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14-Mar-2004 |
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Suddenly, nearly every war correspondent who had been in Vietnam had an atrocity story to tell. Time's correspondent Frank McCulloch had written a farewell assessment of Vietnam after covering the war for four years. Now, McCulloch recalled having seen men pushed from aeroplanes, shot with their hands tied behind their backs, and drowned because they refused to answer questions. He recalled having seen Americal Division troops unleash a Doberman pinscher dog on an old man suspected of being a Vietcong and watch it tear the man from head to belly. Time's correspondent Burt Pines related the case of a sergeant on patrol who shouted, "A three day pass for whoever gets that gook." After a moment's hesitation, most of the patrol opened up with their M-16s, ripping an old man, as well as the child he was carrying, into pieces."
Phillip Knightley The First Casualty, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1975, p. 393. |
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With no moral restraints against "wasting" Vietnamese, in fact with incentives to do so, and with the understandable desire, above all, to stay alive, the American soldier in Vietnam ended up committing acts that the nation believed impossible. "Some people think that the Japanese committed atrocities, that the Germans committed atrocities, that the Russians committed atrocities, but that the Americans don't commit atrocities," Colonel Robert Rheault, a former commander of the United States Special Forces in Vietnam, said just after My Lai. "Well, this just isn't so. American troops are as capable as any other of committing atrocities." My Lai removed inhibitions on talking about the nature of the Vietnam War. Ex-soldiers appeared on television to confess to having shot children. Others, in hearings conducted by the National Committee for a Citizens Commission of Inquiry on United States War Crimes in Vietnam, told of rape, the machine-gunning of women and children in fields, torture, and murder. Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Herbert, the most-decorated Americal soldier of the Korean War, a battalion commander of the elite 173rd Airborne Brigade, claimed he had reported seeing a United States Lieutenant allow a South Vietnamese soldier to slit a woman's throat while her child clung screaming to her leg. Colonel Herbert alleged that when he made his report, his superiors told him to mind his own business. Phillip Knightley The First Casualty, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1975, p. 394. |
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But, before My Lai, anyone seeking evidence of the nature of the Vietnam War need only have consulted official records. The writer Norman Poirier used the files of the judge-advocate-general of the navy, in Washington, to compile a story of how a squad of nine Marines gang-raped a young Vietnamese mother at Xuan Ngoc on the night of September 23, 1966, and gunned down her entire family � herself, her husband, her two children, and her sister. When the Marines returned in the morning to make the carnage look like an engagement with the Vietcong, they found that one of the children, a five-year-old girl, was still alive, and so one of the Marines stood over the child "and with his M14 rifle bashed its brains in." They were exposed by the recovery of the mother, who had been left for dead, were arrested and tried, and six of them were convicted. Poirier's account of the incident appeared in Esquire in August 1969 � three months before the story of My Lai broke. Despite the fact that Esquire sent proofs to the major American newspapers, to promote the article, it created hardly a ripple of interest. Daniel Lang, in his book Casualties of War, which was based on court files, tells of a patrol of five United States soldiers, operating in the Central Highlands, who abducted a young Vietnamese girl. Four of them raped her, and then ripped her belly open and blew her head off. The fifth soldier reported the incident, and proceedings were initiated against the others, who, after some reluctance on the part of the army, were brought to trial, then retried, and sentenced to rather light terms of imprisonment. Lang's book was reviewed in Newsweek in the very issue that was devoted to the My Lai story. The reviewer wrote: "The brutal killing of a Vietnamese civilian ... should not of itself surprise us ... after all, no one seriously informed about the war in Vietnam believes that U.S. body counts have not included a number of civilians all along." Phillip Knightley The First Casualty, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1975, p. 395. |
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Philip Jones Griffiths, the British photo-journalist, accompanied a unit of the Americal Division on a mission in Quang Ngai in September 1967. The Americans approached a fortified village called Red Mountain, not far from Mo Duc, and lost two men in a grenade exchange. Several armed Vietcong were killed, the village occupied, and about fifteen women and children rounded up and herded together. The Americans withdrew, and the captain called in an artillery strike. As Jones Griffiths remembers: "I said to the captain, 'Hey, what about those civilians? They'll be killed.' The captain looked straight at me and said, 'What civilians?'" If one asks Jones Griffiths why he did not write about this incident � he had photographed the women and children huddled together, just before they were killed by the artillery strike � he replies: "If I had gone back to Saigon and into one of the agencies and had said, 'I've got a story about Americans killing Vietnamese civilians,' they would have said, 'So what's new?' It was horrible, but certainly not exceptional, and it just wasn't news." Neil Sheehan of the New York Times, a fine political reporter and military analyst, defended the correspondents' attitude in his newspaper in 1971. "I had never read the laws governing the conduct of war, although I had watched the war for three years in Vietnam and had written about it for five.... The Army Field Manual says that it is illegal to attack hospitals. We routinely bombed and shelled them. The destruction of Vietcong and North Vietnamese army hospitals in the South Vietnamese countryside was announced at the daily press briefings, the Five o'Clock Follies, by American military spokesmen in Saigon.... Looking back, one realises that the war crimes issue was always present." Sheehan described the ravaging of five fishing hamlets on the coast of Quang Ngai by United States destroyers and bombers, which killed, he estimated, as many as 600 Vietnamese civilians. "Making peasants pay so dearly for the presence of guerrillas in their hamlets, regardless of whether they sympathised with the Vietcong, seemed unnecessarily brutal and politically counter-productive to me. When I wrote my story, however, it did not occur to me that I had discovered a possible war crime." Phillip Knightley The First Casualty, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York and London, 1975, p. 396. |