If you thought you knew all there was to know about the
Vietnam War, you were wrong. For example: ever heard of the "Mere Gook
Rule," a code of conduct the US military came up with in order to make it
easier for soldiers to murder Vietnamese civilians without feeling too bad
about it? ("It's only a mere gook you're killing!")
Well, few people knew about this bit of history either until
author Nick Turse discovered it in secret US military archives, which he used
as the primary sources for his new(ish) book, Kill Everything That Moves: The
Real American War in Vietnam. 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.
The debate over the US's war in Vietnam continues to hang
over this country's most recent and techno-futuristic imperial adventures.
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 30,000 books in print on the 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 was working on a project on post-traumatic stress disorder
among US Vietnam veterans. 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. He
asked me, "do you think witnessing war crimes could cause post-traumatic stress?'
I told him, "excellent hypothesis" and asked what he had.
Within an hour I was going through this box, many boxes
actually, these reports of massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault,
mutilation. 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?
That's exactly right. 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. It operated out of [Chief of Staff] General [William]
Westmoreland's office. 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.
So this group put together this massive collection of files.
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. What did you find?
It was actually a lot easier than I expected to find
witnesses and survivors of these particular incidents. 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.
What I was told in the countryside was beyond my ability to
grasp, something that I could have never have gotten from the records. 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 stay there. 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?
I couldn't get the documents out of my head, and I went to a
couple Vietnam War historians that I knew and tried to interest them in the
project. I said, "You really should get down to the National Archives and
work on these." And everybody at that time, they were burned out on the
War or working on a different project. 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, "Do you think I could write a book and my dissertation at the same
time?" I was 200 pages in on another dissertation. 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 was just a grad student at the time, I didn't have the
money for this endeavor. I said to him, "I'm going to have to put together
a grant proposal and it would be months before I got down there." And he
just pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check on the spot and said,
"Go down there and get these documents."
Within 24 hours I was down at the Archives. 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 always thought he was a little paranoid. 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, "suffering on
an almost unimaginable scale." Artillery shelling, bombing, the
destruction of villages by infantry, revenge missions, massacres, incredibly
sadistic rapes, the gunning down of Vietnamese of farmers and fisherman from
helicopter gunships, free fire zones. You cite an estimate of 3.8 million war
deaths, the majority Vietnamese civilians. What turned so many young American
men into such monsters?
It's a difficult question to answer. I went out and
interviewed well over 100 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 was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.
But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story
about a member of his unit. 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. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away
laughing. And he paused a second and said, "Do you know that GI was
me?" He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. 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 19-year old self.
He told me about how the training that he went through
dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn't think of them as
human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used:
dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how "I didn't become
exactly like a robot but it was like that." You're trained to kill, you
chant "Kill, kill kill." It psychologically readies you for this.
There was even a "Mere Gook Rule?"
There was a shorthand in Vietnam: the MGR, or Mere Gook
Rule. The idea is that the Vietnamese weren't real people. They were subhumans.
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.
They were told by their superiors that all Vietnamese were
likely the enemy. That children might carry grenades, women were probably the
wives or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps.
And even if there were rules of engagement on paper, or
little cards handed out saying to treat the Vietnamese properly, the message
that they were really given was that it was a lot safer to shoot first because
no one was going to ask questions later.
How did high-level policies connect down to village level
atrocities?
The Vietnam War was fought using an attrition strategy. 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 were searching for some metric, some measure to show
that they were winning a war. 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.
Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way
the Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. 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.
The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. 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 coupled with the much higher level of strategic
thinking like the use of "free fire zones," which was basically a
legal fiction that the US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside
to unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling. 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.
You write about particular commanders, like Lieutenant
General Julian Ewell, who oversaw atrocities.
Ewell was one of the most notorious commanders who served in
Vietnam. He was body count obsessed in a military world where body count was
king. Even in the military he was known as the Butcher of the Delta.
