Recently, Murtha has been the guy talking about the
atrocities in Iraq in the context of "this is the sort
of thing that happens when you put young soldiers in a
position of intolerable stress---which comes about
when you can't tell friend from foe." ( Proven when we
learned that IRAQI TROOPS have killed US troops when
on joint patrol.)It's been my belief for some time
that when the spotlight starts seeking out misdeeds of
our troops-------which will happen when you have a
national government claiming WE ARE IN IRAQ FOR MORAL
REASONS---that spotlight is going to find so many
atrocities that the honor of the troops and of the
military will be permanently stained. Hence,
whispering to Murtha to push again to get us the hell
out of there,
VIETNAM: THE WAR CRIMES FILES
Civilian Killings Went Unpunished
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far
beyond My Lai.
By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson
Special to The Times
August 6, 2006
The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of
mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day
before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome
orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a
green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's
central coast.
They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript
settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a
20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut,
unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.
Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across
the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19
civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them.
Henry later recalled the company commander's response:
Kill anything that moves.
Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of
women and children. Then the shooting began.
Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.
Back home in California, Henry published an account of
the slaughter and held a news conference to air his
allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who
spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and
fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for the
massacre.
Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files
show that Henry was telling the truth — about the Feb.
8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men
of B Company.
The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled
by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that
shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in
Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.
The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were
substantiated by Army investigators — not including
the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai
massacre.
Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war
crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to
surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes
investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and
status reports for top military brass.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary
Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice
paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers,
in interviews with investigators and letters to
commanders, described a violent minority who murdered,
raped and tortured with impunity.
Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times
review of the files found. They were uncovered in
every Army division that operated in Vietnam.
Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran
who served on the task force, says he once supported
keeping the records secret but now believes they
deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on
civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.
"We can't change current practices unless we
acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.
Among the substantiated cases in the archive:
• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at
least 137 civilians died.
• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in
which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15
sexually assaulted.
• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S.
soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of
war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.
Investigators determined that evidence against 203
soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or
prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges.
These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers'
superiors for action.
Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just
23 convicted, the records show.
Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six
months to 20 years, but most won significant
reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a
military intelligence interrogator convicted of
committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in an
interrogation hut in 1967.
He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records
show.
Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of
reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the cases, no
action at all.
There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war
crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s
was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the
Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he
disagreed with the attitude but understood it.
"Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away," says Chucala,
now a civilian attorney for the Army at Ft. Belvoir in
Virginia.
In many cases, suspects had left the service. The Army
did not attempt to pursue them, despite a written
opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III, then the
Army's general counsel, that ex-soldiers could be
prosecuted through courts-martial, military
commissions or tribunals.
"I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere," says
Jordan, now a lawyer in Washington.
Top Army brass should have demanded a tougher
response, says retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, who
oversaw the task force as a brigadier general at the
Pentagon in the early 1970s.
"We could have court-martialed them but didn't," Gard
says of soldiers accused of war crimes. "The whole
thing is terribly disturbing."
Early-Warning System
In March 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division
slaughtered about 500 Vietnamese civilians in the
hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the
massacre the following year.
By then, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of
U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had
become Army chief of staff. A task force was assembled
from members of his staff to monitor war crimes
allegations and serve as an early-warning system.
Over the next few years, members of the Vietnam War
Crimes Working Group reviewed Army investigations and
wrote reports and summaries for military brass and the
White House.
The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years
as required by law, and moved to the National Archives
in College Park, Md., where they went largely
unnoticed.
The Times examined most of the files and obtained
copies of about 3,000 pages — about a third of the
total — before government officials removed them from
the public shelves, saying they contained personal
information that was exempt from the Freedom of
Information Act.
In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the
records contain material related to more than 500
alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not
prove or that they discounted.
Johns says many war crimes did not make it into the
archive. Some were prosecuted without being identified
as war crimes, as required by military regulations.
Others were never reported.
In a letter to Westmoreland in 1970, an anonymous
sergeant described widespread, unreported killings of
civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in
the Mekong Delta — and blamed pressure from superiors
to generate high body counts.
"A batalion [sic] would kill maybe 15 to 20
[civilians] a day. With 4 batalions in the brigade
that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a
month, easy," the unnamed sergeant wrote. "If I am
only 10% right, and believe me it's lots more, then I
am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My
Lay [sic] each month for over a year."
