War Without Fronts

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List of Maps

Introduction

CBS VIEWERS HAD probably been waiting for news of Apollo 12 and the return of American heroes from the second moon landing. And then it came: Walter Cronkite, the doyen of television journalists and according to various opinion polls the ‘most trustworthy man in America’, announced on 20 November 1969 that the evening news was possibly ‘not fit for a juvenile audience’. What followed was a slow camera movement over a series of colour photographs taken by an Army photographer in My Lai (4), showing a group of peasants shot dead on a field track: old people, women, children and babies, victims of C Company Task Force Barker, which on the morning of 16 March 1968 had attacked several villages in the Son My district and within a few hours had massacred 500 civilians.²

Four days later CBS broadcast on the Walter Cronkite Show an interview which Mike Wallace had conducted with one of the perpetrators, Paul Meadlo:

MEADLO: ‘I fired them on automatic, so you can’t – you just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed, ’cause they were going fast. I might have killed ten or fifteen of them.’

M: ‘And babies . . . And so we started shooting them, and somebody told us to switch to single shot so that we could save our ammo. So we switched to single shot, and fired a few more rounds.’ . . .

M: ‘Why did I do it? Because I felt like I was ordered to do it, and it seemed like that, at the time I felt like I was doing the right thing, because like I said I lost buddies . . . So after I done it, I felt good, but later on that day it was gettin’ to me.’

W: ‘Obviously, the question comes to mind – the father of two little kids like that – how can he shoot babies?’

M: ‘I didn’t have the little girl. I just had the little boy at the time.’

M: ‘Not while I was doing it. It just seemed like it was the natural thing to do at the time. I don’t know. It just – I was getting relieved from what I’d seen earlier over there.’

M: ‘Well, I was getting – like the – my buddies getting killed or wounded or – we weren’t getting no satisfaction from it, so what it really was, it was just mostly revenge.’³

Up to this point the American media had ignored the lives and deaths of Vietnamese civilians. Apart from a few exceptions that could be counted on the fingers of both hands,⁴ the civilians who had been killed by bombs or massacred by ground troops played no part in press, radio or television coverage – they were simply invisible. ‘We missed the big one. We surely did,’ Neil Sheehan from the New York Times observed self-critically, looking back at his year-long coverage.⁵ Whether it was the tradition of war journalism, which made heroes of the American soldiers, that decided the issue or whether there was a feeling of obligation to follow the line, promoted in February 1962 by the Departments of State and Defense, that reports of casualties amongst the Vietnamese civilian population ‘are clearly inimical to the national interest’⁶ is an open question.⁷

‘The policy is what they [the officers] say it is,’ maintained the Washington Post in mid August 1965 in an article entitled ‘Civilized Warfare’, which dealt with the operations of the Marine Corps and led to a comparison with the practices of the German armed forces in the Second World War. ‘Americans have no stomach for [it] . . . Thank goodness the Marines are not engaged in that kind of barbarism . . . The American military is well aware of the importance of protecting and safeguarding civilians whenever possible.’⁸ The reason for this tribute to the ‘humane, compassionate and gallant American Fighting Man’ was a Morley Safer film broadcast by CBS on 5 August 1965, which had shown the Marines burning down a village. The dissident Safer was treated the same way as other journalists who deviated from the firmly held policies of the mainstream. When, for example, shortly before Christmas 1966 Harrison E. Salisbury reported in the New York Times on the havoc wreaked by US bombers in North Vietnam, the relevant head of department accused him of irresponsible bias towards Hanoi and countered with several articles justifying Washington’s policies.⁹ Even in the wake of the Tet Offensive of January 1968, when the fighting entered its bloodiest phase and acts of terror against civilians increased rapidly, the human cost of the war was mentioned only in passing in the press, and on television virtually not at all.¹⁰

Instead, most of the media maintained the position they had championed from the start: that in Vietnam an outpost of the Free World would and must be defended – as could be seen from an analysis of thirty-nine daily newspapers carried out in February 1968, of which not a single one argued for a withdrawal from Vietnam.¹¹ Their criticism, which grew ever louder after Tet, was therefore directed not so much at the aims of the war, but rather at their implementation by the Johnson administration, which was perceived as inadequate. In other words, it was about disappointed expectations of victory, false promises of a speedy end to the fighting and the impression that personal sacrifices had been made in vain.¹² Because the suffering of others was of no interest, the transcripts of the ‘Russell Tribunal’, which took place in Stockholm in 1967 and provided proof of a military strategy that regularly contravened international laws of warfare, were generally ignored; as was the memorandum ‘In the Name of America’, which was presented shortly afterwards: a 420-page documentation of atrocities and war crimes in Vietnam, published by the organisation ‘Clergymen and Laymen Concerned’ and drawn up by twenty-nine Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clerics. ‘The energies of liberals and conservatives alike were devoted to discrediting its evidence,’ said the lawyer Richard Falk of this press boycott.¹³ As Clarence R. Wyatt asserted at the time, Vietnam was ‘in journalistic terms the most covered but least understood war in American history’.¹⁴

No attention was given even to the My Lai (4) massacre for a year and a half. In principle the accredited journalists in South Vietnam might easily have done so. Soldiers from various units circulated the story for months; Radio Hanoi repeatedly broadcast corroboratory reports; some reporters admitted later to having known about it.¹⁵ However, the majority of war reporters had, according to Peter Braestrup of the Washington Post, ‘subscribed to herd journalism’. They corroborated each other in the expectation that in the wake of Tet the war would be decided in the towns and lost sight of the rest of the country in their short-sighted rivalry for the most impressive ‘Saigon Stories’. ‘Competition between NBC and CBS seemed at times a contest over who could shout the same words more loudly . . . It was “news”, but not information.’¹⁶ Those few reporters who did not chase after feel-good stories nor were after rapid success to further their careers, but instead accompanied fighting troops on sorties, nonetheless did not remain critically detached from the objects of their coverage – partly because they marvelled at the courage and endurance of the soldiers, partly because they needed them for protection and partly because they feared for their own accreditation in the case of critical coverage.¹⁷ But those who fell into the trap of closing ranks subjected themselves inevitably to self-censorship, according to Neil Sheehan,¹⁸ regardless of any interest which their editors at home had in political patronage and how they made use of it.

It took an outsider, the thirty-one-year-old Seymour M. Hersh, to force the journalistic fraternity into action. After an apprenticeship at City News Bureau and a regional paper in his hometown of Chicago, in 1965 he became Pentagon correspondent for Associated Press and made a name for himself with articles on biological and chemical warfare. In 1968 Hersh took on the job of press spokesman for Eugene McCarthy, who ran for presidential candidate as a ‘peace senator’, but gave that up again shortly afterwards due to differences of political opinion. Convinced that he would have more problems than opportunities as an investigative reporter for the established papers, Hersh opted for freelance journalism – and in autumn 1969 this judgement was borne out in an unexpected manner.

At the beginning of September the public information office at Fort Benning had announced that one Lieutenant Calley was to be charged over the death of an ‘unknown number of civilians’ in My Lai (4). The newsflash was printed by Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and countless other national newspapers. But none of the editors commissioned further investigations – to the astonishment of the military, which had feared a vigorous inquiry.¹⁹ Hersh himself only learnt of the imminent military tribunal in October 1969 from a lawyer friend and from another contact in the Pentagon. ‘This Calley is just a madman, Sy, just a madman! He just went around killing all those people. Little babies! There’s no story in that. He’s just pathetic and should be locked up in an institution.’ Even a Congress employee advised him against investigating the supposed psychopath. ‘By this time I knew I had a story,’ remembers Hersh.²⁰

Furnished with $2,000 for travel expenses from the ‘Fund for Investigative Journalism’ – one of the foundations established by Sears-Roebuck heir Philip Stern – Hersh flew 30,000 kilometres in three weeks when making his initial inquiries, spoke for hours with William Calley and his barrister and in mid November 1969 came up with an article that correctly described the fundamentals of the My Lai (4) massacre. ‘I believed that kid [Calley] at My Lai and I know these guys are telling me the truth. There’s just no formula for sources.’²¹ Yet he was turned away everywhere. Look showed no interest and Life did not want to take the risk, although the editors had already been told about My Lai (4) by the former GI Ronald Ridenhour. Hersh received a negative reply from the New York Times and was brushed off by one editor as a ‘peddler’. ‘It was in effect part of the snobbery of the paper, as if it fancied itself above the fray, distant from events. Its reporters were not supposed to scurry around in dark alleys looking for corruption and injustice,’ says its longstanding reporter David Halberstam.²²