What Ewell did was unleash heavy fire power across the
Mekong Delta, which was the rice bowl of Vietnam and the most densely populated
area. He opened the countryside to unrestrained artillery fire, bombing, and
pushed his troops hard. His subordinates, the colonels under his command, were
constantly badgered about body count. He demanded it, and if you didn't produce
body count you were going to be sacked, and somebody else would be brought in
until he got it.
Ewell's signature operation was code-named Speedy Express.
It began in December 1968 and ran until the end of May 1969. Ewell's troops
reported almost 11,000 enemy dead, but they only recovered less than 750
weapons. This great disparity was somehow ignored, as it often was across the
country, by reporters in Vietnam. But a couple of years after Speedy Express
ended, a stringer at Newsweek got wind of the story. Alex Shimkin. He felt that
something extremely bloody had gone on in the Delta, and he amassed some
evidence and brought it to his bureau chief Kevin Buckley. They came up with an
estimate of 5,000 civilians killed during the operation.
Their report was heavily truncated by Newsweek, and the
story never got out in the fullest way that it could have. What they didn't
know is there had been a whistleblower in the military who had let the high
command know exactly what was going on in the Delta. And what they also didn't
know was that the military conducted their own investigation, because they were
afraid that the Speedy Express story that Newsweek had would blow up and become
as big or bigger than the My Lai massacre story. I found this in the National
Archives. It had been buried for decades. But the military's own estimate
showed that Newsweek probably underestimated the toll there, total. The
military estimated as many as 7,000 of the dead were civilians. So 7,000 of
11,000. Just a devastating conclusion that no one knew about for decades.
Was Ewell ultimately punished since the military did indeed
find that these atrocities had taken place?
No, far from it. After Speedy Express, Ewell was hailed as a
hero. This was seen as a major victory. He was promoted to something called II
Field Force Vietnam, the largest combat command in the world at the time. And
from there he was promoted to become the military attache to the Paris peace
talks. This was probably the least peaceful man in the military and the one
least suited for the peace talks sent because what he'd done in Vietnam was
considered such a success.
Ewell's crimes were understood and known by Westmoreland and
other top officials. And instead of any effort to discipline or reign him him
he was promoted?
That's exactly right. Westmoreland had received a letter at
the end of Speedy Express from a soldier who had served within the division,
and seen what had gone on firsthand. And he just set this letter aside. And
this whistleblower wrote other letters to other top commanders, and eventually
the military looked like they were going to conduct a full investigation, or at
least begin one. They set about tracking down the whistleblower, and that's
where the trail kind of ends. You could see that they identified him, they were
going to make efforts to speak to him, and then shortly thereafter the
investigation was killed. Subsequent investigations into Speedy Express were
all suppressed, none of them ever made public. It was all disappeared.
What Newsweek had was the stuff of Pulitzers or
Congressional investigations.
Why did editors suppress it?
They kept pushing back on it. I've read the cable traffic
between Newsweek and Buckley, and they objected to him linking My Lai and
Speedy Express together. They said they felt the Army and the White House had
been through so much with the My Lai scandal, they didn't think it was fair to
put them through that type of thing again.
Poor babies.
Exactly. So what had been a 5,000-word article, a really
devastating piece of reporting, was truncated down to something around 1,800
words. And Julian Ewell's name wasn't even in the piece.
You write about many failures of journalism during and after
the war. Seymour Hersh nearly couldn't even find a publisher for his My Lai
investigation.
Yeah, Hersh took this story to Look magazine, Life magazine,
a whole bunch of publications. Nobody was interested. Some of these
publications had even heard about it previously from the whistleblower who got
the entire My Lai investigation started, Ron Ridenhour. Hersh finally had to
take it it to Dispatch News Service, which was a brand new, fledgling anti-war
news service. They were able to distribute it into the mainstream, but really
second tier newspapers. And it was only after it became public, and some photos
of My Lai were published, only then did the story really start to gain steam.
