimes?

So what if some soldiers were spat on, it sure beats being napalmed and raped. It’s a bit ridiculous to lament the evils of war, but to tiptoe around those who fight them and give them victim status.

I don’t think they’re all evil or anything like that, I also find the mafia guys in the Sopranos quite likeable, but ultimately they fight the wars and when push comes to shove they will kill, and will kill civilians.

And avoiding the draft wasn’t such a big deal if you were serious about it, you just had to accept some unpleasant consequences. JFK was onto something when he, of all people, said:

“War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today.”

I’ve been reading Frank Snepp’s “Decent Interval” and Gloria Emerson’s (RIP) “Winners & Losers.” Hmmmm, Turse was born in the year Saigon fell? Maybe I’ll read him too. Gloria’s chapter on Experts is good, chilling. And how is Gen. Westmoreland these days?

As horrifying as all this is, the example of the UK isn’t one to hold up – think of all the empire-worship propagated by UK Prime Ministers and politicians since 2000, and the way that the UK government has had to be dragged kicking and screaming to recognise atrocities committed as a result of empire-building activities.

The US is still (more or less) at the height of its’ imperial moment; the awful recognition of what was done in empire’s name comes well after the peak and the fact of empire continues to pollute and derange domestic politics for a long time afterwards.

Above all, though, there are only two rules of empire; firstly, empires always fall and secondly, for every ten years you spend building an empire, your descendents spend a hundred regretting it…

@ajay
I was going to object to that comment of R.Lurker’s too, but then decided, b.c there were so many things wrongs w it, not to bother. Given this thread’s main subject, it’s ironic (for lack of a better word) that one of the flaws of US strategy in Vietnam was the assumption that Ho Chi Minh would crumple if his industrial base (what there was of it) was targeted by intense bombing. Rostow to Rusk: “Ho has an industrial complex to protect, he is no longer a guerrilla fighter with nothing to lose.” (Memorandum quoted in Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War)

“Not the 1991 invasion of Iraq”

aerial bombing of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Gulf War

On the main topic, someone above recommended Harry Summers and Sorley and others as better than Turse. Depends on what you want, I suppose. Did those authors write much about the suffering America inflicted on Vietnamese civilians? I’d almost say that a good litmus test for a Vietnam War book would be whether the author mentions “Operation Speedy Express” or only writes about My Lai–if it only does the latter than there it’s taking the easy way out, focusing on something that could be portrayed as an aberration by one company. That’s not always a fair litmus test, because Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright Shining Lie” is quite good about the brutality of American tactics, but doesn’t mention “Speedy Express”. But it would have been a better book if it had. What is fascinating about the whole “Speedy Express” saga is not only the campaign itself, but the struggle Buckley had to get Newsweek to publish anything at all.

Turse, btw, isn’t the first to write about Speedy Express in a book about Vietnam–Phillip Knightley wrote about it in 1975, as did Chomsky a few years later, and even Hitchens mentions it in his Kissinger-bashing book. Guenter Lewy also mentions it in his apologetics for the war “America in Vietnam”.

AIUI one of the great lessons of the WWII bombing campaigns was that “morale bombing” (Harris’s preferred phrase) is a chimera – to disaffect the civilian population to the point of having an impact on the war effort you essentially have to flatten the place, go back a month later and flatten it again, and repeat. At which point what you’re doing is less about “morale” and more about the older approach of killing ’em all and letting God sort ’em out. So it would be surprising if contemporary warfare was all about eroding the enemy’s civilian support – actually achieving that by force of arms is awfully hard to do, except for some highly unusual cases where the enemy’s support is thin already (Grenada, parts of Iraq – but only parts, and there’s the rub).

The irony is that by the time of the big raids over Germany Britain had plenty of experience of “morale” bombing – in London and Coventry, among other places – and we knew that, in our case, morale hadn’t collapsed. Perhaps Bomber Command thought the Germans would think differently.

