Hi cnyndwllr; Re "But I do believe that atrocities were common in Vietnam and the basis for that belief is not solely based on "gossip." I think that war was tailor made to create a climate that virtually guaranteed that atrocities would commonly occur. Part of my belief is based on common sense, part is based on the "rumors" and "gossip" you reference, and part is based upon my knowledge of the command climate of our leaders in Vietnam and the attitudes of the men I served with there."
My belief is based on the historical fact that any EVERY WAR everyone ALWAYS misstimates the number of prevalence of attrocities. Humans are gossipy creatures who like to talk about sex and violence. Stories get repeated that have little connection to the true situation.
Just because you personally experienced the war doesn't mean that you know what went on in it. The soldiers who talked about the massive numbers of attrocities committed during WW1 were just as convincing and convinced as you are now.
There were something around 300,000 civilian deaths in South Vietnam during the war. The war lasted about 10 years. That's about 30,000 per year. A lot of those were killed by the other side. US peak deployment to Vietnam came to something around 500,000 men, or maybe a total of 3 million man years. So even if you ignore the Vietnamese civilians killed by BOTH the South and North Vietnamese, even if you ignore those killed by air power, the typical US serviceman killed about 0.1 Vietnamese civilian per year. Expand the figures by taking at face value what the North Vietnamese claimed and you can inflate these figures slightly, but they just don't add up to a lot of attrocities.
If you want to see war reports that involve a lot of attrocities, go back and read what happened in various ancient conflicts. Every now and then the soldiers were ordered to "put to the sword" the ENTIRE population of cities that resisted seiges.
By the way, civilians deaths in North Vietnam were also about 300,000. I suppose most of them would have been accounted for by US air power, but that sort of thing isn't called "attrocity".
-- Carl
P.S. Here's a reference:
Since that piece was printed, the Kennedy subcommittee has received final, complete data on hospital admissions within South Vietnam for 1970, on the basis of which the subcommittee staff now estimates civilian casualties for 1970 to have been between 125,000 and 150,000, of which between 25,000 and 35,000 were killed. This brings the subcommittee's estimates of total civilian casualties from 1965 through 1970 to 1.1 million, including from 325,000 to 335,000 killed.
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