http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0438/turse.php From the National Archives: New proof of Vietnam War atrocities
Swift Boat Swill
by Nicholas Turse
September 21st, 2004 11:40 AM
John Kerry is being pilloried for his shocking Senate testimony 34 years ago that many U.S. soldiers—not just a few "rogues"—were committing atrocities against the Vietnamese. U.S. military records that were classified for decades but are now available in the National Archives back Kerry up and put the lie to his critics. Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, and said this:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.
The archives have hundreds of files of official U.S. military investigations of such atrocities committed by American soldiers. I've pored over those records—which were classified for decades—for my Columbia University dissertation and, now, this Voice article. The exact number of investigated allegations of atrocities is unknown, as is the number of such barbaric incidents that occurred but weren't investigated. Some war crimes, like the Tiger Force atrocities exposed last year by The Toledo Blade, have only come to light decades later. Others never will. But there are plentiful records to back up Kerry's 1971 testimony point by point. Following (with the names removed or abbreviated) are examples, directly from the archives:
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http://www.accuracy.org/press_releases/PR082404.htm Did the U.S. Commit War Crimes in Vietnam?
DAVID MacMICHAEL, dmacm@adelphia.net
A disabled veteran of ten years active Marine Corps service in Korea, MacMichael was a Defense Department consultant from 1965 to 1969 in Southeast Asia. During most of that period he was attached to the office of the Special Assistant for Counter-Insurgency at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. In that capacity he reviewed classified reports from the U.S. mission in Vietnam. MacMichael said today: "Some Vietnam veterans are outraged that presidential candidate Kerry in his 1971 Senate testimony spoke of atrocities reportedly committed by U.S. military forces in Vietnam. There is more than a little substance to the charge. The Toledo Blade won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize by revealing that in 1967 the 101st Airborne Division created a 'Tiger Force' ordered to kill all Vietnamese males in Quang Ngi Province. According to official U.S. Army records unearthed by the Blade reporters, Tiger Force killed many hundreds of Vietnamese and, yes, soldiers of that force did proudly ware necklaces of the ears they cut from their victims. The Army did investigate and identified the perpetrators of the crimes but chose not to prosecute them." www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/section?Category=SRTI... >
MacMichael added: "In 1968, Colonel George S. Patton III -- son of the World War II general -- then commanding a brigade in Vietnam, sent out Christmas cards showing dead Vietnamese stacked up Abu Ghraib-fashion with the message 'Peace on Earth' and signed by him and his wife.... And then, of course, there was My Lai. There, C Company of the 11th Brigade of the Americal Division in 1967 entered that village and methodically executed between 347 and 504 of its unarmed inhabitants, men, women and children. At least 100 of them were lined up in an irrigation ditch by Lt. William Calley and shot to death by his GIs. The slaughter only ended when the shocked crew of an Army helicopter gunship landed and forced C Company at gunpoint to cease and desist. My Lai was far from an exceptional case. In fact, it might never have come to light had not a troubled Americal Division mortarman, Tom Glen, who had not been present, heard about it and, after rotating out of Vietnam to the U.S., wrote to the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland. His letter only mentioned My Lai as 'part of the abusive pattern that had become routine in the Americal Division.'"
DAVID CLINE, daoudc@aol.com, www.veteransforpeace.org, www.vvaw.org, www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.html
Currently national president of Veterans for Peace and a longtime coordinator of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Cline is a disabled combat veteran. He said today: "After 30 years, some people are trying to whitewash what happened in Vietnam."
S. BRIAN WILLSON, bw@brianwillson.com, www.brianwillson.com
Willson is a former Air Force captain who served in Vietnam. He said today: "As head of a 40-man USAF combat security unit in Vietnam, I was separately tasked to assess 'success' of targeted bombings. I discovered egregious war crimes -- daylight terror bombings of undefended fishing and rice farming villages resulting in mass murders and maimings of hundreds of residents. Subsequently, in conversations with members of the 9th Infantry Division, I heard bravado about slaughter of 11,000 'enemy' from ground operations, though the vast majority proved to be unarmed civilians."
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http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Tiger_force_120803.htm Tiger Force (Vietnam) Uncovered and Exposed
Witness to Vietnam atrocities never knew about investigation
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 10, 2003
Talk of the Town, p.41
<snip>
At the height of the rampage, the Tiger Force platoon was operating a few dozen miles from a Quang Ngai hamlet that the Army called My Lai 4, and where, in March, 1968, more than five hundred Vietnamese civilians were massacred by a task force whose platoon leaders included William L. Calley, Jr. The Blade quoted a law professor as stating that My Lai might have been avoided if the senior officer corps had acted on complaints of military brutality in Quang Ngai that had been filed by at least two soldiers. The Blade further reported that in the early nineteen-seventies, after Calley's conviction for the murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians, in March, 1971, and while the Army was publicly insisting that My Lai was an isolated incident, senior officials in the White House and the Pentagon were provided with periodic reports on the Tiger Force inquiry.