Now if you mean that the bombing in Desert Storm wasn’t intended to demolish Iraqi cities, that’s true. It was no longer acceptable to do that sort of thing, but more subtle means of inflicting great harm on a civilian population, , using sanctions and carefully targeted bombing of power plants, are still fairly easy to sell to many Westerners who like to think of themselves as civilized, but still want to put pressure on a regime this way. It requires some doublethink, but people are naturally good at that.

The bombing in the 91 war was intended to wreck much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, with the idea that it couldn’t be repaired under sanctions, thereby giving leverage over Saddam, who might face a rebellious immiserated population.

That isn’t true of most of the bombing (incidentally, that link is extremely short on sources, evidence etc). Furthermore, hitting things like electricity infrastructure and oil refineries had immediate, direct effects on the Iraqi military, which was the main target of the air and ground campaigns. A campaign whose main intention was to destroy civilian infrastructure would have looked very different from the actual Desert Storm target list.

207: Fallujah (both the Fallujahs) were 2004, not 2003, and neither were primarily waged in order to destroy infrastructure. Again, think about what an air force or army would do when given the mission “DESTROY civilian infrastructure in area of FALLUJAH in order to remove civilian support for insurgents”, and compare that with what they actually did.

Re: OP
see Stanley Cohen States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering
John Tirman The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars

211: ah, I see. Sorry for the nitpick, in that case.

As I recall, the bombing in Serbia was also targeted at civilian infrastructure – power plants, water treatment, etc. The goal was to destroy the societies capacity to function, without a large body count, both to hinder the military capacity to wage war and to break the people’s will.

No, the goal of the bombing wasn’t to destroy the ability of Serbian society to function. If you wanted to do that, your priority targets would be local government offices, schools, telephone exchanges, hospitals, bridges, utilities and supply routes. Essentially you’re trying to do what a nuclear weapon would do: “turn a functioning city into nothing but a sink for disaster relief”. That’s not what the NATO target set in 1999 looked like (it included some of those, but it had lots more things like tanks and military installations on it, which aren’t part of that list at all).

Using phrases like “break the people’s will” is a bit unhelpful because the essential function of any military action is to break someone’s will. A weapon is a tool for changing minds, remember? You don’t get the enemy out of your country by killing all of them. You get them out by making them decide to leave.

It’s also worth noting that in 1940 there was a very clear and obvious example of how bombing civilians could lead a government to surrender: the Netherlands. The Germans bombed Rotterdam badly (by 1940 standards) and threatened to bomb Utrecht if the Dutch didn’t surrender: they did so the next morning.

Given that example, it wasn’t entirely ludicrous to think that a much bigger bombing offensive against Germany might have a similar effect. Wrong, as it turned out, but not entirely ludicrous.

“(incidentally, that link is extremely short on sources, evidence etc)”

Yeah, probably because most of the military sources Barton Gellman interviewed didn’t want to go on record–I’m not sure what you’d expect. If the idea was to hurt the civilian population of Iraq (and btw, did you miss the entire sanctions debate of the 90’s, because this is when it started), and also to maintain plausible deniability, a smart Western government doesn’t come right out and announce it. I’m actually surprised he got at least one to say what he says–

“Pentagon officials declined two written requests for a review of the 28 electrical targets and explanations of their specific military relevance.

“People say, ‘You didn’t recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage,’ ” said the planning officer. “Well, what were we trying to do with [United Nations-approved economic] sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions.”

Col. John A. Warden III, deputy director of strategy, doctrine and plans for the Air Force, agreed that one purpose of destroying Iraq’s electrical grid was that “you have imposed a long-term problem on the leadership that it has to deal with sometime.”

“Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity,” he said. “He needs help. If there are political objectives that the U.N. coalition has, it can say, ‘Saddam, when you agree to do these things, we will allow people to come in and fix your electricity.’ It gives us long-term leverage.”

Said another Air Force planner: “Big picture, we wanted to let people know, ‘Get rid of this guy and we’ll be more than happy to assist in rebuilding. We’re not going to tolerate Saddam Hussein or his regime. Fix that, and we’ll fix your electricity.’ ”

Lt. Gen. Charles A. Horner, who had overall command of the air campaign, said in an interview that a “side benefit” was the psychological effect on ordinary Iraqi citizens of having their lights go out.”

