Those Who Have Borne the Battle (31 page)

As clumsy as the body count was as a metric, it was a metric. In the last years of the war, the military objectives were less clear. Fighting, securing, and then withdrawing was not a military tactic easily understood. Places such as Hamburger Hill in the A Shau Valley, taken with heavy army casualties and then abandoned, became symbolic of this type of costly warfare.

Vietnam veteran and award-winning writer Tim O'Brien wrote in his novel
Going After Cacciato
, “They did not know even the simple things: a sense of victory, or satisfaction, or necessary sacrifice. They did not know the feeling of taking a place and keeping it, securing a village and then raising the flag and calling it a victory. No sense of order or momentum.
No front, no rear, no trenches laid out in neat parallels. No Patton rushing for the Rhine, no beachheads to storm and win and hold for the duration. They did not have targets. They did not have a cause.”
⁷¹

 

 

As the war wound down, there clearly was a breakdown in purpose and in discipline in some of the units. By 1970 there were even reports of some units refusing orders to enter an area, sending in false reports on activities, or even avoiding engagements with the enemy. Fragging incidents—American troops assaulting and killing their officers and NCOs—did increase. There were some eight hundred reported incidents between 1969 and 1972.
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The last years of the Vietnam War helped to establish a public image of a war that was cruel and brutal and of its front-line soldiers and marines who were unhappy, rebellious, and undisciplined. It was the image of My Lai, of drugs and racial tensions, and of veterans who led in a public criticism of their own conduct and that of others in Vietnam. Acknowledging the power and the tenacity of this image, confirming individual elements of it, does not confirm its accuracy as a generalization.

On December 5, 1969,
Life
had a long story on My Lai with a number of horrible photographs of Vietnamese civilians, including large numbers of women and children, who were killed by soldiers from the Americal Division at Son My village in March 1968. Participants and others with firsthand knowledge spoke about the massacre, and some provided photos. It was clear that a major tragedy had occurred, with estimates of the number of noncombatants that American soldiers had killed ranging from nearly four hundred to more than six hundred. Americans were appalled and sickened as they learned of the instances of rape and murder and of shooting defenseless civilians, including infants.

It was a tragedy for the Vietnamese civilians and for all civilized society. It was, I believe, also a tragedy for American justice and for American culture that the blame for this became a generalized blame. Clearly, there had been provocations, and there was anger and fear within Charlie Company when they arrived at the place that the army called “Pinkville.” Provocations are not justifications, and fear and anger are not bases for
any actions by professional military. Members of Charlie Company who participated in this massacre and their leadership, and the command structure that encouraged or covered up their conduct, needed to be held accountable. The only person finally found guilty was Lieutenant William Calley. It was by all accounts a guilt well placed. But not only were all others given a pass, but Calley himself finally was considered by the public to be a victim, a casualty of a military culture and strategy that determined his conduct. Calley's lawyer, George Latimer, after the conviction of the young officer by a military court, said on
NBC Nightly News
: “This was the product of a system, a system that dug [Calley] up by the roots, took him out of his home community, put him into the army, taught him to kill, sent him overseas to kill, gave him mechanical weapons to kill, sent him over there and ordered him to kill. . . . Society and the country itself has to take a large measure of blame for My Lai.”
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Few looked for individual accountability. Antiwar US senator Mark Hatfield believed that My Lai provided evidence “of what the war is doing to all of us, not just the soldiers.” George McGovern said that it was troubling that one young officer “should bear the burden for the tragedy of this war.” President Nixon agreed and freed Lieutenant Calley from prison and placed him under house arrest. The mother of one of the men in Charlie Company, Paul Meadlo, lamented, “I gave them a good boy and they made him a murderer.” Poll results revealed that 80 percent of Americans disagreed with the conviction of Lieutenant Calley.
⁷⁴

