Fire in the Lake (61 page)

Once investigated, the My Lai report and others that followed led to the courts-martial of five soldiers — among them Lieutenant William Calley. In making a case for the accused, some of the defense attorneys considered the advantage of raising the question of the legitimacy of the war and the responsibility of the higher political and military authorities. The military courts naturally refused to touch such an explosive political issue, but the very fact that the issue had been raised allowed Calley and others to take a moral position that proved sympathetic to thousands of Americans all over the country: Calley had committed no crime, he was just doing his job as a soldier in killing Vietnamese — civilians though they were. The argument did not, of course, take account of the principle of individual responsibility established at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, nor did it take account of those thousands of American soldiers who did not see killing civilians as in the line of their duty. Still, there was a certain sense in which it could be said that the responsibility belonged to American policy in Vietnam.

According to the State Department's justification of the war in international law, the American soldiers had been sent to Vietnam to defend the South Vietnamese against an “invasion from the North.” In this the State Department had, of course, deceived the soldiers, for when they arrived in Vietnam, the GIs found that they had also to fight the South Vietnamese. This deception did not, however, surprise them, for the administration officials and their superior officers had as much as told them that the legal grounds in international law were no more than a fiction, that they were going to Vietnam not so much to defend territory as to defend the “Free World allies” of the United States against totalitarian Communism. But it was in this purpose that they would feel themselves most bitterly deceived, for upon arriving in Vietnam, they found not a nation of Communists and democrats, but a nation of “gooks.” To say that one “gook” was a Communist whereas another was not was to make what seemed to be a purely metaphysical distinction which, if wrongly made, might cost you your life. As Calley said after his trial, “When my troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn't see, I couldn't feel and I couldn't touch — that nobody in the military system ever described them as anything other than Communism. They didn't give it a race, they didn't give it a sex, they didn't give it an age. They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man's mind. That was my enemy out there.”
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Thus in the My Lai massacre the soldiers abandoned the unrealistic war aims of Dean Rusk and drew their mistaken but nonetheless understandable conclusion: since all Communists in Vietnam are Vietnamese, and since the only good Communist is a dead one, then all Vietnamese had to be killed.

Of course, the syllogism was faulty, and the defenders of Calley were being disingenuous in describing the cold-blooded murder of babies and old women as necessary to the safety of his troops.
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The logic would not hold for him. But there were many other cases in which the moral issue was much less clear. When, as happened frequently, a unit received enemy fire from a village, the officer in charge would have the choice of flattening the village with artillery or ordering his troops to go in and search it. If he chose the first alternative, he might discover that the village contained only one or two snipers and a large number of civilians — many of them now dead. If he chose the second, he might find it contained an enemy company, and that he had (unnecessarily?) forfeited the lives of his own men. His dilemma pointed to the more fundamental dilemma of the highly mechanized American armed forces fighting a “people's war” in a foreign country. The basic problem was, of course, that the U.S. official picture of “the Viet Cong” as an army and a coercive administration fighting over an apolitical peasantry was simply a misrepresentation of facts. In many regions — and those where the greatest U.S. military effort was made — the unarmed peasants actively and voluntarily cooperated with the Front troops, giving information, carrying supplies, laying booby traps. Where, then, was the distinction between “soldiers” and “civilians”? In many regions “the Viet Cong” were simply the villagers themselves; to “eliminate the Viet Cong” meant to eliminate the villages, if not the villagers themselves, an entire social structure and a way of life. It is in this context that charges of war crimes against the American civilian and military authorities who directed the war have a certain validity. In the first place, by the very act of sending American soldiers to Vietnam the U.S. command was denying many of its soldiers and field officers the very power of choice over killing civilians. It was making some civilian deaths inevitable. In the second place the U.S. command's decision to use certain weapons and certain strategies insured that the number of civilian deaths would be sizable.

From 1954 to 1968 the entire American effort in Vietnam went through many of the same changes that occurred in the most insecure and domineering of the American advisers. The central aim of the United States in Vietnam had never been to develop the economy and reform the Saigon government, but to “stop Communism” in Southeast Asia. When the military aid together with the attempts at reform and development failed as one means to that end, the United States adopted two additional strategies: the bombing of the north and the commitment of American combat troops. The second strategy the officials had hoped to avoid for the reason that it cost American lives and raised political difficulties at home. The first was much less “expensive.” In 1965 they began to prosecute the air war on a large scale and for reasons that were of dubious rationality.

Though enclosed in “tough-minded” analytical terms, such as “graduated escalation” and “limited war,” the American bombing of North Vietnam made little military sense. As Clark Clifford pointed out when he came to the Defense Department, it did not constitute a strategy for winning the war or even for gaining the administration's “limited objectives.” During the Second World War the Allies had — it was arguable — contributed to the defeat of Nazi Germany by bombing its industrial plant and thus impairing its capacity for war-making. The Americans could not, however, hope to defeat North Vietnam in the same way because that country could continue to obtain munitions from the outside, from noncombatant powers. In August 1967, Robert McNamara himself took pains to show a Senate committee that the bombing had not significantly reduced infiltration or affected North Vietnam's war-making capability. In his opinion it was not the air war that limited the infiltration but “the ability of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese, operating, by the way, without, for all practical purposes, a single wheeled vehicle in all of South Vietnam, to accept the men and matériel from the North.”
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In answer to his objections, the U.S. Joint Chiefs had only psychological theories about “punishing” the North Vietnamese and “destroying their morale.” But a man does not “punish” an equal; he punishes someone over whom he has some legal or moral superiority. In thinking they might destroy North Vietnamese morale by the bombing, the generals had to assume the North Vietnamese to be psychologically inferior to the British under the German air raids of the Second World War, or indeed to themselves.

