The goal of American strategy in Vietnam was to kill the Viet Cong in such large numbers that they could no longer be replaced. An author-veteran of the Vietnam conflict wrote: "General Westmoreland’s strategy of attrition also had an important effect on our behavior. Our mission was not to win terrain or seize positions, but simply to kill: to kill Communists and kill as many of them as possible. Stack ‘em up like cordwood. Victory was a high body count, defeat a low kill ratio, war a matter of arithmetic. The pressure on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense, and they in turn communicated it to their troops . . . It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and a predilection for taking it." General Westmoreland’s war of attrition was referred to as the "meatgrinder" in the Pentagon. Given the environment of Vietnam, this often pitted the US armed forces against the Vietnamese civilians.
1LT Calley, along with every other officer, quickly grasped "the protocol of body count culture." When asked how he arrived at a body count, 1LT Calley replied: "You just make an estimate off the top of your head. There is no way to really figure out exact body count . . . As long as it was high, that was all they wanted . . . I generally knew that if I lost a troop, I’d better come back with a body count of ten, say I shot at least ten of the enemy."
Although members of the armed forces were instructed on the Law of Land Warfare, virtually no one received instruction on unlawful or illegal orders, or on when not to obey orders. The instruction on the Hague and Geneva Conventions was minimal, and was about one hour in length. Every soldier received such instruction stateside as part of basic/advanced training. This was supplemented in Vietnam through the inclusion of the more important provisions of the Geneva Conventions in the ROEs, distributed by MACV in pocket-sized cards, which the Peers Commission ruled as "nothing short of ludicrous."
Son Thang: In 1998, for example, Marine Corps veteran Gary D. Solis published the book Son Thang: An American War Crime describing the court-martial of four US Marines for the apparently unprovoked killing 16 women and children on the night of February 19, 1970 in a hamlet about 20 miles south of Danang. The four Marines testified that they were under orders by their patrol leader to shoot the villagers. A young Oliver North appeared as a character witness and helped acquit the leader of all charges, but three were convicted.posted by y2karl at 9:37 PM on August 31, 2004
Tiger Force: The Toledo Blade won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a series published in October, 2003 reporting that atrocities were committed by an elite US Army "Tiger Force" unit that the Blade said killed unarmed civilians and children during a seven-month rampage in 1967. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed - their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings," the Blade reported. "Investigators concluded that 18 soldiers committed war crimes ranging from murder and assault to dereliction of duty. But no one was charged."
"Hundreds" of others: In December 2003 The New York Times quoted Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University who has been studying government archives, as saying the records are filled with accounts of atrocities similar to those described by the Toledo Blade series. "I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported," Turse was quoted as saying. "I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn't stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That's the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds."
"Exact Same Stories": Keith Nolan, author of 10 published books on Vietnam, says he's heard many veterans describe atrocities just like those Kerry recounted from the Winter Soldier event. Nolan told FactCheck.org that since 1978 he's interviewed roughly 1,000 veterans in depth for his books, and spoken to thousands of others. "I have heard the exact same stories dozens if not hundreds of times over," he said. "Wars produce atrocities. Frustrating guerrilla wars produce a particularly horrific number of atrocities. That some individual soldiers and certain units responded with excessive brutality in Vietnam shouldn't really surprise anyone."
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Elite unit savaged civilians in Vietnam
Ex-G.I.'s tell of Vietnam brutality
"Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground
bunkers," The Blade said. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed - their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings."
In 1971, the newspaper said, the army began a criminal investigation that lasted four and a half years, "the longest-known war-crime investigation of the Vietnam conflict." Ultimately, the investigators forwarded conclusions that 18 men might face charges, but no courts-martial were brought.
In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.
But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a "rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told to do and their superiors knew what they were doing.
"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Causey, then a medic with the unit, "is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."
Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for U.S. ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.
The tactics - particularly in "free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game - arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.
Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities. "I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported," Turse said by telephone. "I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn't stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That's the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds."
The Doctrine of Atrocity
The Toledo Blade articles, some of the best reporting on a Vietnam War crime during or since that war, tell only a small part of the story. As a historian writing a dissertation at Columbia University on U.S. war crimes and atrocities during the Vietnam War, I have been immersed in just the sort of archival materials the Blade used to flesh out one series of incidents. My research into U.S. military records has revealed that there were hundreds, if not thousands, of analogous violations of the laws of war.
The Blade said the Tiger Force's seven months of brutality was "the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War." Unfortunately, this was not true. According to formerly classified army documents, for instance, a military investigation disclosed that from at least March 1968 through October 1969, "Vietnamese [civilian] detainees were subjected to maltreatment" by no fewer than 21 separate interrogators of the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment. The inquiry found that, in addition to using "electrical shock by means of a field telephone," the MI personnel also struck detainees with their fists, sticks, and boards, and employed water torture. The documents indicate that no disciplinary actions were taken against anyone implicated in that long-running series of atrocities.
The declassified documents reveal that the Tiger Force atrocities--and the resulting lack of punishment, which amounted to tacit approvalppwere merely the tip of the iceberg. In September 1967, for instance, an American sergeant killed two Vietnamese children, executing one at point-blank range with a bullet to the head. Court-martialed in 1970, the sergeant pleaded guilty to, and was found guilty of, unpremeditated murder. According to military documents, "he was sentenced by the court to no punishment."...
The My Lai Massacre: A Case Study.
Consider the Army of the time as well:
''The Collapse of the Armed Forces,'' Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., Armed Forces Journal, June 1971
To understand the military consequences of what is happening to the U.S. Armed Forces, Vietnam is a good place to start. It is in Vietnam that the rearguard of a 500,000 man army, in its day and in the observation of the writer the best army the United States ever put into the field, is numbly extricating itself from a nightmare war the Armed Forces feel they had foisted on them by bright civilians who are now back on campus writing books about the folly of it all.
"They have set up separate companies," writes an American soldier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, "for men who refuse to go into the field. Is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don't even put on their uniforms any more... The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key...There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion."
Can all this really be typical or even truthful?
Unfortunately the answer is yes.
"Frag incidents" or just "fragging" is current soldier slang in Vietnam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs. With extreme reluctance (after a young West Pointer from Senator Mike Mansfield's Montana was fragged in his sleep) the Pentagon has now disclosed that fraggings in 1970(109) have more than doubled those of the previous year (96).
Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of certain units.
In one such division -- the morale plagued Americal -- fraggings during 1971 have been authoritatively estimated to be running about one a week.
CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam
Distorting History by Gareth Porter Transaction/SOCIETY, November-December 1983, pp.18-22 (pdf)
Much of this comes from Grover Furr's Vietnam War Page
Response to Swift Boat Vets claim that Kerry falsely accused himself and them of war crimes
For context, see--
From the Dick Cavett show in 1971:
Mr. Kerry: Did you serve in a free fire zone?
Mr. O'Neill: I certainly did serve in a free fire zone.
Mr. Kerry: [Reading] "Free fire zone, in which we kill anything that moves--man, woman or child. This practice suspends the distinction between combatant and non-combatant and contravenes Geneva Convention Article 3.1."
Mr. O'Neill: Where is that from, John?
Mr. Kerry: Geneva Conventions. You've heard about the Geneva Conventions...
posted by y2karl at 8:45 PM on August 30, 2004