http://monthlyreview.org/100501kuzmarov.php
Jeremy Kuzmarov
May 2010
Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam, translated by
Anne Wyburd and Victoria Fenn (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), 518 pages, $35.00, hardcover.
--
In late 1970, prompted by the debate over the exposure of U.S.
atrocities in the village of M Lai, an anonymous GI wrote a letter to
Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, claiming to have witnessed
hundreds of acts of terrorism by U.S. soldiers during Operation
Speedy Express. The campaign, intended to reclaim portions of the
Mekong Delta, purportedly killed over ten thousand enemy but seized
only seven hundred weapons.
"In the ambushes we killed anything or anybody and a lot of these
weren't VC. We used claymores on any people, on any boat that passed
even if sometimes it would be loaded with bananas and a couple of
women, or a papasan [male Vietnamese] with a hoe. No big thing, they
were VC as soon as we killed them." The GI went on to state that
there was random shooting from helicopters at anything that moved on
the ground and that the "snipers were the worst killers who were
responsible for at least 600 murders per month [during the
Operation]." The Battalion commander [Lieutenant Colonel David
Hackworth, among the most decorated soldiers in U.S. history], told
his company commander that "pretty soon there wouldn't be any rice
farmers left because his snipers would kill them all. And he laughed."
Such revelations provide a pivotal component of Bernd Greiner's
compelling new book, War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam, which
vividly details the genocidal nature of the warfare carried out by
the U.S. Army in Vietnam, based on evidence drawn from Army criminal
investigation division reports into alleged war crimes. These records
were declassified in 1994 but largely ignored by scholars until
recently. Greiner's findings and analysis are especially pertinent,
given the historical revisionism and cultural amnesia that have taken
root in U.S. society about the Vietnam War, paving the way for the
current military aggression in the Middle East.
Much of the voluminous literature on the Vietnam War focuses on the
decision-making process of policy elites, and not the real-life
consequences of U.S. policies on the ground. Most disturbingly,
several recent books and articles have sought to exonerate the U.S.
record, either by rehabilitating the U.S.-backed client Ngo Dinh
Diem, or by minimizing the scale of U.S.-backed atrocities.
Right-wing historian Mark Moyar has gone so far as to claim that U.S.
soldiers who testified about tortures and other abuses were mentally
unbalanced and hence not credible sources. Along with the recently
published work of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Nelson and
Nicholas Turse, Greiner's book provides a corrective to these
spurious notions.
After the M Lai massacre (in which troops under the command of
Lieutenant William Calley killed five hundred villagers) was publicly
exposed, the Nixon administration and military were increasingly
concerned about the public relations ramifications and conducted
secret investigations of alleged war crimes in Vietnam. The reports
provide an important window into the massive scope of the atrocities,
and confirm the charge of the antiwar movement and Winter Soldier
hearings that M Lai was the tip of the iceberg. The reports further
shed insight into the racist mentality of the U.S. military toward
the Vietnamese and into the obsession of senior ranking officers with
obtaining a high-body count, which underlay much of the barbarism.
The most disturbing facet of the book is its revelation of just how
callous the treatment of Vietnamese civilians was by the U.S.
military and of how human norms break down in war. Building on
previous literature on the topic, Greiner documents incident after
incident in which soldiers shot down peasants for sport, burned
villages in so-called free-fire zones, tortured prisoners, mutilated
the bodies of their victims, collected body parts, and carried out
the wide-scale rape of women, often as a means of punishing
collaborators with the enemy or to relieve the stresses of combat.
Amid the violent social environment of the warwhat psychiatrist
Robert Jay Lifton termed the "counterfeit social universe of the
Nam"many of the soldiers actually saw killing as a means of
affirming life by defying their own death. For others, killing was
undertaken for pleasure purposes or, like rape, to prove their
masculine prowess before their comrades. One GI commented: "The
trouble is nobody sees the Vietnamese as a people." Another said,
"they're all VC or at least helping themsame difference."
Besides the insights into the psychology of violence, Greiner
provides a devastating indictment of the military senior command,
which openly embraced a strategy of terrorizing the population into
submission. In routine instances, officers encouraged indiscriminate
slaughter by giving orderswhich soldiers dutifully obeyedto take no
prisoners and kill "anything that moves." When some brave GIs tried
to report incidents of abuse, they were often threatened with murder
by platoon members. Commanding officers often valued the most
bloodthirsty individuals who could amass a high body count total.
When one soldier was threatened with removal for war crimes in the
notorious Tiger Force death squad, his commanding officer reported to
headquarters: "We're in the middle of a war. And you want me to take
[him] out for killing gooks?" Another GI commented: "The Captain
liked you better if you were a rough son of a bitch who hated dinks."
Some of the worst atrocities during the conflict were committed under
the banner of the Phoenix program, which was designed to liquidate
the leadership of the National Liberation Front (the southern-based
resistance movement), and by South Koreans subcontracted by the U.S.
military. According to the RAND Corporation, after the Korean forces
arrived in 1965, they were reputed to "burn everything down, to
destroy everything, to seize everything and kill everyone." In one
incident in a village near M Lai, which appears to have been quite
typical, they forced thirty-six villagers to dig graves, and executed
them, one after another, by shooting them in the head. The Vietnamese
peasants were deathly afraid of the Koreans and refused to work in
their fields for fear of attacks.
At the end of the book, Greiner provides an interesting discussion of
public reaction to the M Lai massacre, which many in the United
States rationalized as justified under the conditions of war or as a
response to worse transgressions supposedly committed by the
"Vietcong." The Nixon administration became inundated with letters
from the so-called "Silent Majority" who saw Calley as a scapegoat
for broader administrative and bureaucratic failures and, in some
cases, as a hero unfairly punished for carrying out his patriotic
duty. For Greiner, these letters exemplify the enduring quality of
the "Victory Culture," or myth of American exceptionalism, which
posits that the United States only fights wars for defensive
purposes, and generally acts humanely unless responding to a savage
enemy. These letters, also, in turn, foreshadowed the rise of an
assortment of postwar myths claiming that the United States was
stabbed in the back by treasonous antiwar protestors and liberal
politicians who betrayed the troops in their unwillingness to go "all
out" to achieve victory. Memory of the war was, in the process,
distorted, as the culture sought to avenge the "Vietnam syndrome"
through renewed projections of force, in Grenada, Panama, and now
Afghanistan and Iraq.
On the whole, Greiner has written a powerful and well-documented
account of the dark side of U.S. military policy and conduct in
Vietnam. He sheds much insight into the barbarism inherent in the
waging of modern warfare, whose principal victims are almost always
civilians. War Without Fronts is especially relevant today, as the
U.S. Army continues to fight in blood-soaked conflicts where, sadly,
history is being repeated.
.
0 comments:
Post a Comment