In fact, while the Army was conducting its internal investigation of My Lai, it discovered that a second large massacre had taken place on the same day in the same area, in a hamlet known as My Khe 4, but Lieutenant General William R. Peers, who had served for more than two years in Vietnam and who led the investigation, publicly denied that there were any other incidents. "It was not brought out to me in the evidence," Peers told reporters at the close of the inquiry, and he was not challenged on that assertion, even though two Army officers who had been present at My Khe had already been charged with war crimes. Twenty years later, the Army declassified an April, 1970, memorandum to the General responding to an article I had written about My Lai. It noted that I did not appear to "possess any substantive information concerning the suppression or cover-up aspects of the incident," but that I was being aided in my reporting by someone with access to the official records. It concluded, "The need to terminate such assistance to Mr. Hersh becomes increasingly important when consideration is given to the use Mr. Hersh would make of any information he obtained concerning command reaction and efforts of suppression."
John Dean, the former White House counsel to President Nixon, acknowledged that he had received a series of reports from the Army on the status of pending war-crimes investigations, including My Lai, but that they gave no hint of the extent of the crimes. "It doesn't get to the top unless there's a problem," he told me last month. "I had no knowledge of My Lai"-that is, its full horror--"until it hit the press."
In war-crimes investigations, the disparity between the facts and the military's official versions of them has repeatedly been exposed, often with bruising consequences, by an independent press. The Blade's extraordinary investigation of Tiger Force, however, remains all but invisible. None of the four major television networks have picked it up (although CBS and NBC have been in touch with the Blade), and most major newspapers have either ignored the story or limited themselves to publishing an Associated Press summary. In a column published on the first day of the series, Ron Royhab, the Blade's executive editor, pointedly wrote that the decision to run the Vietnam stories now had "nothing to do" with the current military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he told me, "We can't have this kind of information and sit on it, because then we'd be a party to a coverup." There is, of course, a hesitancy in time of war--and, in particular, during an increasingly unpopular war against an entrenched guerrilla enemy, to publish stories that could be interpreted as undermining military morale. And news organizations instinctively debunk scoops nom their competitors, especially those in smaller markets. It may be that others in the media are planning to do their own Tiger Force investigations. Let's hope so. Terrible things always happen in war, and the responsibility of the press is to do exactly what the Blade has done-to find, verify, and publish the truth.
-Seymour M Hersh
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http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=51&ItemID=6217From Vietnam to Fallujah
. by Fran Schor September 13, 2004
The recent controversy surrounding the "Swift Boat Veterans" ad challenging John Kerry's Vietnam record and his later statements as a leader of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) have fallen into predictable partisan perspectives. Republicans and their media attack machine still insist that Kerry's medals are suspect and his VVAW activities were treasonous. Kerry and the Democrats, in turn, have found further documentary evidence and eye-witness accounts to support his version of the Vietnam incidents. As far as Kerry's 1971 testimony about US atrocities in Vietnam, Kerry has reiterated that he was just recounting reports from the Winter Soldier Investigations. In addition, he tried earlier to deflect criticism of his VVAW positions by claiming that some of his statements were overzealous and part of the heated rhetoric of the times. In effect, the Bush Administration and Republicans have tried to deny that atrocities took place while Kerry and the Democrats have tried to minimize or marginalize them.
For those who have studied the historical record of the US prosecution of the war in Southeast Asia, neither the Republicans nor Democrats have confronted the full measure of those atrocities and what their legacy is especially in the war on Iraq. While most studies of the war in Southeast Asia acknowledge that 4 times the tonnage of bombs was dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than that used by the US in all theaters of operation during World War II, only a few, such as James William Gibson's The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, analyze the full extent of such bombing. Not only were thousands of villages in Vietnam totally destroyed, but massive civilian deaths, numbering close to 3 million, resulted in large part from such indiscriminate bombing. Integral to the bombing strategy was the use of weapons that violated international law, such as napalm and anti-personnel fragmentation bombs. As a result of establishing free-fire zones where anything and everything could be attacked, including hospitals, US military operations led to the deliberate murder of mostly civilians.
While Rumsfeld and the Pentagon have touted the "clean" weapons used in Iraq, the fact is that aerial cluster bombs and free-fire zones have continued to be part of present day military operations. Villages throughout Iraq, from Hilla to Fallujah, have borne and are bearing US attacks that take a heavy civilian toll. Occasionally, criticisms of the type of ordnance used in Iraq found its way into the mainstream press, especially when left-over cluster bomblets looking like yellow food packages blow up in children's hands or depleted uranium weapons are dropped inadvertently on British soldiers. However, questions about the immorality of "shock and awe" bombing strategy have been buried deeper than any of the cluster bomblets.
In Vietnam, a primary ground war tactic was the "search and destroy" mission with its over-inflated body counts. As Christian Appy forcefully demonstrated in Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam, such tactics were guaranteed to produce atrocities. Any revealing personal account of the war in Vietnam, such as Ron Kovic's Born on the Fourth of July, underscores how those atrocities took their toll on civilians and US soldiers, like Kovic. Of course, certain high-profile atrocities, such as My Lai, achieved prominent media coverage (almost, however, a year after the incident.) Nonetheless, My Lai was seen either as an aberration and not part of murderous campaigns such as the Phoenix program with its thousands of assassinations or a result of a few bad apples, like a Lt. Calley, who nonetheless received minor punishment for his command of the massacre of hundreds of women and children. Moreover, as reported in Tom Engelhardt's The End of Victory Culture, "65% of Americans claimed not to be upset by the massacre" (224). Is it, therefore, not surprising that Noam Chomsky asserted during this period that the US had to undergo some sort of de- nazification in order to regain some moral sensitivity to what US war policy had produced in Vietnam
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