The administration's theory proved false. The North Vietnamese refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of American “punishment” and insisted upon being treated as an equal, an enemy. At that point the administration, if it were to pursue its objectives, had very little choice but the strategy of attrition. And because of the very nature of the war, that strategy meant the attrition not only of enemy troops and military supplies but of all Vietnamese. No one in the American government consciously planned a policy of genocide. The American military commanders would have been shocked or angered by such a charge, but in fact their policy had no other military logic, and their course of action was indistinguishable from it. By 1969 South Vietnam had become one of the three most heavily bombed countries in history — the other two being Laos and North Vietnam. South Vietnam was certainly the most heavily bombarded by artillery.

American commanders, of course, liked to interpret their whole military policy as nothing more than an impersonal exercise of their military machine. But as applied in Vietnam, the policy of “harassment and interdiction,” the creation of “free fire zones,” the use of artillery to replace ground patrolling in populated areas — these and other bombing and artillery practices would have been unthinkable for U.S. commanders in occupied France or Italy during the Second World War. In Europe the Americans rejected the use of chemical warfare, but in Vietnam they used napalm, phosphorus, tear gas, and various kinds of defoliants as a general practice and in such quantities as to render certain parts of the country uninhabitable. The use of a “body count” as an index of progress was also unique to the Vietnam War. Besides all of these unconventional military tactics, and to some extent the guiding forces behind them, was the Westmoreland-Komer strategy for pacification: to remove from the countryside all those people who could not be put under military occupation. The ARVN commanders had no great record of humanitarian concern for civilians, but even they would never by themselves have gone to the lengths of removing entire villages to refugee camps for the sake of eliminating the NLF from a certain piece of real estate. Humanitarian concerns aside, the strategy did not even bring the Americans any closer to winning the war: it merely postponed the losing of it for some time while it strained the resources of South Vietnam beyond its limits. (In the First Corps it even stretched the American resources beyond their limits. In 1967 the AID representatives in the First Corps asked the U.S. military command to stop “generating” refugees because they had neither the food nor the logistical capacity to feed the people already removed from their land. The military command agreed, but rather than stop its bombing raids or its search-and-destroy operations, it merely stopped warning the civilians that their villages would be destroyed. The omission of the warning system was a change the American commanders had wanted to make for some time because they suspected, and with reason, that the enemy units were the first to take notice of the warnings.)
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But by the beginning of 1968 it was precisely time that mattered to the American government in its attempt to save itself from something that might look like a defeat. Whether or not Johnson ever had any greater ambitions, it now became clear that the original war aims as explained to the American public no longer held. What had looked like an attempt to “save Vietnam from Communism” was rather an attempt to save American “prestige” around the world. But the time for that had already passed by. The leaders of other nations had already seen what a small and determined group of people could do to the United States and were in the process of drawing their conclusions. The American war effort had, then, become almost entirely solipsistic: the U.S. government was trying to save “American prestige” for Americans alone, to convince itself of American superiority.

At the same time, the war was putting the American officials and politicians who favored the anti-Communist struggle in an increasingly difficult moral position. As the IVS letter to President Johnson predicted, they had either to withdraw their support from the war or to look upon its brutality as a necessary and acceptable means to an end. As few wished to do either, the majority attempted to avoid the dilemma altogether by taking the refuge of the ostrich. As Richard Nixon's closest adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger, pointed out with some interest, a poll taken in St. Louis at the time of the My Lai disclosure showed that only 12 percent of those who had heard the story said they believed it to be true. Such a refusal of belief was, perhaps, excusable for Americans many thousands of miles removed from the scene of action, who had learned to discredit much that they heard about Vietnam; but it was the same stance taken over similar issues by Americans in Vietnam whose job it was to know the results of American actions. Asked in 1967 whether the U.S. bombing of the north did not produce as many civilian casualties as Viet Cong terrorism in the south, one American spokesman replied:

There is no possible comparison.

We use the most sophisticated electronic measures known to keep from killing civilians with our bombs. Our gear cross-check and double-check everything an airplane does up North.

Here in the South, Charlie [the Viet Cong] is out to get any and all he can, without regard to political affiliation, nationality or anything else. The point is to prove to the people that Charlie can call his shots without any regard to the thousands of Government soldiers.

We haven't even take into consideration some little guy's well, or the pagoda that the residents of an entire village might have put all their money into, a pagoda that the Viet Cong leveled.

Any figures you get won't take into consideration the tons of groceries that never got to market, the produce that will rot where the bridge or foot bridge is blown out, of the plants that will shrivel up and die in the field because the fruit can't be gotten to market because of the Viet Cong.
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What was interesting about the statement was the discrepancy between the impersonal, bureaucratic language the official used to describe the American actions and the vivid, almost poetic, description he lavished upon those of the NLF. Douglas Pike similarly distorted the facts in his widely circulated monograph, “The Viet Cong Strategy of Terror.” In his extended study,
Viet Cong,
published in 1966, Pike went to some length to show that the success of the Viet Cong came not so much from their use of violence and terror (as many Americans assumed) but from their organizational methods. By 1970 he had given the subject a new emphasis. “Terror,” he said, “is an essential ingredient of nearly all [the Viet Cong's] programs.”
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And he went ahead to show his own colors: