Vietnam

by Nigel Cawthorne

  This posed a problem for the US military. What they needed was a scapegoat who could be branded a madman or psychopath. That way they could assure the world that the My Lai massacre was a one-off. But Calley was just an ordinary man. He had been working as an insurance appraiser in San Francisco when he had been called up in his home state Miami. He started to drive home, but ran out of money just outside Albuquerque, New Mexico, so he enlisted right there. He was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas, for basic training and went on to clerical school at Fort Lewis, Washington. By this time, the US Army had a severe shortage of officers. The extension of the draft meant that the army did not have enough West Point graduates to command its rapidly swelling ranks. As the war grew unpopular, the numbers joining the Reserve Officer Training Corps at universities and colleges declined rapidly. Consequently, poorly educated men such as Calley were picked for officer training. After a so-called 'Shake 'n' Bake' course at the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, Calley graduated without even being able to read a map properly. Certainly the ethics of war was not a subject the course dwelt on. Before graduating , Calley was asked to deliver a speech on 'Vietnam Our Host'. At his trial, he recalled saying that American troops should not insult or assault Vietnamese women, but the rest he was foggy on.

  Nothing could have prepared Calley for the moral morass that was Vietnam, certainly not his sketchy training. He found himself unable to control his own men and incapable of resisting the mounting pressure from his superiors for a 'body count'. As the war in Vietnam had no clear military objectives, the 'body count' had become all important. The problem was that Calley and his men could not find any Vietcong. In his own book on the My Lai massacre Calley described how, when he went with a prostitute who showed Communist leanings, he wondered whether he should have shot her. But she was the only 'enemy' he ever even clapped eyes on. His inept attempts at ambush were noisy enough to alert the enemy miles away. Out in the paddy fields, he could find no one. But the enemy were out there all right, invisible in the jungle, and close enough to pick off Calley's men with rifle shots, seemingly at will.

  Patrolling near My Son in the My Lai area in February 1969, Calley's radioman was shot. For three days the company tried to penetrate My Son but were driven back. Two men were killed by booby traps. Another was hit by sniper fire. The patrol then blundered into a nest of booby traps, but when they extricated themselves unscathed, two more men were cut down by sniper fire.

  On their next assignment, they were heading for the rendezvous point when an explosion tore through the early morning stillness and a man screamed. There was another explosion and another scream. Then another explosion and another and another and another. They had stumbled into a minefield and, as men rushed forward to rescue their wounded buddies, there were more and more explosions. Severed limbs flew through the air, medics crawled from body to body and there were still more explosions. It lasted for almost two hours, leaving 32 men killed or wounded.

  On 4 March the company was mortared and most of the men's personal possessions were destroyed. Two days before the assault on My Lai, four men – including the last of the company's experienced NCOs – were blown to bits by a booby trap. In thirty-two days, C Company, whose field strength was between 90 and 100, had suffered 42 casualties, a 40 per cent casualty rate, without ever even seeing the enemy.

  Calley had had evidence of atrocities committed by the Vietcong though. One night, the VC had captured one of his men and they heard him screaming all night. He was seven kilometres away. The screams were so loud that Calley thought the Vietcong must have had a PA system and amplifiers. They didn't. They had skinned the GI alive, leaving only the skin on his face. They then bathed his raw flesh with salt water. Calley's platoon recovered the body the next morning. Such mutilation was commonplace. Calley had seen a village elder broken in spirit when the VC delivered an earthenware jar containing what looked like stewed tomatoes to his door one morning. There were fragments of bone in it, and hair, and lumps of floating flesh. It was what remained of his son. He had seen GIs shooting down civilians for fun or target practice. He had heard of helicopter gunships hired out for human turkey shoots and bored GIs going 'squirrel hunting' in civilian areas. He had seen US soldiers casually fire on each other for no reason at all, and he had heard of fragmentation grenades being tossed into officers' quarters when their men did not want to go out on patrol.

  'I look at Communism the same way a Southerner looks at a Negro,' he said in an interview. 'As for me, killing those men in My Lai didn't haunt me. I didn't – I couldn't kill for the pleasure of it. We weren't in My Lai to kill human beings, really. We were there to kill ideology that is carried by, I don't know – pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. And I wasn't in My Lai to destroy intelligent men. I was there to destroy an intangible idea'.

  He even wished, humanely, that he could shoot the philosophy part out of people's heads. Besides, it wasn't even really him doing it.

  'Personally, I didn't kill any Vietnamese that day, I mean personally. I represented the United States of America. My country,' he said.

  Calley believed that he should put his duty to his country above his own conscience. He was not even worried about killing the aged, the women, the children. He had heard of mama-sans throwing grenades, children laying mines, girls carrying AK-47s. Besides, when the children grew up they would be VC, like their fathers and mothers. And where were all the men? My Lai was full of women and kids, but no young men. To Calley that meant their fathers were away fighting. They must be VC. Anyway, Calley reasoned, was what he had done any worse than dropping 500-pound bombs on them from a B-52 or frying them with napalm? The US had killed women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by dropping an atomic bomb on them, hadn't it? And as a Southerner he wondered what these damn Yankees – the Pentagon, the media, the anti-war protesters – were getting so worked up about. He had done nothing worse than General Sherman had done in his march to the sea during the Civil War. Calley noted that the wisdom of the times was: 'The only way to end the war in Vietnam was to put all the dinks [South Vietnamese] in boats and take them out to sea, kill all the North Vietnamese...then sink the boats'.

