US “imperialists” were executed during this attempted political transformation.94 The victims were thrown into mass graves;95 some were buried alive.96 But the “Hue Massacre,” as despicable as it was, did not represent typical Vietcong or NVA conduct.
American troops, on the other hand, were not desperate to cultivate the goodwill of villagers. On top of this, civilians looked like the enemy, often aided the enemy, and were generally of a different race than GIs. Veterans document a wide range of war crimes involving civilians in their narratives, including beatings, rape, and murder. Caputo says that on two occasions his platoon went “nuts,” turning into “unrestrained savages” who burned down villages in fits of rage.97 Lee Childress, a veteran who contributed to Everything We Had, an oral history, says a fellow GI shot an old Vietnamese woman because she stole his pack of chewing gum.98 One of the first veteran narratives published was the ghostwritten memoir of Lieutenant William Calley, the only American soldier convicted for the My Lai murders. Calley is shockingly frank about his participation in the massacre, but he asserts that killing unarmed women and children was justified because they aided the Vietcong.99
Few narratives can be categorized as definitively antiwar. But many facets of these works put the American venture in Vietnam in a poor light, from the seemingly senseless and ineffective tactics employed by the US military, to the horrendous atrocities attributed to American troops. It seems odd, then, that another reoccurring theme in these accounts is the idea that American soldiers were victimized by Vietnamese civilians, the people who suffered the most in the war. Some reasons for this hatred of civilians are obvious. GIs became enraged when peasants did not warn them about booby traps planted in and around their villages. Many noncombatants actively aided the Vietcong and NVA, and many more were unwilling for various reasons to help American troops find their elusive enemies.
The idea of civilians as victimizers, however, goes beyond the role they played in hindering American combat operations. This concept also involves the feeling that while US soldiers were dying for South Vietnam’s freedom, the majority of its citizens were ungrateful and scornful of these sacrifices. One common manifestation of this attitude in memoirs is the portrayal of Vietnamese civilians as motivated by a single-minded desire for American dollars. The great majority of Vietnamese who appear in veterans’ accounts are people who tried to part GIs from their money: beggars, prostitutes and their pimps, sellers of shoddy souvenirs, thieves, and hustlers. The people portrayed as the greediest members of South Vietnamese society are the children who constantly swarmed US soldiers wherever they went, pleading for handouts of money, candy, and cigarettes.100 During James R. McDonough’s first day in Vietnam he was initially delighted to see groups of “smiling children . . . with grinning teeth and sparkling eyes” waving at him as he passed by in a jeep.101 But his delight turned to shock when he leaned out of the jeep to wave back at a group of boys and they instantly grabbed onto his arm and stole his watch.102
ARVN soldiers, according to memoirists, also ruthlessly took advantage of American soldiers. These US-allied Vietnamese troops, called ARVNs by GIs (pronounced “arvins”), were allegedly so incompetent that Americans were forced to do all the fighting. The scorn heaped upon ARVN troops in veteran narratives cannot be exaggerated. They are called “pathetic” and “chickenshit sons-of-bitches,”103 “fucking cowards” and “babies,”104 and are shown either running away from danger, avoiding the enemy, or acting like happy-go-lucky clowns who would rather lounge around than fight. Puller saw an ARVN unit whose members smoked cigarettes, chatted, and listened to transistor radios while on patrol.105 Malevolent ARVNs laughed at Downs and his platoon one day as they marched off in search of Vietcong. The Vietnamese soldiers evidently thought it was funny that the Americans were risking their lives in “the bush” while they stayed behind and relaxed in hammocks.106
Veterans express the most anger towards Vietnamese who initially hid their greed or contempt by treating GIs with, as Broyles puts it, “exaggerated kindness.”107 Caputo writes of street children who praised Americans when they passed out money and treats, but hurled curses and insults at them when they did not.108 A formerly friendly beggar child threw rocks at Broyles when he did not offer up his usual handout.109 Puller was heartened when a village chief invited his platoon to sit down for a lavish meal, but was furious when the chief presented him with a bill after they finished eating.110 Tobias Wolff worked closely with ARVN troops, and they treated him to a farewell dinner shortly before his tour ended. When his Vietnamese hosts broke into hysterical laughter during the meal he realized that they were not honoring him. Wolff had instead been set up for a cruel practical joke; they had fed him his dog.111
Besides being portrayed as pitiless exploiters, most of the Vietnamese who appear in veteran narratives basically serve as scenery or props. These nameless figures are the “villagers,” “people,” or “gooks” with whom GIs briefly interact as they pass through rural hamlets or urban neighborhoods. The occasional Vietnamese who rise above this status invariably speak in snippets of broken English and GI slang. Caputo, for instance, records begging children saying “Gimme cig’rette gimme candy you buy one Coka. One Coka twenty P you buy,” and a teenager who says, “Hokay, hokay. Kill buku VC.”112 Readers are only rarely presented with Vietnamese who seem like real human beings with thoughts, feelings, and complex motivations for their actions.
The Vietnamese, of course, were real people, and many had good reasons for acting in ways that American soldiers found annoying or despicable. So many South Vietnamese seemed greedy because prying dollars away from comparatively wealthy American servicemen was their best option for survival.113 Before the war, the great majority of South Vietnamese lived in rural areas and relied on agriculture, principally rice production, for their livelihoods. But the countryside became increasingly dangerous as the war escalated, and US forces, as part of their “pacification” efforts, laid waste to farmland with bombs and chemical defoliants. These developments led to an exodus of people to cities,114 causing “the urban population of South Vietnam [to increase] from 15 to 40 percent of the total population” by 1968.115 The South was “normally a rice-exporting area,” but with much of its rice crop destroyed and farmers fleeing their paddies, it was forced to import rice by 1967.116
Deprived of their livelihoods, refugees who settled in slums or the shantytowns that surrounded US bases were forced by necessity to get what they could from the Americans. For some this meant working as laborers or maids for the Americans, but for others it meant pursuing more illicit occupations.117 An example of how this process played out for one South Vietnamese citizen is found in the memoir of Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Hayslip spent the first years of her life in a small village, but fled her home after local Vietcong cadre sentenced her to death because they mistakenly believed she was a government informant. She ended up in Saigon and became pregnant while still a young girl. Hayslip first made money peddling black market goods to US soldiers. She later lived with a series of American boyfriends who paid her expenses, a route taken by her sister and many other South Vietnamese women. On one occasion, after being offered what to her was a fabulous amount of cash, Hayslip reluctantly had sex with a GI for money.118
In addition to disruptions caused by the random destructiveness of war, the lives of millions of South Vietnamese were upset by their government’s “strategic hamlet” program. Initiated in 1962 by South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, this plan was designed to separate the Vietcong from civilians by forcibly removing peasants from their villages and relocating them to fortified government-run camps.119 Citizens conscripted into the program had to build their own new housing and were charged for building materials, including the barbed wire strung around the encampments. No matter that the construction supplies were “provided free by the United States” to the Saigon government.120 People were “motivated as never before to support the Viet Cong” after they suffered such indignities.121
The
