destroyed all the villages contained within it, and supposedly cleared it of enemy fighters. Six months later the Vietcong was again operating there.30
The best depiction of the hopelessness of American tactics is found in a chapter of A Rumor of War called “Officer in Charge of the Dead.” For part of Caputo’s tour in Vietnam he was put in charge of tallying casualties.31 This task put him right in the middle of the war of attrition, a war in which the performance of an American unit was evaluated “by the number of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio).”32 Caputo kept track of these statistics on a “scoreboard” that the commander of his battalion consulted in order to determine which companies needed to increase their body counts.33 GIs, under pressure to perform, were not scrupulous in the identification of enemy remains, going by the maxim: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.”34
GIs were infuriated by many Vietcong tactics, but the use of booby traps, especially landmines, was perhaps the most maddening enemy tactic of all. It was bad enough to fight an enemy who attacked and then fled before any revenge could be exacted, but it was even worse when casualties were inflicted by inanimate objects. The most vivid account of the demoralizing effect that booby traps could have on US soldiers is found in Puller’s Fortunate Son. Puller, maimed by a booby trap himself, describes the weeks before his wounding as a “living hell” in which his men were constantly being taken out by landmines. The platoon felt that every step they took might be their last, and their morale was sapped by not being able to retaliate for such attacks.35 Puller and his men struggled to answer a question posed by a veteran in another narrative: “How do you fight back against a booby trap?”36
Though a cynical attitude predominates in memoirists’ depictions of combat, a number of authors express pride in their service. Such veterans do not suggest that their tours were a waste of time, or that American efforts in Vietnam were ridiculously futile. Virtually no memoirs, however, even those that present a generally positive view of the war, depict their authors’ tours as having achieved much of anything. The majority of veterans portray the months they spent in Vietnam as one long series of firefights interrupted by brief periods of rest and inactivity. Almost never is the impression given that the actions of the authors and their comrades, including killing scores of “VC” and NVA, somehow contributed to an ultimate victory. At the end of most memoirs, the author leaves Vietnam and the war continues on without him, as if nothing changed at all since he arrived a year earlier.
Added to this sense of low achievement is the admission of some veterans that they eventually gave up caring about who won or lost the war. Tripp purposely kept his platoon out of an area with a strong Vietcong presence in order to avoid enemy contact.37 Such examples of “combat avoidance” reportedly occurred throughout the war, but were especially common in the final years of US involvement.38 Memoirist Matthew Brennan served three tours in Vietnam between 1965 and 1969. The war seemed so hopeless by his last tour that he decided his only mission would be to make sure he and his men made it home alive.39 Most American troops, unlike Brennan, did not serve in Vietnam longer than the required yearlong tour, but like him, many decided at some point that their sole duty was not to defeat the enemy, but to stay alive long enough to make it back to the United States.40
A hallmark of guerrilla warfare is that it is fought amongst the people, and for this reason, civilians are inevitably caught in the crossfire and become unintentional casualties. The exact number of civilians killed in Vietnam is disputed and probably unknowable, but in 1975, the US Senate “subcommittee on refugees” estimated that approximately “430,000 South Vietnamese civilians were killed between 1965 and 1974 and more than 1 million were wounded.”41 The Senate’s estimate is probably too low because it does not account for the thousands of slain civilians erroneously added to the enemy body count.42 Mostly because of their “heavy reliance on firepower in and near populated areas,” as much as 80 percent of the civilian casualties in South Vietnam were caused by US and allied forces, rather than their foes.43 Though the bombing of North Vietnam has received more attention, US aircraft also dropped millions of tons of explosives on South Vietnam. It is likely that a high percentage of Southern civilians killed in the conflict were caught in these air raids.44
Accounts of civilian casualties are common in veterans’ narratives, but not in the form of deaths caused by American air or artillery bombardments. Instead, the most common civilian casualties recounted by veterans are those that were inflicted by American ground troops, even individual soldiers. In such cases the memoirist knew who was directly responsible for the accidental killing of a civilian, often saw it take place and, in a few instances, is among those responsible. Such episodes are invariably described as moments of horror for the soldiers at fault, especially when women and children were the victims. Brennan writes of a GI in his platoon who wept after shooting an unarmed man he mistook for a Vietcong fighter.45 Puller tells the story of a marine who was no doubt inflicted with “psychic wounds” when he accidentally shot a young girl during a skirmish in a village.46 Perhaps the most memorable episode of this kind was recounted by Kovic in his famous memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. Kovic’s platoon opened fire on a village it believed housed enemy troops, but when the shooting stopped the marines discovered that they had “shot up a bunch of kids.” After Kovic and his comrades made the harrowing discovery, they cried, fell to the ground, and prayed for God’s forgiveness as they desperately tried to help the children they had wounded.47
American troops in Vietnam, as Marilyn B. Young explains, “fought different wars depending on when they arrived and where . . . they were in combat.”48 South Vietnamese insurgents opposed to the US-backed regime in Saigon announced the establishment of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in late 1960. The NLF was dominated by Communists, but it was “an umbrella organization that included non-Communist individuals and organizations.”49 The military forces of the NLF were “formally organized into the People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF)” in early 1961.50 The PLAF was made up of “main force” units “which operated like a regular army throughout” South Vietnam, and local militia groups that operated in their home regions or villages. The NLF was composed almost wholly of native Southerners, but its “overall strategy” was determined by the Communist leadership of North Vietnam, officially known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The DRV, in response to escalated US military involvement, started sending its own troops south to aid the PLAF in 1965.51
GIs stationed in the thinly populated northern regions of South Vietnam often squared off against the DRV’s troops, officially known as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Referred to as the NVA by Americans, these were conventional, uniformed troops.52 US troops in South Vietnam’s lower latitudes, however, fought PLAF guerrillas, or as they were called by Americans, the Vietcong. VC fighters usually wore “traditional peasant garb” instead of uniforms, which generally made them indistinguishable from civilians.53 GIs became justifiably paranoid because of this situation, learning not to trust any Vietnamese. Several veterans recount instances in which outwardly friendly civilians turn out to be Vietcong. William Broyles Jr., for instance, knew a twelve-year-old boy who joked with Americans one day and helped to kill them the next.54 Memoirists focused a lot of attention on stories of women and children fighting for the Vietcong. Accounts of toddler suicide bombers and enemy assassins disguised as prostitutes that circulated amongst GIs were undoubtedly rumors. But a significant minority of Vietcong fighters were indeed women,55 and children were used by the guerrillas to relay messages, act as lookouts, and plant booby traps.56 Tim O’Brien’s assertion that there was no way “to distinguish a pretty Vietnamese girl from a deadly enemy” because “often they were one and the same person,” is not hyperbole.57
War crimes or atrocities occur during every war, and the Vietnam conflict was no different. It is impossible to determine the exact number of atrocities committed in Vietnam,
