War Crimes Notes

 As the Russian assault on Ukraine continues these two links about "war crimes" have come to my attention. The first is a current commentary at Asia Times, Blowbacks from Ukraine war will be deadly serious. The other is four years ago in 1968, THE YEAR THAT SHATTERED AMERICA  A Smithsonian magazine special report.

Two self-explanatory quotes will make my point. The Asia Times critique of current events in Ukraine is an excellent overview critical of the US response which is not receiving the global embrace policy-makers were hoping.

Despite Western media accusations of genocide and war atrocities, Putin has apparently been careful to limit civilian casualties. As former ambassador and US official Chas Freeman has pointed out, the ratio of civilian casualties from the Ukraine conflict to military casualties has been one-tenth of that normally found in a typical war.

Newsweek reported a US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst as saying, “I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so. In fact, I’d say that Russian could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to.”

Yet Blinken had the temerity of wanting to charge Putin with war crimes without any sense of irony. So far, no one has accused Putin of indiscriminate carpet-bombing, drone strikes on wedding parties or waterboarding of prisoners of war. All are war crimes that Americans could have been charged with but have not.

That Newsweek link is extensive, including a video and detailed analysis of the Russian tactical and strategic aims. These are the concluding paragraphs:

Heartbreaking images make it easy for the news to focus on the war's damage to buildings and lives. But in proportion to the intensity of the fighting (or Russia's capacity), things could indeed be much worse.

"I know that the news keeps repeating that Putin is targeting civilians, but there is no evidence that Russia is intentionally doing so," says the DIA analyst. "In fact, I'd say that Russian (sic) could be killing thousands more civilians if it wanted to."

"I'm no com-symp," the analyst says. "Russia is dead wrong, and Putin needs to be punished. But in terms of concluding the war in a way that both sides can accept and where we don't see Armageddon, the air and missile war provides positive signs."

Every war is unique and awful, and Ukraine is no different. But Russia's choice to modulate its destructiveness is an important counterintuitive element. Vladimir Putin can't easily win; he can't accept loss or retreat; and he can't escalate. He has to keep destruction and pressure at a very careful, just-bad-enough level to keep some advantage.

"I know it's thin consolation that it could be a lot worse," the DIA analyst says, "but to understand how that is the case should really change people's perspectives, even inside the U.S. government, as to how to end this."

As I read and listened to the audio of these links my mind drifted back to my days as a draftee during the Vietnam era when one of the signal moments was the much publicized account of the My Lai Massacre and subsequent trial of Lt. William Calley. 

There are endless references to that terrible moment in our history, but a recent Smithsonian Magazine followup underscores the point I want to note in this post.

January 2018
The Ghosts of My Lai
In the hamlet where U.S. troops killed hundreds of men, women and children, survivors are ready to forgive the most infamous American soldier of the war

The landscape surrounding Son My is still covered with rice paddies, as it was 50 years ago. There are still water buffalo fertilizing the fields and chickens roaming. Most of the roads are still dirt. On a recent Wednesday afternoon, ten young men were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at the side of one of those roads. A karaoke machine was set up on a motorbike, and the loudspeakers were placed next to a blink-and-you-miss-it plaque with an arrow pointing to a “Mass Grave of 75 Victims.”

Tran Nam was 6 years old when he heard gunshots from inside his mud and straw home in Son My. It was early morning and he was having breakfast with his extended family, 14 people in all. The U.S. Army had come to the village a couple of times previously during the war. Nam’s family thought it would be like before; they’d be gathered and interviewed and then let go. So the family kept on eating. “Then a U.S. soldier stepped in,” Nam told me. “And he aimed into our meal and shot. People collapsed one by one.”

Nam saw the bullet-ridden bodies of his family falling—his grandfather, his parents, his older brother, his younger brother, his aunt and cousins. He ran into a dimly lit bedroom and hid under the bed. He heard more soldiers enter the house, and then more gunshots. He stayed under the bed as long as he could, but that wasn’t long because the Americans set the house on fire. When the heat grew unbearable, Nam ran out the door and hid in a ditch as his village burned. Of the 14 people at breakfast that morning, 13 were shot and 11 killed. Only Nam made it out physically unscathed.