My link didn’t work. I’ll just paste the web address here–

http://www.hrw.org/reports/1991/gulfwar/

AF@219: little different than that of broad economic sanctions

For an eye-opening essay on the lethality of economic sanctions, and their dismayingly large scope in contemporary American foreign policy, see Andrew Cockburn in the latest Harper’s.

“to encourage the formation/action of opposition to Hussein in Iraq. In this respect, though, the pressure sought was little different than that of broad economic sanctions”

It set the stage for them–the idea was, as Warden said in the Gellman piece, that Saddam couldn’t fix the electricity without outside help. The air war “accelerated the effect of the sanctions” as an unnamed planner put it.

Ajay, are you sure about the timing of the Dutch surrender relative to the Rotterdam raid? I thought that the Dutch govt agreed to (most) German terms while the raid was in the air, with the result that some of it was ordered back. That doesn’t invalidate the wider point about the perceived effectiveness, among British elite circles, of unopposed terror bombing: but I think that it remained more theoretical than practical at that point.

For a sharply critical reading of Turse’s book, by an actual Vietnam veteran who has written extensively about the war, see: http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/apocryphal-now_716295.html?page=1
As with every war, Vietnam had a messy and sometimes horrifying underside. But an historian owes readers a balanced account — the facts can speak for themselves.

@227: But very different from the idea that it was a deliberate slaughter, no? The end of that piece seems very reasonable to me:

“War brings out the best and the worst in us. Former Marine commandant Peter Pace told a Citadel audience in 2006 that, as a young platoon leader in Vietnam, he called in an artillery strike on a village from which a sniper had killed a young Marine—the first man he lost. Pace’s platoon sergeant “didn’t say a word, he just looked at me.” The look was sufficient. Pace called off the strike and ordered a sweep through the village, finding only women and children. Pace’s story, as the literature of Vietnam memoirs makes clear, could be told many times over. Any fair and balanced account of American war crimes demands attention to those stories, too.

Nick Turse, however, has no interest in such stories. His unmeasured effort at exposé—relentless, indiscriminate, and cocksure in its judgment that American military policy made the killing of innocents inevitable—exacts a high moral price.

If it was all policy, the war as an “atrocity–producing situation,” as Robert Jay Lifton famously put it, then we lose the ability to make moral distinctions, to recognize both evil and honor. If we’re all guilty, then no one is guilty. If every atrocity story is to be believed, then it is all noise—and we lose the ability to mourn for that woman in Quang Tri, shot in the back by a young Marine who did not know the difference between a legal and an illegal order. “

I thought that on the whole Gary Kulik’s review of Turse’s book was balanced. He certainly shows that Turse was always willing to believe the worst (of American soldiers), even when the evidence was slim or contradictory; on the other hand he’s quite clear in asserting that atrocities did in fact occur.

I think he stumbles over this, however: There were around 300 allegations of war crimes brought by Army prosecutors in 77 cases. Each case typically contained multiple allegations. The Army convened Article 32 hearings, roughly the equivalent of civilian grand jury hearings, for each case, a measure of the seriousness with which the Army took the allegations. (You won’t learn that from either Nelson or Turse, though, who have no interest in the process of military justice.)

The fact that the Army convened hearings on cases brought by Army prosecutors proves next to nothing about the “seriousness with which” they took the allegations. These allegations, perhaps, but the thrust of the criticism, from long before Turse’s time, is that evidence for most atrocities never rose to the level of proof that prosecutors would require; in fact many went totally unreported. One comparison might be to rape; no one but the most legalistic observer would conclude that the incidence of rape can be measured by the number of cases brought to prosecution, ignoring those not reported or those reported which the prosecutors decided – for better or worse reasons – not to take to court.