Hersh reached his goal only in a roundabout way via the previously insignificant Dispatch News Service. Its director presented the article to the public with a white lie: by getting the undecided and hesitant editors of fifty newspapers to believe that the competition might have already bitten and was on the point of pocketing single-handedly the credit for the scandal story. The rest virtually happened by itself. On 13 May 1969 thirty-six newspapers printed Hersh’s first article about My Lai (4); the New York Times and the Washington Post followed suit; the foreign press and the British government took up the subject. On 20 November Hersh published a second article, with the deliberately provocative headline ‘It Was Like A Nazi Thing’, and on the same day the shots taken by the Army photographer Ronald Haeberle in My Lai (4) appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer – the same photos which CBS presented in that day’s evening news to an audience of millions.

Seymour Hersh is rightly given the credit for single-handedly bringing to light one of the most frightful massacres that ever took place in Vietnam. Yet the repercussions of his initiative are still generally underestimated, for in the end the scandal spread far beyond the My Lai (4) story. The fact that historians today are in the position to describe events on the killing fields of Vietnam and thereby to present the profile of an asymmetrical war without front lines is due to a collection of source material which was only compiled under the impact of the public discussion provoked by Hersh – material which no one working individually could ever have discovered and which might well have been too much even for research groups to put together. From the beginning of 1970 the Department of Defense had these reports compiled, in a bureaucratic panic attack, in order to weather a public controversy, through which it was apparently no longer able to steer its way with the usual means of political damage limitation.

To begin with, the leading media reacted to the initial shellshock with questions which for the majority of the public were just as disturbing as the pictures from Vietnam. ‘My Lai is a token of the violence that hovers beneath the surface of American life: where else, and in what ways will it next erupt?’ commented Time. Did the military strategy pursued in Vietnam encourage the mass murder of civilians? To what extent can society be held responsible for the behaviour of its soldiers? ‘They were Everymen, decent in their daily lives.’ Was the population of the United States morally insensitive? Was violence as American as the Stars and Stripes? ‘When the Kerner Commission²³ suggested that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with “Who, me?” protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history.’ Was the mental mobilisation of the Cold War, during which people lived in a permanent state of tension, now exacting its price? ‘How much injustice and corruption distort the reality of democracy that the U.S. offers to the world? The answers are debatable; the questions are not.’²⁴ Regardless of whether or not the self-image America had cultivated since its foundation – that of a ‘redeemer nation’ chosen by God to fight for salvation – was a delusion,²⁵ and no matter how many ‘My Lais’ there had actually been, the country stood at a crossroads. As Jonathan Schell wrote in the New Yorker in mid December 1969: ‘If we learn to accept this, there is nothing we will not accept.’²⁶

In addition, prominent politicians, amongst them a notable number of conservatives as well as community activists, demanded a say in the My Lai inquiry. Instead of the official military prosecutor, a so-called ‘Blue Ribbon Panel’ – a non-partisan commission, independent of government and bureaucracy – should be convened and commissioned, not just to look into the background to the massacre, but also to investigate the question of whether the military strategy followed in Vietnam was compatible with the letter and the spirit of international laws governing warfare. Since the end of November 1969, Senators John Stennis and Margaret Chase Smith, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and a group of former employees of the State Department, together with thirty-four well-known practising and academic lawyers, had expressed themselves along the same lines.²⁷

From today’s perspective this might seem an obvious demand. Yet the White House under Richard Nixon sensed a general attack on the competence of the Executive. General Alexander Haig, deputy to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, said, ‘I can think of nothing worse than assembling a group of high-level civilians to look into the ethics of conducting military operations . . . Military discipline [and] the effectiveness of our military [would be] seriously damaged.’²⁸ Kissinger himself rejected the suggestion on other grounds: ‘I suspect it [the Blue Ribbon Commission] would tend to prolong public interest in the incident which has, hopefully, already passed its peak.’ On the other hand he drew attention to the unpredictability of the situation and told President Nixon,

There is one dangerous trend which may build that would reverse my judgement on this matter, however. This is the possibility that other Vietnam veterans will publicize additional atrocities in an effort to achieve personal notoriety or because this incident has created real or imagined recollections of similar incidents. Should the situation develop over the coming weeks in which a series of additional accusations appear then I believe you will be forced to resort to a commission of the type proposed.²⁹

What Kissinger had feared did indeed occur: scarcely had the first newspaper articles about My Lai (4) appeared than former members of the unit based there³⁰ as well as dozens of other GIs went public and produced evidence of crimes that they wanted to be understood as the rule rather than the exception in Vietnam.³¹ The ‘National Committee for a Citizens’ Commission of Inquiry on United States War Crimes in Vietnam’ – CCI for short – was the hub for collecting and disseminating this evidence. Set up in December 1969 by anti-war activists and well-known intellectuals in reaction to the news over My Lai (4), ³² the CCI and its coordinator Jeremy Rifkin held public hearings for Vietnam veterans across the United States, and with the help of their evidence lobbied Congress to establish independent inquiries or to set up an international tribunal under the patronage of the United Nations. At the CCI‘s invitation 200 former Vietnam servicemen reported over the course of the following months on their experiences in different units and in all parts of Vietnam.³³

Nevertheless the biggest stir was created neither by the CCI nor by initiatives like the closely linked ‘Concerned Officers Movement’³⁴ but by ‘Vietnam Veterans Against the War’, an association of several thousand servicemen formerly based in Vietnam, which was brought into being in 1967.³⁵ At the end of January 1971 it held the historic ‘Winter Soldiers’ hearing in Detroit. (The name referred to the troops loyal to George Washington who, in their camp at Valley Forge in 1776, had not allowed themselves to be scared off by either the superior numbers of British troops or the impact of a hard winter.) In the course of three days 150 witnesses described what they had seen or had themselves done in Vietnam. They reported on rapes, on the random murder of civilians, on water and electric torture, on the custom of ripping out the gold teeth of slaughtered enemies, cutting off their heads and limbs or other mutilation; they claimed that captured Viet Cong were used as mine dogs or thrown from flying helicopters, that surplus ammunition was used for target practice on peasants in the fields or in settlements; they spoke of a scorched-earth policy reminiscent of the practices of Genghis Khan or, to be more precise, the premeditated annihilation of all means of livelihood – and repeatedly of the mass execution of bystanders. ‘On this bloody canvas,’ wrote Life correspondents, ‘the massacre at My Lai emerges not as an isolated aberration but as an extension of all that had gone before and was going on at the time, different in only two respects: the large number of civilians killed, and the fact that men were caught and brought to trial.’³⁶

Admittedly the Winter Soldiers were suspected of pursuing sensationalism by questionable means. Because most of the witnesses refused to name the perpetrators, instead placing prime responsibility on the political and military leadership, some critics cast doubt on the fundamental credibility of their statements. It also happened that a handful of participants testified under false names.³⁷ And finally, on one interview tape a prominent Winter Soldier, Mark Lane, had recorded a number of GIs who had either not been stationed in Vietnam or served in different units from the ones they claimed to have been in.³⁸ On the other hand, the organisers of the Detroit hearing could point to the predominant number of trustworthy witnesses and, with the legal adviser Ramsey Clark (formerly attorney general under Lyndon B. Johnson) and their spokesman John F. Kerry, summon up representatives who cut an impressive figure on any stage. In mid April 1971, when Kerry brought the results of the various hearings before the Senate Committee for International Affairs, he was met with spontaneous applause from the chairman J. William Fulbright and the five other members present. According to one Army observer, ‘Mr Kerry’s intensity prompted the Chairman to urge him not to lose confidence in the political system because of the “errors in judgement” of some of those within the system . . . The Committee members were sympathetic to Mr Kerry’s views; Senator Pell opined that the witness would become one of his “colleagues” in the Senate.’³⁹ From that point of view, the Winter Soldiers, like all other veterans who were willing to testify, represented an incalculable hidden risk. And the Army had to steel itself as far as possible against a multitude of possible revelations – particularly since President Nixon did not want to commission an independent board of inquiry and therefore gave the management of the crisis to the Pentagon alone.

