By Daniel Denvir
If you thought you knew all there was to know about the Vietnam War,
you were wrong. For example: ever heard of the “Mere Gook Rule,” a code
of conduct the US military came up with in order to make it easier for
soldiers to murder Vietnamese civilians without feeling too bad about
it? (“It’s only a mere gook you’re killing!”)
Well, few people knew about this bit of history either until author
Nick Turse discovered it in secret US military archives, which he used
as the primary sources for his new(ish) book, Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The
book is based on Turse’s discovery of theretofore secret internal
military investigations of US-perpetrated atrocities alongside extensive
reporting in Vietnam and among American veterans, and it reminds us
that the most significant fact about the Vietnam War is its most
overlooked: massive and devastating Vietnamese civilian suffering.
The debate over the US’s war in Vietnam continues to hang over this
country’s most recent and techno-futuristic imperial adventures. Nick’s
book makes for timely if extraordinarily painful reading, and I sat down
with him recently to talk about the ongoing relevance of Vietnam,
massacres, and secretly photocopying whole US government archives.
fight systemically waged against the civilian population. How does this
account that you documented differ from the Vietnam war as it’s
popularly remembered in the United States today?
Vietnam War, and most of them deal with the American experience. They
focus on American soldiers, on strategy, tactics, generals, or diplomacy
out of Washington and the war managers there. But I didn’t see any that
really attempted to tell the complete story of what I came to see as
the signature aspect of the conflict, which was Vietnamese civilian
suffering. Millions of Vietnamese were killed, wounded, or made refugees
by deliberate US policies, like the almost unrestrained bombing and
artillery shelling across wide swaths of the countryside. That is,
deliberate policies dictated at the highest levels of the US military.
But any discussion of Vietnamese civilian suffering is condensed down to
a couple pages or paragraphs on the massacre at My Lai.
me about the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the documents that you
found.
Vietnam veterans. I would go down to the National Archives and I was
trying to find hard data, military documents, to match up to the
self-reports that we had from veterans about their experiences during
the war. And on one of these trips I hit dead ends at every turn. After
two weeks I had nothing to show for my research. I went to an archivist I
worked with. I told him I couldn’t go back to my boss empty handed. He
thought about it for a second. He asked me, “do you think witnessing war
crimes could cause post-traumatic stress?’ I told him, “excellent
hypothesis” and asked what he had.
Within an hour I was going through this box, many boxes actually, these
reports of massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault, mutilation.
Records put together by this Vietnam War Crimes Working Group impaneled
in the Army Chief of Staff’s office in the wake of the My Lai massacre,
to track any war crimes cases or allegations that bubbled up from the
field, to make sure that the Army wasn’t caught flat footed again. And
whenever it could it tried to tamp down these allegations.
didn’t try and put guidance out in the field. They didn’t do anything to
prevent war crimes. It operated out of [Chief of Staff] General
[William] Westmoreland’s office. He had been the supreme commander in
Vietnam a couple years before, so he had a vested interest in the war
and how it was portrayed. They just tracked things so they could make
reports to the Secretary of Defense and to the White House to keep them
appraised of possible scandals that were on the horizon.
So this group put together this massive collection of files. And after I
found it I wrote my dissertation on these documents, and after I
defended my dissertation I went to Vietnam.
about in these files with the actual villages where they had allegedly
been committed. What did you find?
survivors of these particular incidents. Generally because the
Vietnamese are so tied to their land, even people who were bombed out of
the countryside into the shantytowns and slums and refugee camps, after
the war they returned to their home villages, and were living there
when I got there. But it really transformed my project, because I went
to talk to Vietnamese about this one spasm of violence that I had in the
records but what they would talk to me about was ten years of living
under bombs and shells and helicopter gunships, and what it took to
negotiate every aspect of their lives around the American war.
What I was told in the countryside was beyond my ability to grasp,
something that I could have never have gotten from the records. And I
would talk to Vietnamese who would tell me about what it was like just
to try and eke out an existence in the war zone. About having their home
burned down five, six seven times. And then finally giving up
rebuilding and starting to live a semi-subterranean life in their bomb
shelter. About how they figured out ways to get out of that shelter, to
get water or food or relieve themselves. And how their entire lives were
just predicated on figuring out a way not to get killed. They would
talk about artillery called down on a hamlet, and they would run into
the bomb shelter. And stay there. And then this whole calculus would
begin where they would try and figure out exactly when the right time to
leave that shelter was. You had to wait until the artillery shelling
stopped, but you couldn’t leave too soon or you were apt to be cut down
by a helicopter gunship that was flying overhead. You had to make sure
you weren’t caught in a crossfire between departing guerrillas and the
onrushing Americans. But you couldn’t stay down there too long because
the Americans were coming, and they would start rolling grenades into
the bomb shelters because they saw them as possible enemy bunkers,
fighting positions. There all of these decisions to be made, and it
wasn’t just your life that depended on making it, but maybe your entire
family. The whole family could get wiped out if you left a second too
early or a second too late.
