Mary Katherine Morrison AAS 375 Professor Le San Francisco State University Works Cited: Power, Cat. Matador Records, 2006 Lennon, John. Apple Records, 1968 Woods. Explore the history of the Vietnam War, including pivotal battles, milestone events, and cultural figures, only on History.com.
Explore interactive visualizations and find detailed information about the TV series Vietnam War Story's cast, ratings, show recommendations, plot, and more. The Vietnam War was protracted and bloody. The Hanoi government estimates that in 21 years of fighting, four million civilians were killed across North and South Vietnam. The Secret History of the Vietnam War . For example: ever heard of the ? 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. 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. VICE: Your book documents how the American war in Vietnam was a fight systemically waged against the civilian population. How does this account that you documented differ from the Vietnam war as it's popularly remembered in the United States today? Nick Turse: We have 3. Vietnam War, and most of them deal with the American experience. They focus on American soldiers, on strategy, tactics, generals, or diplomacy out of Washington and the war managers there. But I didn't see any that really attempted to tell the complete story of what I came to see as the signature aspect of the conflict, which was Vietnamese civilian suffering. Millions of Vietnamese were killed, wounded, or made refugees by deliberate US policies, like the almost unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling across wide swaths of the countryside. That is, deliberate policies dictated at the highest levels of the US military. But any discussion of Vietnamese civilian suffering is condensed down to a couple pages or paragraphs on the massacre at My Lai. This isn't the book that you initially intended to write. Tell me about the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the documents that you found. I would go down to the National Archives and I was trying to find hard data, military documents, to match up to the self- reports that we had from veterans about their experiences during the war. And on one of these trips I hit dead ends at every turn. After two weeks I had nothing to show for my research. I went to an archivist I worked with. I told him I couldn't go back to my boss empty handed. He thought about it for a second. 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 the War Crimes Working Group was not created to prevent or punish atrocities and war crimes? They didn't try and punish wrongdoers. They didn't try and put guidance out in the field. They didn't do anything to prevent war crimes. He had been the supreme commander in Vietnam a couple years before, so he had a vested interest in the war and how it was portrayed. They just tracked things so they could make reports to the Secretary of Defense and to the White House to keep them appraised of possible scandals that were on the horizon. And after I found it I wrote my dissertation on these documents, and after I defended my dissertation I went to Vietnam. Your reporting attempted to match up the atrocities you'd read about in these files with the actual villages where they had allegedly been committed. Generally because the Vietnamese are so tied to their land, even people who were bombed out of the countryside into the shantytowns and slums and refugee camps, after the war they returned to their home villages, and were living there when I got there. But it really transformed my project, because I went to talk to Vietnamese about this one spasm of violence that I had in the records but what they would talk to me about was ten years of living under bombs and shells and helicopter gunships, and what it took to negotiate every aspect of their lives around the American war. 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 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. Your academic advisor suggested that you copy those archives in a hurry before they disappeared? And one of them suggested that I ought to pursue it. I went to my advisor at Columbia, David Rosner, and I said to him, . He said that I was nuts. If the documents were that important, then I should get down to the National Archives and get the documents. 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 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. Your book describes, I think you call it, . You cite an estimate of 3. Vietnamese civilians. What turned so many young American men into such monsters? I went out and interviewed well over 1. American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of many more. I don't know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for several hours. He had a really infectious laugh. 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. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, . 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 1. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how . The idea is that the Vietnamese weren't real people. Mere gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them. That children might carry grenades, women were probably the wives or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps. This wasn't a war like World War I, where you had two armies facing off across a well defined battlefield. It's a guerrilla struggle, where the Vietnamese revolutionaries are radically outgunned. So they're not going to stand toe to toe with the Americans. And the Americans aren't trying to take territory or capture an enemy capital. 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. 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. 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 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. Vietnam War - Facts, Battles, Pictures & Videos. The Vietnam War was a long, costly armed conflict that pitted the communist regime of North Vietnam and its southern allies, known as the Viet Cong, against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States. The divisive war, increasingly unpopular at home, ended with the withdrawal of U. S. More than 3 million people, including 5. Americans, were killed in the conflict.
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