A high-level Army review of the letter cited its
"forcefulness," "sincerity" and "inescapable logic,"
and urged then-Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor
to make sure the push for verifiable body counts did
not "encourage the human tendency to inflate the count
by violating established rules of engagement."
Investigators tried to find the letter writer and
"prevent his complaints from reaching" then-Rep.
Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), according to an August
1971 memo to Westmoreland.
The records do not say whether the writer was located,
and there is no evidence in the files that his
complaint was investigated further.
Pvt. Henry
James D. "Jamie" Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the
Army shaved his hippie locks and packed him off to
boot camp.
He had been living with his mother in Sonoma County,
working as a hospital aide and moonlighting as a
flower child in Haight-Ashbury, when he received a
letter from his draft board. As thousands of hippies
poured into San Francisco for the upcoming "Summer of
Love," Henry headed for Ft. Polk, La.
Soon he was on his way to Vietnam, part of a
100,000-man influx that brought U.S. troop strength to
485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a conflict
growing ever bloodier for Americans — 9,378 U.S.
troops would die in combat in 1967, 87% more than the
year before.
Henry was a medic with B Company of the 1st Battalion,
35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. He described his
experiences in a sworn statement to Army investigators
several years later and in recent interviews with The
Times.
In the fall of 1967, he was on his first patrol,
marching along the edge of a rice paddy in Quang Nam
province, when the soldiers encountered a teenage
girl.
"The guy in the lead immediately stops her and puts
his hand down her pants," Henry said. "I just thought,
'My God, what's going on?' "
A day or two later, he saw soldiers senselessly
stabbing a pig.
"I talked to them about it, and they told me if I
wanted to live very long, I should shut my mouth," he
told Army investigators.
Henry may have kept his mouth shut, but he kept his
eyes and ears open.
On Oct. 8, 1967, after a firefight near Chu Lai,
members of his company spotted a 12-year-old boy out
in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only in
shorts.
"Somebody caught him up on a hill, and they brought
him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to kill
him," Henry told investigators.
Two volunteers stepped forward. One kicked the boy in
the stomach. The other took him behind a rock and shot
him, according to Henry's statement. They tossed his
body in a river and reported him as an enemy combatant
killed in action.
Three days later, B Company detained and beat an
elderly man suspected of supporting the enemy. He had
trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched him up a
steep hill.
"When I turned around, two men had him, one guy had
his arms, one guy had his legs and they threw him off
the hill onto a bunch of rocks," Henry's statement
said.
On Oct. 15, some of the men took a break during a
large-scale "search-and-destroy" operation. Henry said
he overheard a lieutenant on the radio requesting
permission to test-fire his weapon, and went to see
what was happening.
He found two soldiers using a Vietnamese man for
target practice, Henry said. They had discovered the
victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill him for
sport.
"Everybody was taking pot shots at him, seeing how
accurate they were," Henry said in his statement.
Back at base camp on Oct. 23, he said, members of the
1st Platoon told him they had ambushed five unarmed
women and reported them as enemies killed in action.
Later, members of another platoon told him they had
seen the bodies.
Tet Offensive
Capt. Donald C. Reh, a 1964 graduate of West Point,
took command of B Company in November 1967. Two months
later, enemy forces launched a major offensive during
Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.
In the midst of the fighting, on Feb. 7, the commander
of the 1st Battalion, Lt. Col. William W. Taylor Jr.,
ordered an assault on snipers hidden in a line of
trees in a rural area of Quang Nam province. Five U.S.
soldiers were killed. The troops complained bitterly
about the order and the deaths, Henry said.
The next morning, the men packed up their gear and
continued their sweep of the countryside. Soldiers
discovered an unarmed man hiding in a hole and
suspected that he had supported the enemy the previous
day. A soldier pushed the man in front of an armored
personnel carrier, Henry said in his statement.
"They drove over him forward which didn't kill him
because he was squirming around, so the APC backed
over him again," Henry's statement said.
Then B Company entered a hamlet to question residents
and search for weapons. That's where Henry set down
his weapon and lighted a cigarette in the shelter of a
hut.
A radio operator sat down next to him, and Henry was
listening to the chatter. He heard the leader of the
3rd Platoon ask Reh for instructions on what to do
with 19 civilians.