Vietnam War historians that I knew and tried to interest them in the
project. I said, “You really should get down to the National Archives
and work on these.” And everybody at that time, they were burned out on
the War or working on a different project. And one of them suggested
that I ought to pursue it. I went to my advisor at Columbia, David
Rosner, and I said to him, “Do you think I could write a book and my
dissertation at the same time?” I was 200 pages in on another
dissertation. He said that I was nuts. If the documents were that
important, then I should get down to the National Archives and get the
documents.
I was just a grad student at the time, I didn’t have the money for this
endeavor. I said to him, “I’m going to have to put together a grant
proposal and it would be months before I got down there.” And he just
pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check on the spot and said, “Go
down there and get these documents.”
Within 24 hours I was down at the Archives. I went in first thing in
the morning and I copied until they threw me out at night. I put every
cent that he gave me into copying. I slept in my car in the Archives
parking lot and I collected this entire collection.
I always thought he was a little paranoid. I didn’t think there was a
real need to get all the documents. It turned out that it was a smart
move because these documents, sometime after I first published from the
files, they were pulled from the Archives’ shelves and they haven’t been
publicly available in the same way since. Now you have to file a
Freedom of Information Act request.
almost unimaginable scale.” Artillery shelling, bombing, the destruction
of villages by infantry, revenge missions, massacres, incredibly
sadistic rapes, the gunning down of Vietnamese of farmers and fisherman
from helicopter gunships, free fire zones. You cite an estimate of 3.8
million war deaths, the majority Vietnamese civilians. What turned so
many young American men into such monsters?
over 100 American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of
many more. I don’t know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to
one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for
several hours. He was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.
But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a
member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a
village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And
in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the
sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her
home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames.
And she’s angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off,
and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt.
And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the
GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second
and said, “Do you know that GI was me?” He had such a tough time
figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the
time he didn’t think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn’t
help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him.
And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking
to with his 19-year old self.
He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the
Vietnamese to the point where they didn’t think of them as human. They
thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used:
dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how “I didn’t become
exactly like a robot but it was like that.” You’re trained to kill, you
chant “Kill, kill kill.” It psychologically readies you for this.
is that the Vietnamese weren’t real people. They were subhumans. Mere
gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something
that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I
talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at
boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them.
They were told by their superiors that all Vietnamese were likely the
enemy. That children might carry grenades, women were probably the wives
or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps.
And even if there were rules of engagement on paper, or little cards
handed out saying to treat the Vietnamese properly, the message that
they were really given was that it was a lot safer to shoot first
because no one was going to ask questions later.
war like World War I, where you had two armies facing off across a well
defined battlefield. It’s a guerrilla struggle, where the Vietnamese
revolutionaries are radically outgunned. So they’re not going to stand
toe to toe with the Americans. And the Americans aren’t trying to take
territory or capture an enemy capital.
They were searching for some metric, some measure to show that they
were winning a war. They settled on the attrition strategy which was
used during the second half of the Korean War, and the main measure was
body count. You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese
bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when
they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could
put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment, the enemy
would give up the fight.
Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way the
Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. And once the debits outweighed
the credits, then they would end the war. They didn’t think the way the
Vietnamese did, that this was a revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese
saw it as a continuation of their anti-colonial fight against the
French.
The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders
were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese
bodies, and if you didn’t you were going to stay out in the field
longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn’t discerning
about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies
would do. This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all
Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of
detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy
dead.
This coupled with the much higher level of strategic thinking like the
use of “free fire zones,” which was basically a legal fiction that the
US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside to unrestrained
bombing and artillery shelling. This caused tremendous amounts of death
and destruction in the country side. And it opened it up to all this
heavy firepower and made it inevitable that large numbers of civilians
would be killed or wounded.
He was body count obsessed in a military world where body count was
king. Even in the military he was known as the Butcher of the Delta.
What Ewell did was unleash heavy fire power across the Mekong Delta,
which was the rice bowl of Vietnam and the most densely populated area.
He opened the countryside to unrestrained artillery fire, bombing, and
pushed his troops hard. His subordinates, the colonels under his
command, were constantly badgered about body count. He demanded it, and
if you didn’t produce body count you were going to be sacked, and
somebody else would be brought in until he got it.
Ewell’s signature operation was code-named Speedy Express. It began in
December 1968 and ran until the end of May 1969. Ewell’s troops reported
almost 11,000 enemy dead, but they only recovered less than 750
weapons. This great disparity was somehow ignored, as it often was
across the country, by reporters in Vietnam. But a couple of years after
Speedy Express ended, a stringer at Newsweek got wind of the
story. Alex Shimkin. He felt that something extremely bloody had gone on
in the Delta, and he amassed some evidence and brought it to his bureau
chief Kevin Buckley. They came up with an estimate of 5,000 civilians
killed during the operation.
