Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 89

R E V I E W E S S AY

Books, New York, 2013), an unsparing account of American complicity in a huge amount of civilian death and suffering in Vietnam. Turse writes from an ideological position at the opposite pole from that of the 50th anniversary website. He sees the U.S. war in Vietnam as an immoral and unjust conflict in which atrocities were not accidents or isolated crimes but reflected the true nature of the war as it was conducted by American forces. Hence his subtitle: The Real American War in Vietnam (emphasis added). That overbroad condemnation will anger many veterans and other readers. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the facts set out in this book just because one dislikes the author’s political slant. His conclusions may be overstated, but Turse makes a strong case that the dark side of America’s war in Vietnam was a good deal darker than is commonly remembered. If the American war was not a crime against humanity, Turse confronts us with convincing evidence that there was an American war that it is hard to call anything else—and that we should not scrub out of our history. Turse covers two separate issues. One concerns murders and other abuses that clearly violated the laws of war and official U.S. rules of engagement. The other concerns the massive use of firepower that was standard practice in U.S. military operations—and killed far more civilians than died in outright war crimes. One notorious example was a six-month campaign by the U.S. 9th Infantry Division code named Operation Speedy Express, in which at least 5,000 civilians died, mainly from artillery fire and air strikes. That is ten times the death toll in My Lai, the site of the best known and most deadly U.S. atrocity. In the first category, Turse details a fairly long list of incidents that, he states, indicate criminal acts on a scale “far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some ‘bad apples,’ however numerous.” A handful of these events made news at the time. Most remained unknown until Turse uncovered the details, initially drawn from longignored military reports and expanded through numerous interviews with veterans in America and survivors in Vietnam. From that fuller record, he concludes that such crimes were not an aberration but “the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.”
MILITARY REVIEW ? September-October 2013

That judgment is debatable. The archived files that Turse discovered contain reports on more than 300 incidents involving verified or alleged war crimes by U.S. troops—a horrifying number, and surely not the full tally, since there must have been many more that were never brought to the authorities’ attention. But can several hundred or several thousand crimes really be considered representative of American soldiers’ actions over the course of an eight-year war in which a couple of million U.S. troops were involved? The dispassionate answer to that question is probably, “No.” But if you ask different questions, the answers are more disturbing. Did prevailing authorized military practices fail to show reasonable concern for Vietnamese lives? Did those practices and senior officers’ attitudes—particularly the relentless pressure for high body counts—create a climate in which war crimes were more likely? Did unit leaders up and down the chain of command largely turn a blind eye to atrocities and unnecessary civilian deaths? On these, Turse leaves no reasonable doubt that the answers are “Yes,” “Yes,” and “Yes.” And those yeses show, also beyond reasonable doubt, that even if many Americans served honorably in Vietnam, what our nation and our military leadership did there gives no cause for sentimental celebration. There’s a troubling footnote to Turse’s work. The archive that led to his quest contained reports collected by a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. Routinely declassified after the required 20-year wait, the file was sent to the National Archives, where Turse discovered it in 2001. But soon after his research became known, the documents were pulled from the public shelves and remain unavailable. Even decades later, it seems, the official response to American war crimes is to try to hide them, rather than acknowledge the truth. As grim as it is, Turse’s account actually does not portray the full measure of civilian suffering in South Vietnam. That is because he does not show that those civilians were victims of both sides, not just one. The Vietnamese Communists had only a small fraction of the firepower employed by U.S. forces, but their war, waged with mines, rocket and mortar attacks, assassinations, executions, and forced conscription—not to mention the imprisonment of tens of thousands in “reeducation” camps after the war—also brought plenty of fear, loss, and death to the Vietnamese countryside over many years.
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