http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081201/turse
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.
In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story of the 1968 My Lai
massacre, during which US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians
in Quang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta. Some months later, in
May 1970, a self-described "grunt" who participated in Speedy Express
wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army chief
of staff, saying that the Ninth Division's atrocities amounted to "a
My Lay each month for over a year." In his 1976 memoir A Soldier
Reports, Westmoreland insisted, "The Army investigated every case [of
possible war crimes], no matter who made the allegation," and claimed
that "none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and
horror of My Lai." Yet he personally took action to quash an
investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the
soldier's letter.
I uncovered that letter and two others, each unsigned or signed only
"Concerned Sergeant," in the National Archives in 2002, in a
collection of files about the sergeant's case that had been
declassified but forgotten, launching what became a years-long
investigation. Records show that his allegations--of helicopter
gunships mowing down noncombatants, of airstrikes on villages, of
farmers gunned down in their fields while commanders pressed
relentlessly for high body counts--were a source of high-level
concern. A review of the letter by a Pentagon expert found his claims
to be extremely plausible, and military officials tentatively
identified the letter writer as George Lewis, a Purple Heart
recipient who served with the Ninth Division in the Delta from June
1968 through May 1969. Yet there is no record that investigators ever
contacted him. Now, through my own investigation--using material from
four major collections of archival and personal papers, including
confidential letters, accounts of secret Pentagon briefings,
unpublished interviews with Vietnamese survivors and military
officials conducted in the 1970s by Newsweek reporters, as well as
fresh interviews with Ninth Division officers and enlisted
personnel--I have been able to corroborate the sergeant's horrific
claims. The investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian
slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at
the Army's highest levels. The killings were no accident or
aberration. They were instead the result of command policies that
turned wide swaths of the Mekong Delta into "free-fire zones" in a
relentless effort to achieve a high body count. While the carnage in
the Delta did not begin or end with Speedy Express, the operation
provides a harsh new snapshot of the abject slaughter that typified
US actions during the Vietnam War.
The Concerned Sergeant
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 [alone] were a My Lay every other month.
In this letter, and two more sent the following year to other
high-ranking generals, the sergeant reported that artilery,
airstrikes and helicopter gunships had wreaked havoc on populated
areas. All it would take, he said, were a few shots from a village or
a nearby tree line and troops would "always call for artilery or
gunships or airstrikes." "Lots of times," he wrote, "it would get
called for even if we didn't get shot at. And then when [we would]
get in the village there would be women and kids crying and sometimes
hurt or dead." The attacks were excused, he said, because the areas
were deemed free-fire zones.
The sergeant wrote that the unit's policy was to shoot not only
guerrilla fighters (whom US troops called Vietcong or VC) but anyone
who ran. This was the "Number one killer" of unarmed civilians, he
wrote, explaining that helicopters "would hover over a guy in the
fields till he got scared and run and they'd zap him" and that the
Ninth Division's snipers gunned down farmers from long range to
increase the body count. He reported that it was common to detain
unarmed civilians and force them to walk in front of a unit's point
man in order to trip enemy booby traps. "None [of] us wanted to get
blown away," he wrote, "but it wasn't right to use...civilians to set
the mines off." He also explained the pitifully low weapons ratio:
compare them [body count records] with the number of weapons we got.
Not the cashays [caches], or the weapons we found after a big fight
with the hard cores, but a dead VC with a weapon. The General just
had to know about the wrong killings over the weapons. If we reported
weapons we had to turn them in, so we would say that the weapons was
destroyed by bullets or dropped in a canal or pad[d]y. In the dry
season, before the moonsons, there was places where lots of the
canals was dry and all the pad[dies] were. The General must have
known this was made up.
According to the Concerned Sergeant, these killings all took place
for one reason: "the General in charge and all the commanders, riding
us all the time to get a big body count." He noted, "Nobody ever gave
direct orders to 'shoot civilians' that I know of, but the results
didn't show any different than if...they had ordered it. The
Vietnamese were dead, victims of the body count pressure and nobody
cared enough to try to stop it."
--
About Nick Turse
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military
Invades Our Everyday Lives and a forthcoming history of US war crimes
in Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves (both Metropolitan).
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