"The lieutenant asked the captain what should be done
with them. The captain asked the lieutenant if he
remembered the op order (operation order) that came
down that morning and he repeated the order which was
'kill anything that moves,' " Henry said in his
statement. "I was a little shook … because I thought
the lieutenant might do it."
Henry said he left the hut and walked toward Reh. He
saw the captain pick up the phone again, and thought
he might rescind the order.
Then soldiers pulled a naked woman of about 19 from a
dwelling and brought her to where the other civilians
were huddled, Henry said.
"She was thrown to the ground," he said in his
statement. "The men around the civilians opened fire
and all on automatic or at least it seemed all on
automatic. It was over in a few seconds. There was a
lot of blood and flesh and stuff flying around….
"I looked around at some of my friends and they all
just had blank looks on their faces…. The captain made
an announcement to all the company, I forget exactly
what it was, but it didn't concern the people who had
just been killed. We picked up our stuff and moved
on."
Henry didn't forget, however. "Thirty seconds after
the shooting stopped," he said, "I knew that I was
going to do something about it."
Homecoming
For his combat service, Henry earned a Bronze Star
with a V for valor, and a Combat Medical Badge, among
other awards. A fellow member of his unit said in a
sworn statement that Henry regularly disregarded his
own safety to save soldiers' lives, and showed
"compassion and decency" toward enemy prisoners.
When Henry finished his tour and arrived at Ft. Hood,
Texas, in September 1968, he went to see an Army legal
officer to report the atrocities he'd witnessed.
The officer advised him to keep quiet until he got out
of the Army, "because of the million and one charges
you can be brought up on for blinking your eye," Henry
says. Still, the legal officer sent him to see a
Criminal Investigation Division agent.
The agent was not receptive, Henry recalls.
"He wanted to know what I was trying to pull, what I
was trying to put over on people, and so I was just
quiet. I told him I wouldn't tell him anything and I
wouldn't say anything until I got out of the Army, and
I left," Henry says.
Honorably discharged in March 1969, Henry moved to
Canoga Park, enrolled in community college and helped
organize a campus chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War.
Then he ended his silence: He published his account of
the massacre in the debut issue of Scanlan's Monthly,
a short-lived muckraking magazine, which hit the
newsstands on Feb. 27, 1970. Henry held a news
conference the same day at the Los Angeles Press Club.
Records show that an Army operative attended
incognito, took notes and reported back to the
Pentagon.
A faded copy of Henry's brief statement, retrieved
from the Army's files, begins:
"On February 8, 1968, nineteen (19) women and children
were murdered in Viet-Nam by members of 3rd Platoon,
'B' Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry….
"Incidents similar to those I have described occur on
a daily basis and differ one from the other only in
terms of numbers killed," he told reporters. A brief
article about his remarks appeared inside the Los
Angeles Times the next day.
Army investigators interviewed Henry the day after the
news conference. His sworn statement filled 10
single-spaced typed pages. Henry did not expect
anything to come of it: "I never got the impression
they were ever doing anything."
In 1971, Henry joined more than 100 other veterans at
the Winter Soldier Investigation, a forum on war
crimes sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
The FBI put the three-day gathering at a Detroit hotel
under surveillance, records show, and Nixon
administration officials worked behind the scenes to
discredit the speakers as impostors and fabricators.
Although the administration never publicly identified
any fakers, one of the organization's leaders admitted
exaggerating his rank and role during the war, and a
cloud descended on the entire gathering.
"We tried to get as much publicity as we could, and it
just never went anywhere," Henry says. "Nothing ever
happened."
After years of dwelling on the war, he says, he
"finally put it in a closet and shut the door."
The Investigation
Unknown to Henry, Army investigators pursued his
allegations, tracking down members of his old unit
over the next 3 1/2 years.
Witnesses described the killing of the young boy, the
old man tossed over the cliff, the man used for target
practice, the five unarmed women, the man thrown
beneath the armored personnel carrier and other
atrocities.
Their statements also provided vivid corroboration of
the Feb. 8, 1968, massacre from men who had observed
the day's events from various vantage points.
Staff Sgt. Wilson Bullock told an investigator at Ft.