Having said that, the burden is on Turse to show that unreported/unprosecuted atrocities were so extensive as to be systemic, and Kulik’s review suggests that Turse only achieved this by taking every allegation at face value, which is hardly a scholarly approach. The “Winter Soldiers” who released much of this evidence while the war was going on had at least the excuses that (1) they made no claim to be scholars and (2) they were trying to stop something still ongoing. Some exaggerations might be forgiven. Forty years after the fact, by a scholar: not so much.

AF@231: Plenty of criticism has been written about the strategy and tactics used, and about the costs of those mistakes.

There is something between “mistakes” and Nazi-like deliberate massacres. We might call it “criminal negligence and indifference to civilian casualties on so massive a scale that it shocks the moral sense and makes utter nonsense of perennial American claims to ‘exceptionalism’ in respect of human rights and international law, and should compel, even at this late date, a national reckoning.”

Marc, Ralph, Andrew: would you accept this formulation?

There is something between “mistakes” and Nazi-like deliberate massacres. We might call it “criminal negligence and indifference to civilian casualties on so massive a scale that it shocks the moral sense and makes utter nonsense of perennial American claims to ‘exceptionalism’ in respect of human rights and international law, and should compel, even at this late date, a national reckoning.”

But this, of course, is why we’ll never have a proper conversation about Vietnam, or about anything else, really. It’s cognitive dissonance on a national scale: we’re good people who don’t do bad things, so a) bad things were not done, b) if they were done, they weren’t done by us, and c) if we did do them (and we didn’t!) it was absolutely necessary because the alternative was a million times worse and you’d better trust the steely-eyed lantern-jawed generals if you know what’s good for you. Just like, in America, it’s worse to be accused of racism than to actually do racist things, so it is worse to be accused of committing systematic war crimes than it is to actually have committed them.

To: Henry

If you wish to learn about the Vietnam War I suggest you visit the “Vietnam Center and Archive”, at Texas Tech University. The Vietnam Center and Archive collects and preserves the documentary records of the Vietnam War. The Center is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive collection of information on the Vietnam War.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu

Can you answer the questions and challenge the facts?

1. Question: Did you participate in an atrocity, witness an atrocity, or did you hear rumor of an atrocity?

2. Question: Can you PROVIDE DETAILS (location, date, persons involved, crime, etc.)?

3. Fact: Turse starts “cooking the facts” on page 10 and continues “cooking the facts” throughout the entire book.

ENEMY TROOP STRENGTH IS JUST ONE EXAMPLE.

– On page 10, Turse says ” By 1968 the US Forces and their allies in the South were opposed by an estimated 50,000 North Vietnamese troops plus 60,000 PLAF soldiers, while the revolutionaries’ paramilitary forces- part time local guerrillas- likely reached into the hundreds of thousands.” (25)

– CIA Document: “CIA now believed the figure to be somewhere between 450,000 and 600,000. Helms added that, of those totals, CIA accepted some 90,000 to 140,000 enemy irregulars, whereas MACV and CINCPAC still maintained that such forces could not and should not be quantified.” (185) Helms, Memorandum for Walt W. Rostow, Special Assistant to the President, “Estimates of Enemy Strength in South Vietnam” 2 May 1968, (S/Compartmented). CIA files, Job No. 78T02095R, O/DDI, Box 1, Folder 2.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/cia-and-the-vietnam-policymakers-three-episodes-1962-1968/epis3.html

– Also, infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail exceeded 20,000 North Vietnamese per month.

– Also, North Vietnam had a significant military presence in NEUTRAL Laos and Cambodia.

SUGGEST YOU LOOK AT REVIEWS UNDER “THE WAR BEHIND ME: VIETNAM VETERANS CONFRONT THE TRUTH ABOUT U.S. WAR CRIMES” BE DEBORAH NELSON, PUBLICATION DATE: OCTOBER 28, 2008.