On 11 December 1969 Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird called on the minister responsible for each branch of the armed forces to put together all the accusations of atrocities and war crimes which had been made publicly and in the press, to initiate relevant inquiries and to report regularly and in full on the state of the investigations.⁴⁰ To this end the Army set up a working group solely dedicated to this task – the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG), initially a political early-warning device and, at the end of its four-year activity, the Pentagon’s institutional memory for all war-crime matters. Based on media reports and the publications of veteran organisations, the members of VWCWG drew up monthly – and sometimes weekly – ‘talking papers’ to offer briefing for statements to the press and for background discussions with politicians and journalists – with occasional tips on how to shake the credibility of critics, in particular of former officers. Moreover, all the investigations carried out or still pending between 1970 and 1974 were documented in the form of ‘central files’ and ‘war crimes allegations case files’. By using the records of the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army and the Judge Advocate General’s office, there was thus created the most extensive archive about American war crimes in Vietnam, comprising about 10,000 pages in which – excluding the massacre of My Lai (4) – 246 cases and accusations against several hundred suspects are documented.⁴¹

After a twenty-year waiting period, the records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were handed over to the National Archives in College Park, Maryland in 1994. Strangely enough, historians have up to now hardly made any use of this archive, which can only be described as a gold mine.⁴² This is the first book published anywhere in the world which uses this material to reconstruct both the daily grind of war in Vietnam and the political and legal handling of war crimes.⁴³ The present worry is that in the foreseeable future interested parties will only have restricted access to the sources. The mania for secrecy of the George W. Bush administration did not stop even at documents released long ago. When, in the aftermath of the new Balkan wars in 2000, a debate was started over sexual violence in wartime and whether it should be punished under international or military law,⁴⁴ many records of rape during the Vietnam war were conspicuously blocked or ‘reclassified’ without further explanation. Since 2004 it has only been possible to view parts of the remaining files of the VWCWG, on the pretext of data protection. This is particularly directed at the interrogation reports prepared by various investigating authorities of the armed forces, in which not just the name but also the social security number of the suspected perpetrators were routinely noted. It remains to be seen whether the archives administration provides the means and the staff to black out the incriminating information and eventually make unhindered access possible again. There is also a legal argument as to whether under the Freedom of Information Act access to the full records really can be denied in such cases.

Unrestrictedly available, however, are the records of the Peers Commission, an Army investigating committee set up shortly before the establishment of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, which similarly owes its existence to the impact of the My Lai (4) scandal. Its remit was originally only to clarify the internal cover-up of the massacre, but the chairman of the commission, General William R. Peers, won his demand for a detailed reconstruction of the event. Apart from My Lai (4) and Task Force Barker, which was responsible for the massacre, on Peers’s instructions several dozen researchers assembled extensive dossiers on the type, extent and dynamics of excessive violence in Vietnam, on the history of the units involved, their composition, training and battle experience, as well as on the thinking of the officer corps – to name just a few aspects of their investigations. The records, which fill over a hundred archive boxes and are an essential resource for any historical approach to the war, I have analysed systematically for the present task. In March and April 1970 Peers handed in his four-volume final report to the Defense Department: an annotated summary of the material and 500 pieces of written evidence, together with statements given by over 400 witnesses to the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and the investigators appointed by Peers himself. These four volumes, which became universally accessible in 1975 and were published in shortened form in 1979,⁴⁵ are an integral part of all relevant accounts of the My Lai (4) massacre.⁴⁶ However, historians have up to now ignored the complete documentation of the Peers Commission.