I always thought it was very telling that at the time the My
Lai massacre took place there were somewhere between 500 and 700 reporters in
Vietnam. But when it was reported in the US, it was just a major victory over
enemy forces: 128 enemies killed at a cost of no US lives. There was only a
handful of weapons collected, but nobody thought to ask any questions.
Basically the military press releases were just copied and put into the
newspapers. It took a reporter back in the US to finally break the story.
My Lai has become the single atrocity through which the bad
of the war is remembered. How did that happen, and what does that do to the way
we think about Vietnam?
It really gives a false impression of the war. Most
histories just distill down all discussion of Vietnamese civilian death and
civilian suffering to the My Lai massacre. Two things were atypical about it:
one, 500 civilians killed over a four hour period is an anomaly. But My Lai was
also an anomaly because it was the one war crime that was completely and
thoroughly investigated. Even the other investigations that I had in the files,
nothing is the scope of My Lai. It came to stand in for a lot of what was going
on in Vietnam. And after that, when other atrocity stories would come to light,
a lot of editors felt that it was old hat. We've heard about My Lai. We know
about that. The war was wrapping up and people weren't interested in revisiting
this.
In histories of the war, academics and scholars haven't
wanted to draw on what existed during the war, a fairly substantial anti-war
literature that talked about atrocities. Most of this was written off as
propaganda, and I think what seemed safe to talk about was My Lai. And because
Americans generally focus on the American side of the war, it made it easy to
do.
This seems like such a profound and outrageous failure on
the part of both reporters and academics. You write, it went from being
considered "propaganda and leftist kookery" one day to
"yawnworthy common knowledge" the next.
I think that was really the case. There was only a brief
window of opportunity, maybe one year in 1971, when it seemed that the issue of
war crimes and the issue of Vietnamese suffering was gaining some traction. The
military was having a tough time keeping a lid on it as it had done for years
before. But with the war wrapping up, Vietnam started to migrate off the front
pages. It was no longer leading the nightly news. The press seemed to be moving
on and a lot of people wanted the war to go away. And of course the military
had wanted this to go away to and took active steps to suppress the story
whenever it could.
You write that civilian support for the National Liberation
Front made such civilians legitimate targets as far as the US was concerned.
A lot of the places I talk about in the book, they were what
the US called "hardcore revolutionary areas" because of strong
nationalist revolutionary support. They and their allies in Saigon were never
able to win over the population in that countryside. The governments that had
ruled these areas for years, that represented the people, that provided the
services: this was the revolutionary government. They were inextricably tied to
the population. So they're unable to win them over, and they really couldn't
break that bond. All the US really had was firepower. They tried to drive the
people out of the countryside, to drive them into refugee camps. When people
would get driven into refugee camps, most didn't have adequate housing, there
wasn't potable water, there wasn't sufficient food. And they would filter back
to the countryside. It was easier to take your chance even amidst the firepower
and free fire zones than to try to eke out a living in one of these camps.
There was this explicit campaign to break the ties binding
Vietnamese people to their land, to drive them into cities. You quote a 1968
Foreign Affairs article by Samuel Huntington arguing that this, "forced
urbanization and modernization" was a good thing.
This was seen as the one means to break Vietnamese support
for the guerillas, to physically move the Vietnamese population. But the
Vietnamese were so tied to their land, tied to their rice fields. This is where
their ancestors were buried. And it's very important to Vietnamese to venerate
their ancestors. So people were very reluctant to move. The only thing they had
at their disposal was destructive force.
You write about the US troops widespread dismembering of Vietnamese
corpses. Why did this become such a common practice?
There are a lot of factors at play. Body count, and the way
to prove the body count was to bring in an ear. This was a practice in some
units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a beach
resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges.
In other cases, troops had this belief that Vietnamese
spirituality said that if the corpse wasn't intact, they wouldn't be able to
move into the afterlife. A lot of Americans would call it "Buddha
heaven." So they had this belief that dismembering Vietnamese would be a
form of psychological warfare. They would leave a "death card,"
either an ace of spades playing card or a specially made up, like a business
card, with the unit's name on it and generally some sort of grim motto
attached.
