Military Barbarism

Brutality in war is like a contagious disease, it spreads and infects previously healthy-minded individuals. This article by the military historian, Max Hastings reviews a book by Howard Jones that gives a full account of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War by American marines.

Hastings brings to us some home-truths that many would like to avoid facing.

 "...the unique selling-point of soldiers, even if tarted up in fancy-dress uniforms and bearskins, is that they are trained killers..."

‘The only thing they told us about the Vietcong was they were gooks,’ army private Reg Edwards said. ‘They were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill.’ 

Phil Caputo, one of the first Marines to land in Vietnam in 1965, wrote in his ' A Rumour of War',"Before you leave here, sir, you’re going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average 19-year-old American boy."

Doug Ramsey said that during his own terrible seven-year jungle imprisonment by the Vietcong ‘my worst moment was when I was taken into a hamlet that the Americans had just worked over’ – and utterly destroyed. ‘The hamlet chief said: “Here is your American aid.”’

"The British army for years sustained a legend that it achieved success in its colonial ‘brushfire wars’ through the efforts of kindly Tommies in winning hearts and minds...British soldiers, in fact, displayed frequent brutality, often condoned by their officers. In all of Britain’s counterinsurgency campaigns, especially in Kenya, substantial numbers of unlawful killings of civilians took place"

"Consider the recent case of a Royal Marine sergeant convicted of killing a wounded prisoner, recorded on his helmet camera. His sentence was commuted following an outcry. It was almost certainly wrong to convict him of murder, rather than of manslaughter, but I remain troubled by the reflection that, if his defence of extreme stress had been offered by a Taliban fighter who had killed a wounded British prisoner, it seems questionable whether it would have been found acceptable."

"In a typical two-week search-and-destroy operation in August 1967, codenamed Operation Benton, soldiers of Task Force Oregon destroyed the homes of more than ten thousand Vietnamese. In an area just six miles by 13, US forces dropped 282 tons of bombs and 116 tons of napalm. Fixed-wing aircraft fired more than a thousand rockets, 132,820 rounds of 20mm cannon ammunition and 119,350 7.62mm rounds, while artillery fired 8488 rounds. Around 640 refugees were evacuated to government camps. Commanders declared an enemy body count of 397, but it is unlikely that anything like that number were communists bearing arms."

Of the murderous events of My Lai itself,  "...far from representing a momentary homicidal impulse by one man or a small group of men, the killings proved to have continued over several hours, and at least forty of C Company’s 105 men participated. None made any attempt to stop others killing villagers, or gang-raping women before murdering them. ‘I just lost all sense of direction, of purpose,’ one soldier, Varnado Simpson, said later. ‘I just started killing in any kind of way I could kill. I didn’t know I had it in me.’ One of the first of those he shot was a child; after that, he said, ‘My whole mind just went.’

On 14 March a patrol of C Company had triggered a booby trap that killed two men, tore the legs off two more and injured another two. Soldiers angry at the casualties saw a woman working in the fields. Private Greg Olsen wrote to his father describing what happened: They shot and wounded her. Then they kicked her to death and emptied their magazines in her head. They slugged every little kid they came across. Why in God’s name does this have to happen? These are all seemingly normal guys; some were friends of mine. For a while they were like wild animals. It was murder, and I’m ashamed of myself for not trying to do anything about it. This isn’t the first time, Dad. I’ve seen it many times before."

My Lai there was an institutionalised cover-up. 

The task force’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, dismissed reports of an atrocity‘It was tragic that we killed these women and children,’ he said, ‘but it was in a combat situation’ brushing aside the implausibility of the 1/20th Infantry’s initial claims to have killed 128 enemy combatants while not recovering a single weapon. 

23rd Division staff officer Major Colin Powell, later the US secretary of state, produced a memorandum for the adjutant-general which was an uncompromising whitewash: ‘Although there may be isolated cases of mistreatment of civilians and POWs this by no means reflects the general attitude throughout the division. In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.

Hastings points out "The My Lai massacre has come to symbolise all that was worst about the US armed forces’ conduct of the war. The lieutenant stretched the truth when he asserted that he was ‘just following orders’, but he could legitimately assert that the killings reflected a culture of casual murder, a racial contempt for Vietnamese, which infected many US units and their commanders...the institutionalised cover-up and the surge of public support for those who carried out the offences, make even uglier reading than the narrative

of the original massacre. The apologists for C Company, and indeed for the US army, tried to make a case that, while it may not have been entirely acceptable to murder Vietnamese peasants, it was understandable and excusable."

Hastings article concludes with the observation, "We need to keep reading about My Lai for the same reason we must continue to struggle to understand the men who carried out the Holocaust: only by acknowledging how low men can sink in wars..."