Carson, Colo., that his platoon had captured 19
"women, children, babies and two or three very old
men" during the Tet offensive.
"All of these people were lined up and killed," he
said in a sworn statement. "When it, the shooting,
stopped, I began to return to the site when I observed
a naked Vietnamese female run from the house to the
huddle of people, saw that her baby had been shot. She
picked the baby up and was then shot and the baby shot
again."
Gregory Newman, another veteran of B Company, told an
investigator at Ft. Myer, Va., that Capt. Reh had
issued an order "to search and destroy and kill
anything in the village that moved."
Newman said he was carrying out orders to kill the
villagers' livestock when he saw a naked girl head
toward a group of civilians.
"I saw them begging before they were shot," he
recalled in a sworn statement.
Donald R. Richardson said he was at a command post
outside the hamlet when he heard a platoon leader on
the radio ask what to do with 19 civilians.
"The cpt said something about kill anything that moves
and the lt on the other end said 'Their [sic] moving,'
" according to Richardson's sworn account. "Just then
the gunfire was heard."
William J. Nieset, a rifle squad leader, told
investigators that he was standing next to a radio
operator and heard Reh say: "My instructions from
higher are to kill everything that moves."
Robert D. Miller said he was the radio operator for
Lt. Johnny Mack Carter, commander of the 3rd Platoon.
Miller said that when Carter asked Reh what to do with
the 19 civilians, the captain instructed him to follow
the "operation order."
Carter immediately sought two volunteers to shoot the
civilians, Miller said under oath.
"I believe everyone knew what was going to happen," he
said, "so no one volunteered except one guy known only
to me as 'Crazy.' "
"A few minutes later, while the Vietnamese were
huddled around in a circle Lt Carter and 'Crazy'
started shooting them with their M-16's on automatic,"
Miller's statement says.
Carter had just left active duty when an investigator
questioned him under oath in Palmetto, Fla., in March
1970.
"I do not recall any civilians being picked up and
categorically stated that I did not order the killing
of any civilians, nor do I know of any being killed,"
his statement said.
An Army investigator called Reh at Ft. Myer. Reh's
attorney called back. The investigator made notes of
their conversation: "If the interview of Reh concerns
atrocities in Vietnam … then he had already advised
Reh not to make any statement."
As for Lt. Col. Taylor, two soldiers described his
actions that day.
Myran Ambeau, a rifleman, said he was standing five
feet from the captain and heard him contact the
battalion commander, who was in a helicopter overhead.
(Ambeau did not identify Reh or Taylor by name.)
"The battalion commander told the captain, 'If they
move, shoot them,' " according to a sworn statement
that Ambeau gave an investigator in Little Rock, Ark.
"The captain verified that he had heard the command,
he then transmitted the instruction to Lt Carter.
"Approximately three minutes later, there was
automatic weapons fire from the direction where the
prisoners were being held."
Gary A. Bennett, one of Reh's radio operators, offered
a somewhat different account. He said the captain
asked what he should do with the detainees, and the
battalion commander replied that it was a "search and
destroy mission," according to an investigator's
summary of an interview with Bennett.
Bennett said he did not believe the order authorized
killing civilians and that, although he heard
shooting, he knew nothing about a massacre, the
summary says. Bennett refused to provide a sworn
statement.
An Army investigator sat down with Taylor at the Army
War College in Carlisle, Pa. Taylor said he had never
issued an order to kill civilians and had heard
nothing about a massacre on the date in question. But
the investigator had asked Taylor about events
occurring on Feb. 9, 1968 — a day after the incident.
Three and a half years later, an agent tracked Taylor
down at Ft. Myer and asked him about Feb. 8. Taylor
said he had no memory of the day and did not have time
to provide a sworn statement. He said he had a
"pressing engagement" with "an unidentified general
officer," the agent wrote.
Investigators wrote they could not find Pvt. Frank
Bonilla, the man known as "Crazy." The Times reached
him at his home on Oahu in March.
Bonilla, now 58 and a hotel worker, says he recalls an
order to kill the civilians, but says he does not
remember who issued it. "Somebody had a radio, handed
it to someone, maybe a lieutenant, said the man don't
want to see nobody standing," he said.
Bonilla says he answered a call for volunteers but
never pulled the trigger.