Their report was heavily truncated by Newsweek, and the story
never got out in the fullest way that it could have. What they didn’t
know is there had been a whistleblower in the military who had let the
high command know exactly what was going on in the Delta. And what they
also didn’t know was that the military conducted their own
investigation, because they were afraid that the Speedy Express story
that Newsweek had would blow up and become as big or bigger
than the My Lai massacre story. I found this in the National Archives.
It had been buried for decades. But the military’s own estimate showed
that Newsweek probably underestimated the toll there, total.
The military estimated as many as 7,000 of the dead were civilians. So
7,000 of 11,000. Just a devastating conclusion that no one knew about
for decades.
was seen as a major victory. He was promoted to something called II
Field Force Vietnam, the largest combat command in the world at the
time. And from there he was promoted to become the military attache to
the Paris peace talks. This was probably the least peaceful man in the
military and the one least suited for the peace talks sent because what
he’d done in Vietnam was considered such a success.
other top officials. And instead of any effort to discipline or reign
him him he was promoted?
Speedy Express from a soldier who had served within the division, and
seen what had gone on firsthand. And he just set this letter aside. And
this whistleblower wrote other letters to other top commanders, and
eventually the military looked like they were going to conduct a full
investigation, or at least begin one. They set about tracking down the
whistleblower, and that’s where the trail kind of ends. You could see
that they identified him, they were going to make efforts to speak to
him, and then shortly thereafter the investigation was killed.
Subsequent investigations into Speedy Express were all suppressed, none
of them ever made public. It was all disappeared.
What Newsweek had was the stuff of Pulitzers or Congressional investigations.
and Buckley, and they objected to him linking My Lai and Speedy Express
together. They said they felt the Army and the White House had been
through so much with the My Lai scandal, they didn’t think it was fair
to put them through that type of thing again.
piece of reporting, was truncated down to something around 1,800 words.
And Julian Ewell’s name wasn’t even in the piece.
the war. Seymour Hersh nearly couldn’t even find a publisher for his My
Lai investigation.
magazine, a whole bunch of publications. Nobody was interested. Some of
these publications had even heard about it previously from the
whistleblower who got the entire My Lai investigation started, Ron
Ridenhour. Hersh finally had to take it it to Dispatch News Service,
which was a brand new, fledgling anti-war news service. They were able
to distribute it into the mainstream, but really second tier newspapers.
And it was only after it became public, and some photos of My Lai were
published, only then did the story really start to gain steam.
I always thought it was very telling that at the time the My Lai
massacre took place there were somewhere between 500 and 700 reporters
in Vietnam. But when it was reported in the US, it was just a major
victory over enemy forces: 128 enemies killed at a cost of no US lives.
There was only a handful of weapons collected, but nobody thought to ask
any questions. Basically the military press releases were just copied
and put into the newspapers. It took a reporter back in the US to
finally break the story.
the war is remembered. How did that happen, and what does that do to the
way we think about Vietnam?
distill down all discussion of Vietnamese civilian death and civilian
suffering to the My Lai massacre. Two things were atypical about it:
one, 500 civilians killed over a four hour period is an anomaly. But My
Lai was also an anomaly because it was the one war crime that was
completely and thoroughly investigated. Even the other investigations
that I had in the files, nothing is the scope of My Lai. It came to
stand in for a lot of what was going on in Vietnam. And after that, when
other atrocity stories would come to light, a lot of editors felt that
it was old hat. We’ve heard about My Lai. We know about that. The war
was wrapping up and people weren’t interested in revisiting this.
In histories of the war, academics and scholars haven’t wanted to draw
on what existed during the war, a fairly substantial anti-war literature
that talked about atrocities. Most of this was written off as
propaganda, and I think what seemed safe to talk about was My Lai. And
because Americans generally focus on the American side of the war, it
made it easy to do.
part of both reporters and academics. You write, it went from being
considered “propaganda and leftist kookery” one day to “yawnworthy
common knowledge” the next.
opportunity, maybe one year in 1971, when it seemed that the issue of
war crimes and the issue of Vietnamese suffering was gaining some
traction. The military was having a tough time keeping a lid on it as it
had done for years before. But with the war wrapping up, Vietnam
started to migrate off the front pages. It was no longer leading the
nightly news. The press seemed to be moving on and a lot of people
wanted the war to go away. And of course the military had wanted this to
go away to and took active steps to suppress the story whenever it
could.
