HISTORY: War Without Fronts: The USA in VietnamBy Bernd Greiner Bodley Head, 518pp. £20
IN APRIL 2000, during the 25th anniversary celebrations of the end of the Vietnam War, I traveled around Vietnam interviewing people about their memories of the conflict between US and communist forces. Deep in the Mekong Delta I came across a former Viet Cong nurse, called Dung, who managed a little provision shop. Her round face became heavy with sadness as she recalled the “American War” as it is known in Vietnam. “I think often, especially at this time, of the people who died,” she said. “My older brother’s seven children were killed, all but one. My mother was beaten by American soldiers who broke her ribs . . . I have a lot of hatred for Americans, I will hate them till I die. I cannot forget the sight of people dying and being raped by American soldiers.”
There are countless people in Vietnam with similar harrowing stories of atrocities committed by US troops. The most notorious of these occurred on March 16th, 1968, when 500 peasants in the villages of My Lai and My Khe, mostly women, children and old men, were massacred by US soldiers of C-Company, First Battalion, Twentieth Infantry, Eleventh Brigade, American Division.
Their war crime was hushed up until revealed in the US media 18 months later by reporter Seymour Hersh. The Army set up the Peers Commission to clarify the internal cover-up, and historians can be grateful that its chairman, General William R Peers, extended his inquiries into the type and extent of excessive violence in Vietnam, the history, training and battle experience of the units involved, and the instructions of the officer corps. Secretary of Defence Melvin Laird simultaneously created the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group to record all allegations of atrocities and subsequent investigations and trials to respond to media questions.
Both inquiries provided overwhelming evidence that My Lai was not an isolated event and that it was common practice for American soldiers to burn villages and shoot the inhabitants. Much of the material was classified and a lot of the publicised evidence was denied or disputed at the time. General Westmoreland commissioned a study with instructions to show that never in history “had a war been fought with more concern for civilians”.
Fearful that My Lai would put his whole Vietnam policy on trial, President Richard Nixon told his advisor Bob Haldeman to use “dirty tricks” to discredit witnesses. Many books have been written revealing what went on in Vietnam but interest in following up the claims of war crimes waned over the years. According to Prof Bernd Greiner, who is director of the research programme on the theory and history of violence at the Hamburg Institute of Social Research, historians largely ignored the voluminous archives, made available in 1994, containing the testimony of thousands of enlisted men and officers to the Peers and Laird inquiries.
Having trawled through the boxes of material himself, he has compiled a series of case studies to show authoritatively (there are 140 pages of file references) that crimes by US forces against Vietnamese civilians were the rule rather than the exception. They occurred over the entire course of the war and the military command failed to stop them. Lieutenant William Calley, the platoon leader at My Lai, claimed that on patrol preceding the murders his superior officer, Colonel Frank Barker, kept demanding a body count, and Calley obliged by slaughtering the inhabitants of My Lai and claiming the dead as Viet Cong. “The old men, the women, the children – the babies were all VC or would be in about three years,” he testified. Several platoon members joined in the orgy of rape and killing but not everyone shared their blood lust. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, observing from the air, landed his air craft to rescue a group of 16 women, children and old men who were just about to be shot. His reward was to be smeared as a liar at a House Armed Services Committee chaired by Congressman F Edward Hébert of Louisiana.
Calley was pardoned by Nixon to assuage popular anger over what the war was doing to GIs. A recording firm in Tennessee received half a million orders for a single by country singer Tony Nelson, which went: “My name is William Calley, I’m a soldier of the land/ I’ve tried to do my duty and gain the upper hand./ But they made me out a villain, they have stamped me with a brand/ As we go marching on.” The mother of platoon member Paul Meadlo, who shot women and babies at My Lai, said, “I raised him up to be a good boy . . . and they made a murderer out of him.”
Greiner shows that the ultimate responsibility for the Vietnam War atrocities went right to the top in the US administration, where policies were devised to break the will of the Vietnamese through terror. President Lyndon Johnson directed General Creighton Abrams, US Supreme Commander in Vietnam, to “let the enemy feel the weight of everything you’ve got”. Nixon confided to Haldeman that he wanted the North Vietnamese to think he was a madman capable of anything.
The author also uses the mass of declassified sources to explore how fear, intolerable conditions, indiscipline, contempt for locals – and the belief they could get away with it – made American boys into criminal killers. This comprehensive indictment of the Vietnam War was published first in Germany in 2007. One wonders how long it will be before a similar book can be written about the dehumanising effect on a new generation of American soldiers of the Iraq war, also fought against a guerrilla enemy in a foreign land.
Conor O'Clery was Asia Correspondent for The Irish Timesfrom 1996-2001