Military Review English Edition March-April 2014 | Page 76

There were, of course, atrocities committed by
U.S. troops, the most notable being the My Lai massacre on 16 March 1968, when a company from the
Americal Division shot hundreds of unarmed men,
women, and children. The division suppressed the
bloody episode for over a year. When the massacre
was finally revealed, there was a feeding frenzy
by the Western media, especially the Americans.
Soon the whole world knew about it. 1st Lt. William Calley was held responsible, court-martialed,
convicted, and sentenced to life in prison for the
crime (due to political pressure, he was eventually
pardoned).
The rules of engagement issued by the Military
Assistance Command Vietnam strictly forbade the
killing of unarmed civilians or prisoners of war.
This was and is an official policy of the United
States. Guenter Lewy, in his classic America in
Vietnam, one of the best documented, most reliable,
and most even-handed of the countless books on
Vietnam, notes, “Yet despite the pressure for a high
enemy casualty toll, most soldiers in Vietnam did
not kill prisoners or intentionally shoot unarmed
villagers. Violations of the law of war in this regard
were committed by individuals in violation of existing policy.”2 Lewy notes that from January 1965 to
March 1973, 201 Army personnel were convicted
of serious offenses against Vietnamese, and for
the same offense, 77 marines were convicted from
March 1965 to August 1971.
Even iconic anti-war activist Daniel Ellsberg
rejected the idea that incidents like My Lai happened all the time. He wrote, “My Lai was beyond
the bounds of permissible behavior, and that is recognizable by virtually every soldier in Vietnam.”3
Without doubt, there were cases of civilians
being killed or wounded in contested areas or areas
under enemy control for being suspected of causing
American casualties by planting mines, using poisoned pungi sticks, or otherwise aiding the enemy.
A number of civilians were also the unintended
victims of “collateral damage” by artillery or air
strikes, or simply by being caught in a firefight in
populated areas. Some U.S. troops were also accidentally killed or wounded. Lewy notes that “the
tendency on the part of all too many newspaper and
television reporters and editors was to see the war
in Vietnam as an atrocity writ large, and specific
incidents reported therefore were widely accepted
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as true,” when there was little evidence.4 The media
looked for stories that put our forces or our Vietnamese allies in a bad light. I certainly found this
to be true when I served in Vietnam.
One should point out that Isaacs did not begin
reporting on Vietnam until after U.S. ground
combat forces had been removed from Vietnam,
and Turse, who was born in 1975, relied entirely

The tendency on the part of all
too many newspaper and television
reporters and editors was to see
the war in Vietnam as an atrocity
writ large, and specific incidents
reported therefore were widely
accepted as true, when there was
little evidence. – Guenter Lewy

on declassified and other documents, which I know
from experience are not always reliable.
To his credit, Isaacs does fault Turse for onesidedness in his attacks “. . . except for a single
mention” of the 1968 Hue massacre, “he says nothing about Communist conduct at all.”
Not long after I arrived in Vietnam, two young
women, a nurse and a teacher in a village near
Saigon, were executed by the Vietcong (VC)
for being a government presence in the village.
I sensed from this single incident that ours was
a “noble cause” (as Ronald Reagan declared in
1980). From 1957 to 1972, 36,775 South