The six U.S. Army platoons that swept through Son My that day included 100 men from Charlie Company and 100 from Bravo Company. They killed some civilians straight off—shooting them point blank or tossing grenades into their homes. In the words of Varnado Simpson, a member of Second Platoon who was interviewed for the book Four Hours in My Lai, “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it, and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction.” Simpson went on to commit suicide.

Soldiers gathered together villagers along a trail going through the village and also along an irrigation ditch to the east. Calley and 21-year-old Pvt. First Class Paul Meadlo mowed the people down with M-16s, burning through several clips in the process. The soldiers killed as many as 200 people in those two areas of Son My, including 79 children. Witnesses said Calley also shot a praying Buddhist monk and a young Vietnamese woman with her hands up. When he saw a 2-year-old boy who had crawled out of the ditch, Calley threw the child back in and shot him.

Truong Thi Le, then a rice farmer, told me she was hiding in her home with her 6-year-old son and 17-year-old daughter when the Americans found them and dragged them out. When the soldiers fired an M-16 into their group, most died then and there. Le fell on top of her son and two bodies fell on top of her. Hours later, they emerged from the pile alive. “When I noticed that it was quiet, I pushed the dead bodies above me aside,” she told me. “Blood was all over my head, my clothes.” She dragged her son to the edge of a field and covered him with rice and cloth. “I told him not to cry or they would come to kill us.”

When I asked about her daughter, Le, who had maintained her composure up till that point, covered her face with her hands and broke down in tears. She told me that Thu was killed along with 104 people at the trail but didn’t die right away. When it was safe to move, Le found Thu sitting and holding her grandmother, who was already dead. “Mom, I’m bleeding a lot,” Le remembers her daughter saying. “I have to leave you.”

Nguyen Hong Man, 13 at the time of the massacre, told me he went into an underground tunnel with his 5-year-old niece to hide, only to watch her get shot right in front of him. “I lay there, horrified,” he said. “Blood from the nearby bodies splashed onto my body. People who were covered with a lot of blood and stayed still got the chance to survive, while kids did not. Many of them died as they cried for their parents in terror.”

Initially, the U.S. Army portrayed the massacre as a great victory over Viet Cong forces, and that story might never have been challenged had it not been for a helicopter gunner named Ronald Ridenhour. He wasn’t there himself, but a few weeks after the operation, his friends from Charlie Company told him about the mass killing of civilians. He did some investigating on his own and then waited until he finished his service. Just over a year after the massacre, Ridenhour sent a letter to about two dozen members of Congress, the secretaries of state and defense, the secretary of the Army, and the chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, telling them about a “2nd Lieutenant Kally” who had machine-gunned groups of unarmed civilians.

This is a devastating reminder that atrocities are a universal product of war. The victors win not only the military and political objectives, they also write the official historic accounts. Somewhere in that messy aftermath the horrible details usually lie hidden, often for generations, before they are revealed. Here are a few of those details.

The six U.S. Army platoons that swept through Son My that day included 100 men from Charlie Company and 100 from Bravo Company. They killed some civilians straight off—shooting them point blank or tossing grenades into their homes. In the words of Varnado Simpson, a member of Second Platoon who was interviewed for the book Four Hours in My Lai, “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongue, their hair, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it, and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction.” Simpson went on to commit suicide.

Soldiers gathered together villagers along a trail going through the village and also along an irrigation ditch to the east. Calley and 21-year-old Pvt. First Class Paul Meadlo mowed the people down with M-16s, burning through several clips in the process. The soldiers killed as many as 200 people in those two areas of Son My, including 79 children. Witnesses said Calley also shot a praying Buddhist monk and a young Vietnamese woman with her hands up. When he saw a 2-year-old boy who had crawled out of the ditch, Calley threw the child back in and shot him.

Here is another link via BBC underscoring the point. More at the link but this is the core of the main point.