Front made such civilians legitimate targets as far as the US was
concerned.
called “hardcore revolutionary areas” because of strong nationalist
revolutionary support. They and their allies in Saigon were never able
to win over the population in that countryside. The governments that had
ruled these areas for years, that represented the people, that provided
the services: this was the revolutionary government. They were
inextricably tied to the population. So they’re unable to win them over,
and they really couldn’t break that bond. All the US really had was
firepower. They tried to drive the people out of the countryside, to
drive them into refugee camps. When people would get driven into refugee
camps, most didn’t have adequate housing, there wasn’t potable water,
there wasn’t sufficient food. And they would filter back to the
countryside. It was easier to take your chance even amidst the firepower
and free fire zones than to try to eke out a living in one of these
camps.
Vietnamese people to their land, to drive them into cities. You quote a
1968 Foreign Affairs article by Samuel Huntington arguing that this,
“forced urbanization and modernization” was a good thing.
guerillas, to physically move the Vietnamese population. But the
Vietnamese were so tied to their land, tied to their rice fields. This
is where their ancestors were buried. And it’s very important to
Vietnamese to venerate their ancestors. So people were very reluctant to
move. The only thing they had at their disposal was destructive force.
the body count was to bring in an ear. This was a practice in some
units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a
beach resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges.
In other cases, troops had this belief that Vietnamese spirituality
said that if the corpse wasn’t intact, they wouldn’t be able to move
into the afterlife. A lot of Americans would call it “Buddha heaven.” So
they had this belief that dismembering Vietnamese would be a form of
psychological warfare. They would leave a “death card,” either an ace of
spades playing card or a specially made up, like a business card, with
the unit’s name on it and generally some sort of grim motto attached.
There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam. Ears were worn
on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some guys
wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears
and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit
they were cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it
to the commander got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had
cut off a head and he boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull
for a radio.
another, and one of the prime ways was prostitution. A lot of girls who
were sent to it, their villages had been destroyed and they were forced
into the cities. And this was a way to provide for their families. The
Americans had lots of money to spend and these were young guys, 18, 19,
20 years old.
So it was this flourishing sex trade and then out in the countryside
there was what seems to be a tremendous amount of rape and sexual
assault.
What I found was extremely disturbing. I recount a few cases where the
sexual violence is really shocking. A lot of times I found myself, I
felt I didn’t have the language to describe exactly what I found in the
cases, because rape or even gang rape didn’t seem to convey the level of
sexual sadism. These are extremely violent gang rapes, or raping women
with inanimate objects like bottles or even rifles.
prisons that practiced not only torture but also placed prisoners in
“tiger cages,” small, submerged, windowless stone cells where they were
shackled to the floor. Guards would throw lime powder onto prisoners as
punishment.
men and women who were imprisoned for sometimes years on end without
ever being charged, let alone tried. And these were people who spoke out
against the government or spoke up for peace. They were sent to Con Son
as political prisoners and chained in these very tiny cells that had
been built by the French in the 19th century. There had been for years
rumors about what had gone on at Con Son, and it was only in the 1970s a
US aid worker turned activist was able to sneak a couple of American
congressmen in to get a first-hand look at these tremendously deplorable
conditions.
When some tiger cage prisoners were released, a Time magazine report
said ‘you can’t really call them men anymore. They’re more like shapes.’
They talk about them scuttling on the floor like crabs. If you watch
the video of it, that’s really the case. It happened to women too.
Lower-limb paralysis from being chained so long in stress positions.
They can no longer stand and they had to crawl in a very unnatural way.
most infamous, but there were around 500 South Vietnamese detention
centers around the country, mostly set up by the Americans, paid for by
the Americans. The US also operated its own detention system on bases,
where there were military intelligence units that held prisoners for
varying lengths of time before they sent them on to joint American and
South Vietnamese facilities, and most of them ended up in strictly South
Vietnamese facilities.
that torture was widespread. Things like electrical torture, water
torture, what we now call waterboarding. And routine beatings.
controversy over the treatment of War on Terror detainees today. Are
there other parallels in your book? Does the US wage war differently
than it did in Vietnam?
don’t think that the scale of killing of civilians by US forces is
anything near the scale of the carnage in Vietnam. I think specifically
the ways that artillery and airpower are used are radically different.
That said, civilians still die on a regular basis in our war zones, be
it Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of them due to violence set off by
America’s invasions and occupations and the resulting civil strife. Then
of course others have been killed directly from US bombing, from
helicopter gunships, troops on the ground. And still more have been
wounded and still more made refugees. And I think that even despite the
best efforts of the United Nations and some other NGOs, we still don’t
have good numbers on the civilian toll. And I’m afraid that if history
is any guide it might be decades before someone is able to really put
together the real stories of these wars, let alone the semi-covert
campaigns in places like Pakistan and Yemen. So while I don’t think it’s
as bad as it was in Vietnam, I think it remains to be seen exactly what
the toll of these wars has been.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Follow the author on Twitter: @DanielDenvir