http://www.amazon.com/The-War-Behind-Me-Veterans/dp/B002NPCTIG

One reviewer had this to say:
“You can read original documents created by the Army CID investigators who interviewed the Winter Soldier participants here:

http://www.wintersoldier.com/staticpages/index.php?page=WSI_CID

When Nelson and Nick Turse published the basis for this book in the LA Times, I was left to wonder, “Where’s the rest of the story?” They had access to the same CID documents I did, yet they totally forgot to mention that 11 of the Army Winter Soldier witnesses repudiated their testimony when questioned by CID and virtually all the rest stonewalled the investigators, some in outrageously arraogant, if not ridiculously comical, terms. And, the Army only investigated about half of the witnesses from the Winter Soldier Investigation in the first place, because half of them made no substantive allegations of criminal wrong doing at all, just badmouthed the military and the country, and several could not be found at all – which does not prove that those several were frauds, but does make you wonder.

Only one of the Winter Soldier stories investiagted by the Army CID in the 1970s proved to be based in fact – that of Jamie Henry. So, when reading this book, keep in mind what you read with your own eyes in these CID documents.

What happened at the Winter Soldier Investigation had nothing to do with whatever happened, or did not happen, in Vietnam. It was a stand alone propaganda exercise, having little to do with facts or the truth.

To extrapolate, from the several hundred crimes committed over a dozen years during a conflict involving three million U.S. soldiers during a viscious unconventional war, to this blanket libel against the United States, is a crime in itself against both history and our country. But propagandists don’t have scruples about the truth. Their pre-set agenda determines all.”

D Johnson@233
Your remark re A Problem from Hell is interesting. I haven’t read it, but iirc it received not only glowing reviews but at least one major prize (Pulitzer? something like that).

To: dr ngo

YOUR QUESTION: 20,000 NVA a month down the Ho Chi Minh Trail?! I don’t know where this figure comes from – no citation or link is provided – but it’s more than twice as high as the highest estimate I’ve seen.

The information is available from MANY SOURCES including these links:
1. Mike Wallace discusses “The Uncounted Enemy a Vietnam Deception http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOaexO6EaZU
2. THE UNCOUNTED ENEMY: A VIETNAM DECEPTION (cBS & Gen Wm Westmoreland libel lawsuit)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1220895/posts

Please let me know if you need additional reference material.

LFC–My problem (and the problem of many other people) with “A Problem From Hell” is the selective choice of topics. She spends a volume agonizing over America’s sins of omission, when we didn’t intervene to stop genocide, when the obvious problem goes virtually unmentioned–what about the cases where the US actively aided mass murder and genocide or even, arguably, engaged in it? (Some would argue the sanctions on Iraq were genocidal.) If I were wondering why the US didn’t stop genocide in various places, it seems to me relevant that the US was allies with Suharto when he killed 500,000 or so alleged commies (Power, btw, says that lobbying by Stalin is the reason why the mass killing of political opponents isn’t part of the definition of genocide) or later when Indonesia invaded East Timor and caused the death of between 100-200,000 out of 700,000 people. Or when we supported Rios Montt in Guatemala (his mass killing has been called genocide) or the death squads in El Salvador or Savimbi’s guerillas in Angola. Etc…

I’m cynical enough to think that Power pulled her punches because she wanted a career in government–if she’d written a truly honest book on her topic she’d have no better chance of that then, say, Noam Chomsky or Joy Gordon. I think she was pals with Richard Holbrooke, who was the one responsible for policy on East Timor during Carter’s term. She has about three sentences on the subject of East Timor in her book.

To: dr ngo

The “Freerepublic” essay is a somewhat more suspect source, in my eyes, certainly to judge by its general tenor and partisan comments. But I assume they’re correctly reporting the “20,000″ figure, in passing.

If you have a more direct source, I’d appreciate it. Thanks.

