The Atrocity Lessons: What the U.S. Military Learned From Vietnam

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/21/the-atrocity-lessons-what-the-us-military-learned-from-vietnam.html

The Atrocity Lessons: What the U.S. Military Learned From Vietnam
Feb 21, 2013 4:45 AM EST
By Jake Whitney

In March 1969, American helicopters flying over a western part of South Vietnam spotted a group of Vietnamese cutting wood. Circling the group, the Americans grew angry when none of the woodcutters looked up. But the Vietnamese had good reason. American policy held that if a Vietnamese looked at a hovering chopper, he must be Viet Cong. The Americans began dropping canisters of tear gas, which ignited a blaze. When the woodcutters turned to flee, the Americans blasted away with rockets and machine guns, leveling the forest and killing all but one of them.



Smoke rises from burning villages as a Junker 52 from the French Air Force drops its load of 100-pound bombs over suspected Communist Viet Minh positions on March 16, 1951, some 100 miles north of Hanoi.

The eight dead Vietnamese were recorded as "enemy killed in action" by the Americans, but an investigation revealed that the group was solely unarmed civilians, a woman and a child among them. Nevertheless, no American was punished for their murders. Why? The soldiers were simply following policy, which said that if Vietnamese ran, they must be Viet Cong.

Nick Turse uses the woodcutters' story to develop the signal themes of his book, Kill Anything That Moves that American atrocities happened everywhere in Vietnam and often without provocation, that Pentagon policy was the primary cause, and that most civilian deaths were the result of a reckless overuse of modern weaponry. Turse has received wide acclaim for revealing the vast extent of American atrocities and for obliterating the notion that "a few bad apples" were responsible. He tells of Americans shelling entire provinces, searching for a single sniper; using civilians for target practice; and committing mass shootings, rapes, corpse mutilations, and disfiguring children with napalm and phosphorus bombs.

While many of these stories are told sparsely, others are recounted in excruciating detail by a surviving victim. There's the story of Bui Thi Huong, for example, who was 18 years old in 1966 when Marines ransacked her home. After five soldiers gang-raped her, they shot her and her sick husband and four other family members, including their 3-year-old son and a 5-year-old girl. As the Marines covered up the scene, they discovered the 5-year-old still breathing, so one soldier lifted his rifle and, as the others counted in unison, smashed her with the butt until she died.