TPM on Nation article: "New revelations of U.S. coverup of Civilian Killings in Vietnam"

[beachmom]

I will post a few excerpts without comment:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/turse

A My Lai a Month

By Nick Turse

November 13, 2008


By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important revolutionary strongholds during the Vietnam War. Despite its military significance, State Department officials were "deeply concerned" about introducing a large number of US troops into the densely populated area, fearing that it would be impossible to limit civilian carnage.

Yet in late 1968, as peace talks in Paris got under way in earnest, US officials launched a "land rush" to pacify huge swaths of the Delta and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May 1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267 American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the division captured only 748 weapons.

...

An inkling that something terrible had taken place in the Mekong Delta appeared in a most unlikely source--a formerly confidential September 1969 Senior Officer Debriefing Report by none other than the commander of the Ninth Division, then Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, who came to be known inside the military as "the Butcher of the Delta" because of his single-minded fixation on body count. In the report, copies of which were sent to Westmoreland's office and to other high-ranking officials, Ewell candidly noted that while the Ninth Division stressed the "discriminate and selective use of firepower," in some areas of the Delta "where this emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible, the countryside looked like the Verdun battlefields," the site of a notoriously bloody World War I battle.

That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front sharpened the picture. It reported that between December 1, 1968, and April 1, 1969, primarily in the Delta provinces of Kien Hoa and Dinh Tuong, the "9th Division launched an 'express raid'" and "mopped up many areas, slaughtering 3,000 people, mostly old folks, women and children, and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of fields and orchards." But like most NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by US officials. A United Press International report that same month, in which US advisers charged the division with having driven up the body count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery, was also largely ignored.

Then, in May 1970, the Concerned Sergeant's ten-page letter arrived in Westmoreland's office, charging that he had "information about things as bad as My Lay" and laying out, in detail, the human cost of Operation Speedy Express.

...

In that first letter, the sergeant wrote not of a handful of massacres but of official command policies that had led to the killings of thousands of innocents:

Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by pushing the body the count so hard, we were "told" to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay, and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy....

In case you don't think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year....

The snipers would get 5 or 10 a day, and I think all 4 batalions had sniper teams. Thats 20 a day or at least 600 each month. Again, if I am 10% right then the snipers were a My Lay every other month.

More at the link.