SEE “The Communist Road To Power In Vietnam”, Published 1981, William J Duiker page 275

Donald J @242: she pulled her punches

I wonder. I may be naive, but I generally find deliberate misrepresentation, even by omission, a little hard to credit. I suspect that people like Power simply have large, ideologically convenient blind spots, a result of long and intensive socialization in the international affairs community. The US makes mistakes, even tragic mistakes, but they are always, as Anthony Lewis wrote, “blundering efforts to do good.” The US has good intentions; it doesn’t commit or abet crimes, much less genocide — this is axiomatic. If you believe otherwise, that’s bound to come out in the course of your apprenticeship — to suppress powerful convictions indefinitely is very hard — and you simply don’t get to Harvard or publish a well-received book. You lack “balance,” “judgment,” “maturity.” I’d say Powers, like her mentor Michael Ignatieff, is a perfectly sincere hack, an attractive and articulate mediocrity.

geo – Well I think there’s a whole range of phenomena that, in different cases, underly VSPism. Simplifying so as to arrange various phenomena along a one-dimensional spectrum, maybe we have sociopathic, self-serving hackery with eyes fully open at one end, then rationalised lying/noble cause corruption, then bullshit, then ‘self-deception’ about the subject matter, and finally full true-believer dogmatism of the kind you describe.

There are, I suppose, strengths and weaknesses to all of these: taking just two stylised extremes, the fully self-aware dissembler may have a tough job preventing the mask from slipping, while the dogmatist is going to encounter some problems in functioning properly given that various true beliefs and valid evidence has to be rejected in order to protect the axiomatic core. I guess the really effective operators are somewhere in the middle, and perhaps to some extent adept at doublethink and compartmentalisation.

Well put, Tim.

But this is supposed to be a person who is otherwise rational – not making use of doublethink to finesse contradictions – so an incorrigible delusion like that is going to have effects which propagate out through their web of beliefs, and sooner or later that’s likely to give rise to actually damaging mistakes.

That’s probably too abstract a description of what I’m getting at. When I have time I might try and come up with some worked examples. Actually one, still fairly programmatic, illustration would concern ‘why do they hate us?’ bafflement. If one is committed to the proposition that the US is a force for good, so that all countervailing evidence has to be assumed to be misleading, then you are going to come up with some fairly barking mad explanations for hostility to the US, while discounting the obvious one. And such a fundamental misunderstanding of the world is surely going to give rise to some fairly serious mistakes.

Concrete examples are generally less clear cut, but perhaps Joe McCarthy could be an example. He may have started out by adopting Red Scare rhetoric for fairly opportunistic electoral reasons (with, broadly speaking, the support of his party while in opposition), but he then seems at least to some extent to have got carried away and unlike HUAC which was aimed at left wing opinion-formers and organisers, started attacking the Army and State dept for harbouring spies, even after his own party got control of them. He didn;t seem to understand that no-one in power really wanted anything like that to be aired in public, because the war was basically phoney. So he got squelched. In fact USians might even owe him a debt of gratitude for inadvertently bringing an end to HUACism (or ‘Hooverism’) – though I think by then its work was largely done anyway, so maybe not.

“Regarding Samantha Power and A Problem from Hell, my recollection of the book isn’t that she whitewashes US foreign policy – she almost certainly notes that the US has supported regimes, such as Saddam Hussein, who committed atrocities.”

Afaicr she does does take a strong stance against the US in a lot of ways, but the argument against her is that she emphasises *when the US didnt do anything to prevent human rights abuses* rather than when they actively supported/facilitated abuses, to fit her own political preferences (ie greater intervention, even unilaterally)
I’m personally more sceptical than her on that agenda but don’t know if I’d be so critical of her perspective, particularly considering it was born out of witnessing what happened in the Balkans first hand, and the fact that shes genuinely committed to trying to prevent human rights abuses

“It’s true that most of those who served in Vietnam weren’t in the infantry – but some 10% of them were. In any event, the accounts Turse uses as his basis for sweeping claims about US conduct aren’t limited to the infantry.”

The point others have made–in fact, I think Turse himself has made–is that the bulk of the civilian casualties were caused by bombs and artillery shells.

I might look up Ewell’s version of events, but are you suggesting I take his version of Speedy Express seriously? Or just mentioning it as a point of information?

“. Even within that article, though, some important contradictions are in evidence. He quotes approvingly from one veteran that there were no restrictions on the use of artillery near villages, but then quotes another veteran a few paragraphs later who states that he clashed with Ewell because he thought some artillery fire violated the restrictions in place on the use of artillery near villages.”

