Carl, re: Just because you personally experienced the war doesn't mean that you know what went on in it.
Of course you're right. That's the whole point of this discussion. If any of us knew what the true picture was with regard to atrocities in Vietnam, or had any way of finding the truth, we wouldn't have to base our opinions on bits and pieces of incomplete data. That's our only basis for our opinions, however, unless we say, as many do, that "there's no PROOF," and bask in the warmth of our cultivated ignorance. Neither you nor I have taken that path and I suspect that this is a good place to summarize where I think we've gone thus far.
My opinion that atrocities were common is based on my knowledge of the command climate in Vietnam, the "body count" mentality that the men that fought the war developed, the proximity of civilian populations to angry, frightened men who suspected many, or all, of them of at least tacit complicity with those who were killing and maiming them in great numbers, my conversations with men who said they were committing such acts, the numerous reports of men who did come forward on atrocities only to be hushed up and chastised for their complaints, the official investigation of My Lai where the atrocity was widely known and yet supressed by the military until it could no longer be buried, and my understanding of human nature.
It appears that your opinion is based on the belief that 1, humans are prone to amplify and exaggerate atrocity stories, that 2, there is no accurate and reliable record that would indicate atrocities were common, and, 3, in your last post, that an analysis of the number of civilian deaths in Vietnam in the 65-70 time period tends to prove that atrocities were not common. If I've left out any important bases for your views, I apologize, but I will try to address those points.
I agree that humans are prone to exaggerate the dramatic.
It does not follow, however, that such tendencies actually increased the "noise level" of the Vietnam atrocities. Kerry has been criticized for decades for simply saying that such acts were committed. I suspect that a decent percentage of those who served and who criticize him know that he was right. Their criticism has more to do with the fact that he broke the code of silence than with their disagreement with his statement.
When you consider that the men who did commit atrocities and then came back to the "world," would not likely be reporting their "inhuman" acts and that, if they did, it's not likely that anyone wanted to act on such information, and when you consider that the military "strongly discouraged" such reports and found ways to classify civilian deaths of any nature as "enemy KIA," then the thesis about the rumors of atrocities being amplified by "gossipy" talk has a counter thesis that the talk of such acts would be much less than the reality.
With regard to lack of any official record that would indicate that atrocities were common, I think it's clear that such "official records" were compiled in very few instances and then only when the military was forced to act by press publicity or political pressure. Remember that in the My Lai massacre only ONE man paid a price although many men killed, abused and wounded hundreds of unarmed and helpless Vietnamese. And remember that it was long after the incident was well known to military command that the investigation was even started. No one sees, no one knows and no one acts when they don't want to see, know or act.
In the close knit brotherhood of combat veterans in Vietnam, I can assure you that I would have stopped such acts if I'd have been present but if they'd happened in my unit while I was out of the field for RxR of something, I'd have tried to make sure they never happened again but I don't think I'd have turned in my buddies.
Your "numbers" of civilian dead post is interesting but less than convincing for several reasons. First and foremost is that unlike the Germans in WW11, neither the Vietnamese nor the Americans kept any kind of remotely reliable records on civilian dead. Most Vietnamese who died were buried the next day or just rotted in the humidity. Most areas where there was heavy fighting were far from the areas where there would have been the "hospital admissions" which the commission evidently used as a metric to estimate civilian deaths. With the exception of the 68 Tet offensive, most of the dead and wounded civilians were peasants from outside the cities. Almost anyone who was where the fighting occurred would, I believe, be astounded that a commission would attempt to make a reasonable estimate of Vietnamese civilian dead based on "hospital admissions."
In a land where we hugely inflated the number of NVA and VC killed by Americans, it simply makes sense that the number of civilian casualties would be minimized for the same reason; to make the military and government look better.
Even accepting such numbers as accurate for the purpose of discussion, however, the numbers don't prove or disprove the commonality of atrocities in Vietnam. You write that:
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.
Remember, however, that it wasn't 500,000 men that were "killing" Vietnamese during the peak of the war. Most of the killing was done from the air or by only 50 battalions of around 500 men each. That's 25,000 men doing most of the killing. Using your calculations, that would amount to more than 1 civilian for every "combat" soldier. Many of the "combat soldiers didn't operate in areas where there were civilians so the numbers would go even higher for those that operated in the civilian populated combat areas.
Even assuming that your number of .01 or less per soldier was correct, however, that's a lot of dead civilians at the hands of American men. When you factor in that most of the killings were not mass killings like the My Lai incident where several hundred were killed, it takes a lot of seperate incidents to kill that many people. Some of those killings were normal in the fighting of war, and some weren't. The point is that in order to kill the number of civilians that we did, we had to have had a loose rope on those with guns in their hands and fingers on the trigger. Maybe it's a difference in definition, but in my view it's incorrect to say "but they just don't add up to a lot of attrocities."
The North Vietnamese were guilty as well but of course we aren't responsible for their acts and we aren't keeping our heads in the sand and claiming that THEY are not prone to engage in such actions. |
