The implication is that the United States lost the war in Vietnam because General Giap thought nothing of sending unconscionable numbers of Vietnamese to their deaths.
Yet America’s defeat was probably ordained, just as much, by
the Vietnamese casualties we caused, not just in military cross-fire, but as a
direct result of our policy and tactics. While nearly 60,000 American
troops died, some two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, and millions
more were wounded and displaced, during America’s involvement in Vietnam,
researchers and government sources have estimated.
Enraged,
disgusted and alienated by the abuse they suffered from troops who claimed to
be their allies, even civilians who had no inclination to back our opponents
did so.
Now, four
decades later, in distant lands like Pakistan and Afghanistan, civilians are
again treating the United States as an enemy, because they have become the
collateral damage of our “war on terror,” largely unrecognized by the American
public.
In more
than a decade of analyzing long-classified military criminal investigation
files, court-martial transcripts, Congressional studies, contemporaneous
journalism and the testimony of United States soldiers and Vietnamese
civilians, I found that Gen. William C. Westmoreland, his subordinates,
superiors and successors also engaged in a profligate disregard for human life.
A major reason
for these huge losses was that American strategy was to kill as many “enemies”
as possible, with success measured by body count. Often, those bodies were not
enemy soldiers.
To fight its war
of attrition, the United States declared wide swaths of the South Vietnamese
countryside to be free-fire zones where even innocent civilians could be
treated as enemy forces. Artillery shelling, intended to keep the enemy in a
state of constant unease, and near unrestrained bombing slaughtered
noncombatants and drove hundreds of thousands of civilians into slums and
refugee camps.
Soldiers and
officers explained how rules of engagement permitted civilians to be shot for
running away, which could be considered suspicious behavior, or for standing
still when challenged, which could also be considered suspicious. Veterans I’ve
interviewed, and soldiers who spoke to investigators, said they had received
orders from commanders to “kill
anything that moves.”
“The Oriental
doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner,” Westmoreland famously said.
“Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient.”
Having spoken to
survivors of massacres by United States forces at Phi Phu, Trieu Ai, My Luoc
and so many other hamlets, I can say with certainty that Westmoreland’s
assessment was false.
Decades after
the conflict ended, villagers still mourn loved ones — spouses, parents,
children — slain in horrific spasms of violence. They told me, too, about what
it was like to live for years under American bombs, artillery shells and
helicopter gunships; about what it was like to negotiate every aspect of their
lives around the “American war,” as they call it; how the war transformed the
most mundane tasks — getting water from a well or relieving oneself or working
in the fields or gathering vegetables for a hungry family — into life-or-death
decisions; about what it was like to live under United States policies that
couldn’t have been more callous or contemptuous toward human life.
Westmoreland was
largely successful in keeping much of the evidence of atrocities from the American
public while serving as Army Chief of Staff. A task force, known as the Vietnam
War Crimes Working Group, operating out of his Pentagon office, secretly assembled
many thousands of pages of investigative files about American atrocities, which
I discovered in the National Archives.
Despite revelations
about the massacre at My
Lai, the United States government was able to suppress the true scale of
noncombatant casualties and to imply that those deaths that did occur were
inadvertent and unavoidable. This left the American public with a counterfeit
history of the conflict.
Without a true
account of our past military misdeeds, Americans have been unprepared to fully
understand what has happened in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere,
where attacks on suspected terrorists have killed unknown numbers of innocent
people. As in Vietnam, officials have effectively prevented
the public from assessing this civilian toll.
We need to
abandon our double standards when it comes to human life. It is worth noting
the atrocious toll born of an enemy general’s decisions. But, at the very
least, equal time ought to be given to the tremendous toll borne by civilians
as a result of America’s wars, past and present.
Nick
Turse is a historian and journalist and the author of
“Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.” International
Herald Tribune
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