Based on the records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the Peers Commission, as well as a multitude of corresponding sources, this study focuses on a hitherto neglected perspective on the Vietnam War. The vast majority of the accounts published in the past forty years are studies devoted to the writing of political history and therefore concerned with administrative decision-making processes, diplomatic manoeuvring and the global strategic framework of the Cold War.⁴⁷ Or, influenced by the so-called ‘cultural turn’ in international history, they address the cultural and psychological side of events, ranging from memories of the war and its aesthetic presentation and ‘coding’ in the media, literature and film, to those traumatised by war, returning veterans or protagonists on the home front. One could argue that in general the war is written about without being actually described as such.⁴⁸ In contrast this book attempts to decode the often repeated claim that in Vietnam ‘there was more of it’ and to inquire into the conditions and manifestations of a violence that can be neither described nor comprehended with the customary rhetoric about brutality common to all wars.

‘There was more of it in Vietnam.’ At the heart of this book are the wartime atrocities and war crimes committed by the ground troops. To be more precise, acts of violence which were carried out in close proximity to the victims and in the full knowledge of their identity. We are talking of attacks on the physical inviolability of non-combatants or those no longer involved in fighting – torture, rape, murder and mutilation. The victims are not tormented, abused or murdered from an anonymous distance, are not harmed by aerial weapons and bombs but move in sight of the perpetrators and frequently come face to face with them. The international laws governing warfare – from the Hague Convention on the conduct of land warfare to the various Geneva Conventions – address primarily, though not exclusively, this type of violence. It can neither be brushed off as ‘collateral damage’ nor excused as the unintentional price of operations, nor is it aimed at the troops, logistics or material resources of the enemy. This is violence committed outside the theatres of war and beyond the hostilities, where the perpetrators do not fight like soldiers but slaughter like cowardly marauders. Because they do not accept any front lines, they regularly, if not systematically, extend the area of operations to the civilian population and shrink as little from attacks on individuals as from group massacres.

In an analysis of this unlimited violence, situational circumstances deserve particular attention: factors which cannot be understood by referring to strategic planning, goal-driven intentions or deliberate calculations. It goes without saying that the conduct of a war reflects the doctrinal and operational premises conceived by military leaders and endorsed by politicians. For this reason it is crucial that the roles of the masters of war in the White House and the generals in the Pentagon should be considered in as much depth as the behaviour of the officers who were in tactical command in the field and who put strategic policy into effect at operational level. On the other hand, wars follow a logic of their own, a dynamic dictated by chance, unpredictability and chaos. This truism has been borne out empirically in all armed conflicts since early history – a theory spelt out, effectively as ever, by Clausewitz. His dictum on the ‘frictions of war’ can be applied especially to asymmetrical conflicts, in which the combatants fight not only with fundamentally different means but also with a diametrically opposed understanding of warfare. In addition, if a war like that in Vietnam is conducted over a wide area by small groups which act for days or weeks on their own initiative and consequently often without any control, further opportunities for the exercise of excessive violence arise. This is not to imply that the increased chances to commit deeds of violence were inevitably seized; it is more a question of specific ‘windows of opportunity’, in which such deeds were decided and acted upon. In short, in analysing these deeds and decisions it is more appropriate to look at contingent factors rather than to assume what might be expected or indeed what might be regarded as logical behaviour.

It is impossible to gauge accurately the extent of excess violence in Vietnam or the numbers of servicemen stationed there who were involved directly or indirectly. Efforts have been repeatedly made to estimate the number of victims and culprits. Guenter Lewy draws an analogy with criminal statistics from the late 1960s, according to which the US police were only informed about half of the violent crimes which were actually committed in the United States. He implies that, in similar vein, the figure for crimes committed in Vietnam could be twice as high as the number of criminal investigations undertaken by the military.⁴⁹ However much this comparison might appeal, it loses all validity in the face of one banal fact: in the case of Vietnam we lack reference data. Nowhere in the American military were accounts kept of submitted findings, pending investigations, or ongoing or completed military trials, so no analogies with the civilian crime rate can be drawn. Other authors refer to surveys of soldiers and point out that between ten and twelve per cent of those questioned acknowledged their culpability and thirty-three per cent had supposedly witnessed specific offences.⁵⁰ How this data was gathered, however, and whether it is representative, even if only approximately, is not discussed. Any attempt to search military reports for evidence would be completely pointless. Quite apart from the fact that culprits did not report of their own free will, no one was responsible for the scrutiny of action and after-action reports. They were without exception drawn up in the certainty that striking contradictions and inconsistencies would not come to light – not even subsequent deliberate falsification or destruction of files. To give just one example, countless references in the official archives of the units responsible for My Lai (4) should have given rise to suspicion – but no records indicate that the obvious questions had been asked, let alone examined for validity.