The My Lai massacre fitted readily into the growing narrative of the war in Vietnam and the conduct of the forces there—and the shared accountability for whatever individuals did on behalf of the United States. The problem with the narrative of the war in the late 1960s and 1970s was that individual actions became generalizable. All “good boys” were at least potentially murderers if they were tainted by Vietnam service. As one pamphlet distributed by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War pleaded, “Help us to end the war before they turn your son into a butcher or a corpse.”
⁷⁵

Allegations of “baby killers” and of shared “moral outrage” and of troubling “crimes against humanity,” because they were seldom aimed at specific soldiers, ended up including all of them almost by definition. The
“Winter Soldier” hearings in Detroit in January 1971, organized by Mark Lane and a coalition of antiwar groups, provided a forum for testimony about the war by veterans. As one participant testified, “We have personally witnessed and participated in the daily flagrant violations of the Geneva Accords.” The hearings were filled with stories of unsettling atrocities, generally described by young men who confessed to their complicity in them. In 1971 Gallup reported that 50 percent of Americans believed the conduct of the army troops at My Lai was a “common occurrence” in the war. And 81 percent agreed that the military was hiding other events such as My Lai.
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There is no evidence of any other incident of the scale and scope of My Lai. There is ample evidence of other horrible tragedies. A recent critical study of the army in Vietnam summarized, “Every combat platoon leader in Vietnam had the opportunity to kill non-combatants or to lead his men into actions that would have produced high civilian body counts. Yet there is nothing in the military records or in journalists'records that indicates any atrocious behavior on the scale of that in Son My Village.” Before the My Lai massacre became public, the military reviewed 50 allegations brought against US soldiers for criminal treatment of civilians; after My Lai there were 191 allegations. None of these involved an officer leading “his men into a frenzy of killing noncombatants.”
⁷⁷

Deborah Nelson's 2008 study, based on a review of the army's own investigations, available under the Freedom of Information Act, described 239 investigations that followed allegations of murder, rape, or mutilation of bodies. It is a thoroughly unpleasant summary. Nelson points out that there were many other allegations that did not lead to formal investigations. Of course, even these allegations would not have included all of the incidents. Nelson's summary was that of 191 suspects for “violent crimes against persons,” 52 were court-martialed and, of these, 23 convicted.
⁷⁸

The “Tiger Force” unit that was uncovered by
Toledo Blade
reporters in 2003 described one outfit whose conduct allegedly pushed and often exceeded all normal standards of warfare. Torture, killing, and mutilation were tactical means this combat team used to coerce and to silence communist opponents. Michael Sallah and Mitch Weiss received the Pulitzer Prize for their investigation and reporting.
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My Lai may have been a
tragic consequence of some of the emotions and assumptions of Vietnam. Tragically, it was by no means the only instance of intentional murder of civilians. Importantly, it was in no way an example of the conduct of most troops who served in that theater.

The image of My Lai as an example of American conduct in Vietnam was reinforced in the early 1970s by a perception of American troops in Vietnam engaging in widespread use of drugs. Media reports suggested that drug use was common in the field, and the servicemen were often depicted as victims of the war that had lost its support and its purpose. Clearly, in Vietnam—as well as in the United States—drug use was higher than it had been at any recent time, and its practice was reported widely during these years. Many of the men sent to Vietnam had tried drugs in civilian life, and these substances were available widely and cheaply in Vietnam, with a smoked heroin called scag easily procured. Nonetheless, the evidence is that the use of drugs there was not as widespread as the popular image suggested.

In 1971, perhaps at the height of drug use in Vietnam, some 29.9 percent of servicemen leaving Vietnam admitted to having used marijuana, 17.9 percent had used speed or other stimulants or barbiturates, and 11.7 percent had used narcotic drugs. Only a small percentage reported heavy use—nearly half of those who used marijuana used it fewer than ten times in a year.
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As late as 1969, drug use among troops in Vietnam had not caught up with drug use among American troops in Europe. That year it did.