I’m not sure that’s a contradiction. There might have been (possibly theoretical) restrictions on the use of artillery in Vietnam that were lifted by Ewell. In fact, that’s how it sounds. Anyway, the main point is that this operation seems to have been conducted with exceptional callousness even by Vietnam standards, and yet AFAIK there hasn’t been a flood of veterans coming forward to detail the results of the callous policies they witnessed. I wouldn’t expect there would be, but this is why I take some of the criticism of Turse with a grain of salt. The most important issue here is whether there were massive war crimes committed in Vietnam by the US, not the fraction of US soldiers in Vietnam (or Russian soldiers in Afghanistan) who personally did something wrong. Americans all understand this when discussing the Russian war in Afghanistan, but not with Vietnam.

This is how a right-leaning intellectual interprets Power:

“Samantha Power, in her excellent book Genocide: A Problem from Hell, reached a conclusion she didn’t want to reach*, as the best analytical books so often do. After showing that no genocidal government in the twentieth century had ever been stopped except by armed intervention, she reluctantly concluded that the armed intervention usually had to be supplied by the United States.”.

So there you have it. In the middle of a review that faults Karl Kraus (!) for failing to understand the nature of totalitarianism.

http://www.clivejames.com/karl-kraus

*Yeah I’m sure she was just appalled to reach that conclusion. Her moral anguish in supporting American aggression must have nearly torn her apart.

Sorry but I never saw that, in Vietnam for 2 years(69-70) what we always did, and I am quite sure that most other units did also, was simply make up numbers. I have friends who fought during Tet and a couple who fought in Hue. They said that while civs got killed in free fire zones-everyone who was there was already declared an enemy by high command-the fact is that we simply made up numbers. We called in CAS on empty areas, then said they had killed x number of enemy when no one had been there.
It was a game, we all played it. But to claim we were all like the Mei Lai group of idiots is quite simply wrong.
So, are we going to return to the days when we were all baby killers?
BTW, the ROE were quite clear. While I was there we could not fire at anyone until we were fired upon
I read this book and quite frankly it made me sick. I am however going to pass it on to guys that were also there who can then respond to this far better than I.

-Donald, remember Turse’s assertion though is that “many, if not most” of those killed were caused by helicopter attacks at night. That assertion remains misleading at best, even using Lewy’s claim that “about half” of the claimed enemy killed were caused by air strikes.

-I disagree with Lewy’s interpretation of the division’s after-action report explanation for the low weapons-recovered:enemy-killed ratio. That a significant number of claimed enemy killed occurred at night, or as a result of helicopter and artillery strikes, does not imply that those killed were not combatants; it implies that recovery of weapons was impractical or impossible.

However, I don’t disagree entirely with Lewy’s interpretation of one part of that explanation, concerning unarmed VC personnel. It’s a reasonable one.

-Lewy goes on to note on page 143 that “another reason for the spectacular enemy casualty reports” was that “[u]nable to satisfy Ewell’s expectations, commanders apparently falsified body counts,” citing an Air Force report as support.

-So in sum Lewy provides three reasons for the disproportionate weapons recovered/ekia numbers: (1) the use of night attacks, air strikes, and artillery in a populated area, leading to an actually elevated number of civilian casualties, (2) incentive on the part of commanders to claim a fatality as an enemy killed rather than a civilian killed, (3) incentive on the part of commanders to lie about the numbers killed. Lewy misses a fourth reason, (4) that the tactics used more frequently by Ewell may also have more frequently rendered weapons recovery impossible or impractical.

But that’s quite different from Turse’s claims, which imply that the 9th ID deliberately slaughtered civilians as a matter of routine to inflate their body count.

A military operation that causes an excessive number of civilian casualties relative to the military significance of the operational objectives may violate the principle of proportionality; that’s a tougher, more complex case to make. Turse’s account, by contrast, is simple in accusing the 9th ID of routinely murdering civilians to achieve certain metrics, and seems to me an extreme version of events by comparison.