"I couldn't do it. There were women and kids," he
says. "A lot of guys thought that I had something to
do with it because they saw me going up there…. Nope …
I just turned the other way. It was like, 'This ain't
happening.' "
Afterward, he says, "I remember sitting down with my
head between my knees. Is that for real? Someone said,
'Keep your mouth shut or you're not going home.' "
He says he does not know who did the shooting.
The Outcome
The Criminal Investigation Division assigned Warrant
Officer Jonathan P. Coulson in Los Angeles to complete
the investigation and write a final report on the
"Henry Allegation." He sent his findings to
headquarters in Washington in January 1974.
Evidence showed that the massacre did occur, the
report said. The investigation also confirmed all but
one of the other killings that Henry had described.
The one exception was the elderly man thrown off a
cliff. Coulson said it could not be determined whether
the victim was alive when soldiers tossed him.
The evidence supported murder charges in five
incidents against nine "subjects," including Carter
and Bonilla, Coulson wrote. Those two carried out the
Feb. 8 massacre, along with "other unidentified
members of their element," the report said.
Investigators determined that there was not enough
evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of
conflicting accounts "as to the actual language" he
used.
But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for
failing to investigate the killings, the report said.
Coulson conferred with an Army legal advisor, Capt.
Robert S. Briney, about whether the evidence supported
charges against Taylor.
They decided it did not. Even if Taylor gave an order
to kill the Vietnamese if they moved, the two
concluded, "it does not constitute an order to kill
the prisoners in the manner in which they were
executed."
The War Crimes Working Group records give no
indication that action was taken against any of the
men named in the report.
Briney, now an attorney in Phoenix, says he has
forgotten details of the case but recalls a reluctance
within the Army to pursue such charges.
"They thought the war, if not over, was pretty much
over. Why bring this stuff up again?" he says.
Years Later
Taylor retired in 1977 with the rank of colonel. In a
recent interview outside his home in northern
Virginia, he said, "I would not have given an order to
kill civilians. It's not in my makeup. I've been in
enough wars to know that it's not the right thing to
do."
Reh, who left active duty in 1978 and now lives in
Northern California, declined to be interviewed by The
Times.
Carter, a retired postal worker living in Florida,
says he has no memory of his combat experiences. "I
guess I've wiped Vietnam and all that out of my mind.
I don't remember shooting anyone or ordering anyone to
shoot," he says.
He says he does not dispute that a massacre took
place. "I don't doubt it, but I don't remember….
Sometimes people just snap."
Henry was re-interviewed by an Army investigator in
1972, and was never contacted again. He drifted away
from the antiwar movement, moved north and became a
logger in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. He
says he had no idea he had been vindicated — until The
Times contacted him in 2005.
Last fall, he read the case file over a pot of coffee
at his dining room table in a comfortably worn house,
where he lives with his wife, Patty.
"I was a wreck for a couple days," Henry, now 59,
wrote later in an e-mail. "It was like a time warp
that put me right back in the middle of that mess.
Some things long forgotten came back to life. Some of
them were good and some were not.
"Now that whole stinking war is back. After you left,
I just sat in my chair and shook for a couple hours. A
slight emotional stress fracture?? Don't know, but it
soon passed and I decided to just keep going with this
business. If it was right then, then it still is."
Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this
report.
*
About this report
Nick Turse is a freelance journalist living in New
Jersey. Deborah Nelson is a staff writer in The Times'
Washington bureau.
This report is based in part on records of the Vietnam
War Crimes Working Group filed at the National
Archives in College Park, Md. The collection includes
241 case summaries that chronicle more than 300
substantiated atrocities by U.S. forces and 500
unconfirmed allegations.
The archive includes reports of war crimes by the
101st Airborne Division's Tiger Force that the Army
listed as unconfirmed. The Toledo Blade documented the
atrocities in a 2003 newspaper series.
Turse came across the collection in 2002 while
researching his doctoral dissertation for the Center
for the History and Ethics of Public Health at
Columbia University.
Turse and Nelson also reviewed Army inspector general
records in the National Archives; FBI and Army
Criminal Investigation Division records; documents
shared by military veterans; and case files and
related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive at the
University of Michigan.
A selection of documents used in preparing this report
can be found at latimes.com/vietnam.
If you want other stories on this topic, search the
Archives at latimes.com/archives.
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