The Secret History of the Vietnam War

Dalforce 1941 SG

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What Newsweek had was the stuff of Pulitzers or Congressional investigations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

http://www.vice.com/read/vietnam-and-the-mere-gook-rule?utm_source=vicefbus

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