In addition, a number of factors restrict the reach and usefulness of the available sources. Firstly, the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the Peers Commission concentrated exclusively on cases which had already been scrutinised by the appropriate military authorities. It is as difficult to answer conclusively why, out of hundreds of allegations, 244 were selected for the opening of the judicial inquiry, as it is to ask on what grounds only a scant half of those who were allegedly involved were brought before a court of law. Secondly, the vast majority of the reports focus on two of the four war zones – on the I Corps Tactical Zone in the north of South Vietnam and on the IV Corps Tactical Zone in the south. This leads undoubtedly to a corresponding narrowing of perception. On the other hand, these areas were key strategic zones in the war: in the northern provinces there were supply lines, deployment areas and political strongholds for the Viet Cong; in the provinces near the capital Saigon the fighting was over a symbolic presence and the claim of both sides to be in control. Third and last, the records relevant for our purposes cover only four of the ten war years – the period from summer 1967, when the heaviest battles in the I and IV Corps Tactical Zones began, to the withdrawal of American combat troops, which was already in full swing in spring 1971.

No further information can be expected to come out of Vietnam itself. Even the interviewing of actual witnesses there comes up against tightly defined political restrictions. As was made clear to journalists who recently tried to obtain reports of recollections of well-known events such as My Lai (4), this examination of the past has no place in the present – out of consideration for the real or supposed sensitivity of Vietnam’s trading partner, the United States. In a society in which approximately sixty-five per cent of the population was born in the last years of the war or shortly after it ended, it will in any case soon be pointless to search for people with reliable first-hand memories of these events. Little is known about the type or extent of written records. Whether they will ever be made available for historical research freely and without prior amendment or censorship is a legitimate concern, for looking into the escalating violence of this war would in the final analysis involve addressing the atrocities meted out to their own people – in other words, attacks that can be ascribed probably in equal measure to the South Vietnamese Army on the one side and to the guerrillas and the North Vietnamese armed forces on the other.⁵¹

Regardless of how much data and factual evidence may come to light in the future, these will only be isolated examples, revealing in detail but unsuitable for drawing conclusions on the whole. Yet leaving aside these unavoidable limitations, the following picture can be pieced together for the most heavily contested regions of the I and IV Corps Tactical Zones between summer 1967 and spring 1971.

‘I want no prisoners. The more you kill and burn, the more it will please me. Make the interior of Sama a howling wilderness.’⁵⁴ With these orders Brigadier Jacob Smith sent American troops on their way against resisting Filipinos in 1899. Records indicate that similar orders were given in King Philip’s War and in the battle against the natives of New England in the early days of settlement, or at the time of the French and Indian War in the mid eighteenth century, when settler militia and soldiers loyal to the British Crown fell back on the guerrilla tactics of the Indian tribes, who were intermittently allies but at times cooperated with the French. Seen like this, Vietnam was a case of déjà-vu – a return to the scenario of an asymmetrical war. The principles and conduct of asymmetrical wars are discussed in Chapters 1 (‘Masters of War’) and 2 (‘Generals’), in particular the key feature of such confrontations: that the adversaries in the end make use of symmetrical means and that both sides try to force the issue by using terrorism against all who are suspected of collaboration with the enemy.⁵⁵ Yet Vietnam was more than an example of the immutable expansion of the battle zone into civilian areas. Here one can study how the imperatives of the global Cold War overlaid a regional conflict and released a particular dynamic owing to the circumstances of the time. Hence Brigadier Smith’s successors did not just represent his spirit in a different guise.