There is little evidence of troops taking any drugs before they went into combat situations. As one remembered, “As far as I know and as far as everyone else I ever talk to about it, there was essentially no drug use whatsoever in the bush. Everybody knew what the dangers were and nobody was stupid enough to incapacitate themselves.” If they were this irresponsible, the troops managed to self-police this due to their mutual dependence in combat situations. After a mission ended was a different circumstance, especially when there were casualties. “Sometimes we'd just sit under a tree, smoke dope, and cry.”
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There was no finding that related My Lai to drug use among the troops who engaged in that action. Alcohol use, on the other hand, was
very heavy in Vietnam among the troops. It was readily available at and around base camps and in combat zones. One study estimated that as many as 73 percent of enlisted men and 30 percent of officers were problem or heavy drinkers. And this created significant tension and fights.

During the last three or four years of the war, Vietnam also became an arena for racial tension. The positive racial relations of the early war years could not survive the loss of unit cohesion and veteran leadership; it could not escape the racial conflicts that marked the United States in the late 1960s and that draftees and recruits brought with them to the field. The juxtaposition of Black Power symbols and Confederate flag displays made many of the base camps particularly tense. Clearly, some of the fragging incidents were racially influenced.

Colin Powell recalled that when he went back to Vietnam in 1968, there was no time or place for tensions in the field. However, once away from combat, “bases like Duc Pho were increasingly divided by the same racial polarization that had begun to plague America during the sixties. The base contained dozens of new men waiting to be sent out to the field and short-timers waiting to go home. For both groups, the unifying force of a shared mission and shared danger did not exist. Racial friction took its place. Young blacks, particularly draftees, saw the war, not surprisingly, as even less their fight than the whites did.”
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The origins of the Vietnam War were rooted in complicated tensions in international politics and deeply emotional conflicts in American domestic politics. The politics never stopped. Those who fought in this extremely difficult war found themselves often unwilling characters playing unreal roles in the drama and tension of American politics.

My Lai became a rallying cry for those who wished to protect the military from its critics on the Left, and it became a prime example for those who insisted the war was turning all Americans into accomplices in murder. Tales of drug use in Vietnam supported those who wanted to instill discipline and order back into American society, and it encouraged the argument of those who insisted that Vietnam was destroying a generation of young Americans. The burden of Vietnam that veterans of that war carried was heavy enough without the additional weight these images imposed. Most servicemen came quietly home, but they found it
hard to escape the dominant public perceptions about the conduct of their war.

I recently watched again several popular Hollywood films about Vietnam:
Apocalypse Now
,
Platoon
,
Full Metal Jacket
,
The Deer Hunter
,
Taxi Driver
. These are powerful movies that share an image of many troops in Vietnam being scared, stoned, and morally indifferent. They stand in sharp contrast with John Wayne's 1968 heroic movie
The Green Berets
. In the films of the 1970s the veterans returning home were sometimes scarred—or unbalanced in their anger. They had seen and experienced something that set them apart. As Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) says in
Apocalypse Now
, “You have to have men who are moral . . . and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling . . . without passion . . . without judgment . . . without judgment! Because it's judgment that defeats us.”

These movies all appeared after the war ended. They were feature films, fiction, and not documentary studies of the war. They reflected rather than shaped some of the existing popular images of the Vietnam experience. Movie viewers of the time thought the images were accurate—61 percent of the respondents to a 1979 Harris survey said that
Apocalypse Now
provided “a fairly accurate picture of what the war in Vietnam was like.” These Hollywood images had been influenced by events during the war and by coverage of them—by disclosure of the horror of My Lai, the photo of Vietnamese general Loan executing a Vietcong officer, the small naked Vietnamese girl, face filled with fear and terror, fleeing with others from napalm. In this context it seemed confirming rather than jolting to hear Air Cavalry commander Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) exclaim in
Apocalypse Now
, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”