Was My Lai just one of many massacres in Vietnam War?

Researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans, in 2001 I stumbled across a collection of war crimes investigations carried out by the military at the US National Archives.

Box after box of criminal investigation reports and day-to-day paperwork had been long buried away and almost totally forgotten. Some detailed the most nightmarish descriptions. Others hinted at terrible events that had not been followed up.

At that time the US military had at its disposal more killing power, destructive force, and advanced technology than any military in the history of the world.

The amount of ammunition fired per soldier was 26 times greater in Vietnam than during World War II. By the end of the conflict, America had unleashed the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Vietnam.

Vast areas dotted with villages were blasted with artillery, bombed from the air and strafed by helicopter gunships before ground troops went in on search-and-destroy missions.

The phrase "kill anything that moves" became an order on the lips of some American commanders whose troops carried out massacres across their area of operations.

While the US suffered more than 58,000 dead in the war, an estimated two million Vietnamese civilians were killed, another 5.3 million injured and about 11 million, by US government figures, became refugees in their own country.

Today, if people remember anything about American atrocities in Vietnam, they recall the March 1968 My Lai massacre in which more than 500 civilians were killed over the course of four hours, during which US troops even took time out to eat lunch.

Far bloodier operations, like one codenamed Speedy Express, should be remembered as well, but thanks to cover-ups at the highest levels of the US military, few are.

In late 1968, the 9th Infantry Division, under the command of Gen Julian Ewell, kicked off a large-scale operation in the Mekong Delta, the densely populated deep south of Vietnam.

In an already body count-obsessed environment, Ewell, who became known as the Butcher of the Delta, was especially notorious. He sacked subordinates who killed insufficient numbers and unleashed heavy firepower on a countryside packed with civilians.

A whistle-blower in the division wrote to the US Army Chief of Staff William Westmoreland, pleading for an investigation. Artillery called in on villages, he reported, had killed women and children. Helicopter gunships had frightened farmers into running and then cut them down. Troops on the ground had done the same thing.

The result was industrial-scale slaughter, the equivalent, he said, to a "My Lai each month".

Just look at the ratio of Viet Cong reportedly killed to weapons captured, he told Westmoreland.

Indeed, by the end of the operation Ewell's division claimed an enemy body count of close to 11,000, but turned in fewer than 750 captured weapons.

Westmoreland ignored the whistle-blower, scuttled a nascent inquiry, and buried the files, but not before an internal Pentagon report endorsed some of the whistle-blower's most damning allegations.

The secret investigation into Speedy Express remained classified for decades before I found it in buried in the National Archives.

The military estimated that as many as 7,000 civilians were killed during the operation. More damning still, the analysis admitted that the "US command, in its extensive experience with large-scale combat operations in South East Asia, appreciated the inevitability of significant civilian casualties in the conduct of large operations in densely populated areas such as the Delta."

Indeed, what the military admitted in this long secret report confirmed exactly what I also discovered in hundreds of talks and formal interviews with American veterans, in tens of thousands of pages of formerly classified military documents, and, most of all, in the heavily populated areas of Vietnam where Americans expended massive firepower.

Survivors of a massacre by US Marines in Quang Tri Province told me what it was like to huddle together in an underground bomb shelter as shots rang out and grenades exploded above.

Fearing that one of those grenades would soon roll into their bunker, a mother grabbed her young children, took a chance and bolted.

"Racing from our bunker, we saw the shelter opposite ours being shot up," Nguyen Van Phuoc, one of those youngsters, told me. One of the Americans then wheeled around and fired at his mother, killing her.

Many more were killed on that October day in 1967. Two of the soldiers involved were later court martialled but cleared of murder.

About the author: Nick Turse has been researching US military atrocities in the Vietnam War for more than a decade and has detailed his findings in a book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

A Pentagon spokesman, when asked for a statement about the evidence presented, said he doubted that more than 50 years after the US went to war in Vietnam, it would be possible for the military to provide an official statement in "a timely manner."