troops in Vietnam first became an issue of nationwide concern in the United States with the 1969 revelations concerning the My Lai Massacre, an event in which US Army soldiers murdered over two hundred Vietnamese civilians, most of them women and children.58 The horrors of My Lai are important to the history of the war in many ways, but one of its most important, if little known, consequences is that it sparked a secret five-year study conducted by the US Army into American atrocities. Only declassified in 1990 through the Freedom of Information Act,59 the study compiled about eight hundred cases of possible “rapes, torture, murders . . . and other illegal acts” committed by army personnel, three hundred of which were substantiated by further investigation.60 There is no way of knowing how many other war crimes never made it into the investigation because perpetrators, witnesses, and victims stayed silent.
The army based most of its investigation on “sworn statements from soldiers and veterans who committed or witnessed” atrocities.61 Not long after the public first heard about My Lai, over one hundred veterans publicly testified about American war crimes during the Winter Soldier Investigation, an event sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).62 A few months later, VVAW member and future US senator John Kerry, famously summarized the testimonials of the Winter Soldier participants before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.63
Several Winter Soldier veterans alleged that the atrocities they had witnessed were not isolated incidents, but integral aspects of US operations.64 Such allegations are supported by the experiences of journalists who covered the war. Journalist Philip Knightly writes in his book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, that after news of the My Lai Massacre broke in late 1969, “nearly every war correspondent who had been in Vietnam had an atrocity story to tell.”65 These stories were not reported earlier “because the killing of civilians was not unusual either on a small or on a large scale.”66 One journalist, for instance, saw US Army troops attack a group of women and children. He did not publicize the incident because he assumed news agencies in Saigon would reject “a story about Americans killing Vietnamese civilians” as unexceptional.67
There is an apologist attitude towards American atrocities expressed in some prominent memoirs that runs counter to how the Winter Soldier speakers dealt with the subject. Broyles Jr. suggests that the victims of My Lai were partly responsible for their own deaths because they had “watched impassively” when their killers “had been cut to pieces by booby traps all around [their] hamlet.”68 David Donovan was revolted by My Lai, but asserts that the atrocity issue was overblown because civilian deaths are an unavoidable consequence of war.69 Caputo admits that two of his men executed a captured Vietcong on his implicit orders. He argues, though, that neither he nor his men were to blame for the prisoner’s death because the madness of war drove them to commit the act.70
Even though a few memoirists minimized or made excuses for American atrocities, these sentiments are overshadowed by the huge number and wide variety of war crimes that are documented in veterans’ narratives. Perhaps the most commonly related atrocities are those committed against enemy soldiers. Numerous authors say prisoners were beaten, tortured, or executed by GIs and their Vietnamese allies. Such acts were sometimes retribution for enemy atrocities. Mason saw an American sergeant shoot a group of bound NVA prisoners because his comrades had recently been tortured and mutilated after being captured.71 In other cases, US soldiers committed atrocities against their enemies out of frustration. Two of Frederick Downs’s platoon mates slashed a corpse with knives because of the rage they felt at all their efforts resulting in only the death of “one lousy dink.”72 In still other cases, there is no obvious reason for such behavior. Anderson’s unit, for instance, executed a group of wounded NVA soldiers simply because there were “no witnesses in the bush.”73
The most disturbing, and probably most frequent, atrocity against enemy combatants that appears in veteran narratives is the taking of body parts as souvenirs. Memoirists write about GIs who wore necklaces strung with human ears,74 drank whiskey out of skulls, joked about tossing severed ears into mess hall soup,75 and rigged a skull to open and close its jaw so that it appeared to sing along to music.76 Several veterans even claim that they knew of soldiers who brought their macabre trophies back to the United States, or at least hoped to.77 Others say that GIs did not just hack up enemy bodies for souvenirs; they also set them in lifelike poses to get a laugh out of their comrades. Bodies were propped up, cigarettes put between their fingers,78 beer cans in their hands,79 and Playboy magazines placed on their laps.80 Johnnie M. Clark’s platoon mate retrieved a “spare leg” from a pile of NVA corpses, “shoved it into the crotch” of an enemy body to create the illusion that the dead man had three legs, and then laughed at his gruesome handiwork “until tears filled his eyes.”81
Twentieth-century GIs, Peter S. Kindsvatter explains, learned during training “that killing America’s enemies was not only legally sanctioned but also [their] duty.”82 But “this license to kill did not automatically instill willingness; soldiers also wanted to believe that the enemy deserved to die.”83 Soldiers were thus told that their foes were “godless, evil, barbaric, greedy for conquest, even bestial.”84 This propagandizing caused enemies to be dehumanized. Adversaries of various races and ethnicities received this treatment, but Asian enemies, who were “not ethnically and culturally akin to white America,” were especially dehumanized.85 This happened when US forces fought Japanese, Korean, and Chinese troops, and it happened again when they squared off against Vietnamese fighters. Vietnam-era GIs were taught from basic training onward that the VC were inhuman “gooks” and “dinks” that had to be exterminated.86 In light of this indoctrination, it is not surprising that US soldiers sometimes treated Vietnamese corpses more like playthings or slain animals than dead human beings.
Americans were not the only perpetrators of war crimes in Vietnam. Many veterans say that the Vietcong tortured captured GIs to death and mutilated their bodies. Mason, for example, writes about the horrific fate of two fellow helicopter pilots who were shot down during his tour. The pilots’ corpses were found skinned and dismembered, proof that they had been “caught on the ground” by the Vietcong after they crashed.87 Veteran memoirs, however, contain few references to enemy atrocities committed against civilians. This is appropriate because although “the Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed thousands of civilians . . . most of their atrocities were calculated assassinations of specific individuals.”88 In 1958, two years before the NLF was even officially established, “an estimated 700 government officials” were victims of such murders.89 In October 1966, Neil Sheehan of the New York Times reported that “over the past decade, about 20,000 persons have been assassinated by Communist terrorists.”90 Sheehan added, though, that “the gun and the knife of the Vietcong assassin are . . . far more selective” than US bombing raids that indiscriminately killed dozens of people at a time.91
The Vietcong had to be selective in their killing because they could not afford to alienate “the people.” The guerrillas relied on South Vietnamese villagers for food and shelter and needed civilian complicity to evade their adversaries, mount ambushes, and plant booby traps.92 The Vietcong infamously strayed from this pattern of behavior after taking control of the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. During their brief rule the Communists attempted to “not only destroy the government administration of the city, but to establish, in its place, a ‘revolutionary administration.’”93