There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam.
Ears were worn on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some
guys wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears
and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit they were
cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it to the commander
got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had cut off a head and he
boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull for a radio.
Rape was also a weapon of war and an enormous number of Vietnamese women, including children, were forced into prostitution.
They were forced into catering to the US war machine one way
or another, and one of the prime ways was prostitution. A lot of girls who were
sent to it, their villages had been destroyed and they were forced into the
cities. And this was a way to provide for their families. The Americans had
lots of money to spend and these were young guys, 18, 19, 20 years old.
So it was this flourishing sex trade and then out in the
countryside there was what seems to be a tremendous amount of rape and sexual
assault.
What I found was extremely disturbing. I recount a few cases
where the sexual violence is really shocking. A lot of times I found myself, I
felt I didn't have the language to describe exactly what I found in the cases,
because rape or even gang rape didn't seem to convey the level of sexual
sadism. These are extremely violent gang rapes, or raping women with inanimate
objects like bottles or even rifles.
You write about an archipelago of American and South
Vietnamese prisons that practiced not only torture but also placed prisoners in
"tiger cages," small, submerged, windowless stone cells where they
were shackled to the floor. Guards would throw lime powder onto prisoners as
punishment.
The most infamous were at a prison island called Con Son.
There were men and women who were imprisoned for sometimes years on end without
ever being charged, let alone tried. And these were people who spoke out
against the government or spoke up for peace. They were sent to Con Son as
political prisoners and chained in these very tiny cells that had been built by
the French in the 19th century. There had been for years rumors about what had
gone on at Con Son, and it was only in the 1970s a US aid worker turned
activist was able to sneak a couple of American congressmen in to get a
first-hand look at these tremendously deplorable conditions.
When some tiger cage prisoners were released, a Time
magazine report said 'you can't really call them men anymore. They're more like
shapes.' They talk about them scuttling on the floor like crabs. If you watch
the video of it, that's really the case. It happened to women too. Lower-limb
paralysis from being chained so long in stress positions. They can no longer
stand and they had to crawl in a very unnatural way.
And the US was fully aware of this?
There were US advisors inside the entire prison system. Con
Son was the most infamous, but there were around 500 South Vietnamese detention
centers around the country, mostly set up by the Americans, paid for by the
Americans. The US also operated its own detention system on bases, where there
were military intelligence units that held prisoners for varying lengths of
time before they sent them on to joint American and South Vietnamese
facilities, and most of them ended up in strictly South Vietnamese facilities.
And torture and summary execution were common in US-run
facilities as well.
The anecdotal reports, and the few comprehensive
investigations, show that torture was widespread. Things like electrical
torture, water torture, what we now call waterboarding. And routine beatings.
Waterboarding, of course, has been at the center of the
controversy over the treatment of War on Terror detainees today. Are there
other parallels in your book? Does the US wage war differently than it did in
Vietnam?
I've studied today's wars fairly closely, and I have to say
that I don't think that the scale of killing of civilians by US forces is
anything near the scale of the carnage in Vietnam. I think specifically the
ways that artillery and airpower are used are radically different. That said,
civilians still die on a regular basis in our war zones, be it Iraq or
Afghanistan. Many of them due to violence set off by America's invasions and
occupations and the resulting civil strife. Then of course others have been
killed directly from US bombing, from helicopter gunships, troops on the
ground. And still more have been wounded and still more made refugees. And I
think that even despite the best efforts of the United Nations and some other
NGOs, we still don't have good numbers on the civilian toll. And I'm afraid
that if history is any guide it might be decades before someone is able to
really put together the real stories of these wars, let alone the semi-covert
campaigns in places like Pakistan and Yemen. So while I don't think it's as bad
as it was in Vietnam, I think it remains to be seen exactly what the toll of
these wars has been.
