The Vietnam War: An almost unspeakable truth
(America’s 50-year ‘cover-up’finally unravels) By Selvam Canagara
“’Terrorism’ is what we call the violence of the weak, and we condemn it; ‘war’ is what we call the violence of the strong, and we glorify it.” – Sydney J. Harris, in ‘Clearing the Ground (1986)’
It’s hard to believe that half a century later – besides 30,000 books on the subject and still counting – Americans were no-where near the truth about the Vietnam War until, that is, Nick Turse’s just published book: ‘Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam’.
“The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth,” wrote Jonathan Schell, a Fellow at the Nation Institute, in his review of the book for the TomDispatch website.“Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and first-hand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovered that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities, were in fact, the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country.”
Reviewer Schell claims that his “angle of vision” on the Vietnam War was “a highly particular one”and goes on to explain that in early August 1967 he arrived in South Vietnam to report for the New Yorker on the ‘air war.’ The phrase was a misnomer, The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no war of that description.
There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the US in Vietnam, ranging from the B-52, which he said, laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500 pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small that crowded the skies.”
As Schell flew overhead day after day, he watched long lines of houses burst into flames one after another as US troops moved through the area of operation. “No scorched earth policy had been announced but scorched earth was the result.” But still a huge piece was still missing from the puzzle. I was not able to witness most of the significant operations on the ground, first hand. I sought to interview some soldiers but they would not talk, though one did hint at dark deeds. . “You wouldn’t believe it, so I’m not going to tell you,” Schell quoted him as saying. “No-one is ever going to find out about some things, and after this war is over, and we’ve all gone home, no one is ever going to know.”
Nick Turse has put paid to that bombastic claim by one American soldier.
Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports that Turse draws from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing inescapable portrait of this war, writes Schell– “ a portrait that, as an American , you do not wish to see; that, having seen you wish to forget, but that you should not forget; and that the facts force you to see and remember and take account of when you ask yourself what the United States has done and been in the last half century, and what it is still doing and still is.” Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present the picture in statistical terms. He, never the less offers plenty of numbers – for instance the mind boggling estimates that during the war there were some two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the US flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties , and that it expended 30 billion pounds weight of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima Bombs.
What Turse actually describes is not a war but a heinous War Crime. The whole world has known for nearly half a century about the massacre of innocent, defenseless women, children and old people at My Lai village by US. Army Lt. William Calley and the men in his unit, and the whole world was made to believe it was the mere aberration of a few men which had outraged the US. Army and its top brass.
Not so, says Turse. In his carefully researched and documented book, Turse details how Calley’s conduct wasn’t an aberration at all. Instead it was part of an intentional policy of death and destruction that was orchestrated and condoned (-i.e., allowed) by the US. government.
The official government policy was that US soldiers were prohibited from targeting and killing civilians. That was, after all, what the Geneva Convention provided. Thus the official rules of engagement were that soldiers could kill only combatants.
It was all a charade.
As Turse tells it, to ensure that US troops had no crisis of conscience over the killings, the Pentagon indoctrinated them with the mindset that the Vietnamse people, in general were nothing but ‘gooks or ‘dinks’ – in short, subhuman people who didn’t place the same value on human life as American Christians do.
At his trial Calley claimed “I was ordered to go in there and destroy the enemy. That was my job that day. That was the mission I was given. I did not sit down and think in terms of men, women and children. They were all classified the same, and that’s the classification we dealt with over there, just as ‘the enemy.’ I felt then, and I still do that I acted as I was directed and I carried out the order that I was given and I do not feel wrong in doing so..” He served less than four years under house arrest before being pardoned by President Nixon.
The official US. Army policy was simply a way to protect the higher-ups whenever atrocities –such as My Lai – were discovered (by the Media), to enable them to take cover under the so-called “rules of engagement.” Reminds Schell: “Keep in mind, after all, that every US general officer is familiar with the case of Tomoyuki Yamashita , the World-War II Japanese general, who was prosecuted, convicted and hanged by the US government for failing to prevent war crimes by the men under his command.”
“But the reality” Turse says “was that the higher-ups were actually encouraging the mass killing of civilians. Their ‘rules of engagement aside’, they also judged their troops by how many people they killed. That’s where the infamous ‘body-count’came into play. Lower-grade officers knew that their promotions were based upon how many bodies their units produced, and enlisted men were rewarded with things like beer, or extra recreation time for bringing in more bodies. Needless to say, hardly anyone asked any questions when the bodies were brought in or reported.
It turned out that the troops, in order to please their superiors, were going into villages and killing defenceless people en masse, including unarmed women, children and elderly people. Even worse, there were many instances of rape and subsequent murder of young women.
Oftentimes, when the Viet Cong ambushed one or more US troopers or used snipers to kill them, the US response was to go ballistic and wreak its wrath on all the people in the nearest Vietnam village, on the sure notion that the villagers were undoubtedly supporting the Viet Cong anyway.
‘Genocide’was a term coined only in the 1940’s. The US Army – read Government – added another horror during the Vietman War,
‘Ecocide’,the subject of next week’s column. “Vietnam Syndrome”.
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