In this context two problems require independent discussion: why did the US Army conduct the guerrilla war in Vietnam with a strategy designed for conventional war, thus opening the way for additional radicalisation? And why did the political leadership itself see no exit options, even when it became aware that its policies were doomed to failure? The oft-quoted references to ignorance, self-deception and wishful thinking are inadequate explanations for either the conduct of the military or the politicians. It makes no sense to talk of ‘drifting’ into war or of fatal misperceptions. On the contrary, here were elites who had access to clear evaluations of the situation and many alternative courses of action. With the support of the bureaucratic machine at their disposal, they might have been able to strike out on another course – without political damage or other danger to their own careers. Where does this inflexibility come from, this reluctance and ultimately this incapacity for self-correction – in short, this policy of being unable to stop?

The answers, which are outlined in Chapters 1 and 2, point towards an interpretation of American foreign and military policy during the Cold War and therefore go beyond the subject of Vietnam. They start with the ideological twins of the Cold War – the domino theory and the picture of Communism as a monolithic block – go into the connection between ‘imperial presidency’ and political self-blockade and introduce the ‘institutional crisis’ of the US Army – an Army which for a long time found no place in its doctrine for the concept of a ‘small war’ overshadowed by nuclear weapons, and which saw Vietnam as an opportunity to enhance both its prestige and its institutional weight in competition with the other branches of the armed forces. Above all else, as Barbara Tuchman put it, it is a question of the way in which a policy that focused on political and personal credibility was applied under Cold War conditions and in the end fell into a self-made credibility trap.⁵⁶

The implementation of overall political and military policy depends to a great extent on the behaviour of those involved at the middle level: those officers who are responsible for leading the troops, for planning, implementation and especially control of military operations. Here we need to focus on the ‘kings in the field’, as the brigade, battalion and company commanders in the US Army were called – an allusion to their traditionally wide discretionary powers and corresponding tendency towards autonomous, if not autocratic, decisions. In former wars their special position had never been perceived as a problem; in Vietnam it soon proved to be a burden. On the one hand, because of the crying need for non-commissioned officers men were brought in who could not match up to the requisite criteria either by training or character and in other circumstances would scarcely have been promoted from the bottom ranks. On the other hand, a disproportionate number of officers at captain, major and lieutenant-colonel level were sent out to Vietnam for one reason: to solve a lack of promotion opportunities in an officer corps which had been overblown since the mid 1950s. Thus a large number of the unqualified were joined by a no less sizeable group of the uninterested, who saw their grotesquely short six-month term primarily from the viewpoint of individual career management. The disparaging talk of the ‘Vietnam Only Army’ or the ‘Shake and Bake Army’ reflects this staffing policy and its serious consequences.

Officers and non-commissioned officers contributed greatly to the escalation of violence against non-combatants. Silent tolerance towards the perpetrators played as much of a role as active backing, complicity or collaboration. Apart from the well-documented relevant case studies, Chapter 3 (‘Officers’) also discusses the causes of leadership breakdown. I will argue that the roots of this evil lay not so much in poor preparation or inadequate contact with the troops. Officers were criticised with good reason: they were not necessarily unable to contain excessive violence but rather, they had no problem with it. This is already obvious from their understanding of the ‘Rules of Engagement’. These rules were certainly open to interpretation and, if in doubt, made it possible to put the imperative of ‘military necessity’ before the principle that civilians should be protected. But the fact that in practice all loop-holes were exploited and regulations dealing with exceptions became binding rules reflects an endemic contempt for international military law. The particular circumstances had another repercussion: it seems the decision to give the troops a free hand and to tolerate their overstepping the limits was also considered a means to calm the rage and need for revenge of overtaxed GIs. Above all, many commanding officers were personally committed to a strategy of aggressive war unfettered by scruples. Because their success was measured in a ‘body count’ balance sheet and future promotion depended on a positive assessment in Vietnam, in the end it did not matter by what ways and means the desired ‘kill ratios’ were reached. Seen like this, it is not so much a question of ‘leadership breakdown’, as persistently putting into practice a specific concept of leadership.

War Without Fronts

The USA in Vietnam

Bernd Greiner

Translated from the German by Anne Wyburd with Victoria Fern

List of Maps

Introduction