  Like many American servicemen, Calley eventually stopped believing in the war. He came round to the opinion that to argue that Communism had to be stopped in Vietnam before it spread to Thailand, Indonesia, Australia, and finally the US – the domino theory was then still the nearest thing the US had to a strategic aim – was like a man coming around to your house to murder his wife because he did not want blood on his carpet, then murdering your wife for good measure. He knew that it was the Vietcong who were winning the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, not the Americans. After My Lai, Calley became a welfare officer who bought pigs for peasant farmers, arranged sewing lessons for prostitutes, and took sick children to hospital. But he began to realise that even these laudable efforts were wasted. The Vietnamese people did not want his help. They did not care about democracy or totalitarianism, capitalism, or Communism. They just wanted to be left alone.

  When Calley was called to Washington, he thought he was going to be given a medal. He was shocked when he was arrested and charged. Calley's trial split America. Those who supported the war protested that he was only doing his duty. Those against it said that Calley was a scapegoat. Massacres like that at My Lai were happening every day and it was Johnson, McNamara and Westmoreland who should be in the dock. Eighty per cent of those polled were against his conviction.

  In all sixteen men were charged in connection with the massacre at My Lai. Calley went on trial at Fort Benning with six other defendants, including his commanding officer Captain Ernest Medina. The jury went out on 16 March 1971, the third anniversary of the massacre at My Lai. They deliberated for two weeks. In the end, they found Lieutenant William L. Calley guilty of murdering at least 22 civilians. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour. On review this was reduced to 20, then 10 years. He was finally paroled on 19 No
vember, 1974, after serving three and a half years under house arrest: less than two months for each murder he was found guilty of and less than four days for each of the civilians killed at My Lai.

  Charges of premeditated murder and ordering an unlawful act, homicide, against Captain Medina were reduced to involuntary manslaughter for failing to exercise proper control over his men. Not convinced that Captain Medina actually knew what his men were doing in My Lai 4, the jury acquitted him. Charges including the Nuremberg indictment of violating the laws and customs of war were brought against 12 other officers and men. Only five were tried. None were found guilty. A dozen officers, including Calley's divisional commander Major-General Samuel W. Koster, were charged with participation in the cover-up. None were found guilty.

  Calley himself believes that he was no worse than most, and better than many, of the officers and men who served in Vietnam. 'I was like a boy scout,' he said, 'and I went by The Boy Scout Handbook'.

  He believed that he did his duty to God and country, that he was trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. And still there were 347 civilians lying dead after the atrocity at My Lai. One hundred were slaughtered in a ditch. One of them was a two-year-old child.

  CWO Hugh Thompson speaking during the re-investigation of the My Lai massacre, 4 December 1969.

  Despite the blustering of the hawks, My Lai sickened the American people. In its wake came a wave of other atrocity reports, 242 in all. In 1971, it was adjudged unconstitutional to prosecute former servicemen once they had left the service. However, 78 atrocity cases were substantiated. Thirty-six cases were prosecuted successfully and 61 individuals found guilty of war crimes. In all, 201 army personnel were convicted of serious offences against civilians. Ninety Marines were also found guilty of such offences, although Marine records do not distinguish between crimes committed in combat and those committed while off duty. It was plain that the US forces in Vietnam were on the verge of anarchy. Discipline broke down almost completely:

  We had a sense that we were no longer GIs who had to march, who had to salute [said one veteran] That was shit. We didn't have to salute nobody. We dressed the way we wanted to dress. If I wanted one sleeve up and one sleeve down then I did it. If I didn't want to shave I didn't. Nobody fucked with nobody in the field. An officer knew that if he messed with you, in a firefight you could shoot him in the head. That was standard procedure in any infantry unit. Anybody tells you differently, he's shitting you. If you mess with my partner as an NCO or something like that, in the unwritten code there, I had the right to blow your brains out.

  This collapse of military discipline brought into currency a new word – fragging. Initially it meant the murder of an officer with a fragmentation grenade, often casually tossed into their hootch. But soon it came to cover any method of doing away with any inconvenient officer – one who made life difficult for his men, was gung-ho or incompetent and exposed his men to unnecessary risks. In the field there were plenty of opportunities to shoot an officer in the back. Company scout Mike Beaman said, 'We were aware that officers were being fragged and the officers knew it too'.

  Fraggings followed two basic patterns. The first gave the officer a couple of warnings, so he had a chance to change his ways. First, a smoke grenade was tossed into his hootch. If that did not convince, he got a CS gas grenade. 'When they put the gas on you, yeah, you know they mean you no good,' said one GI. If that warning was not heeded, the officer in question would get the real thing.

  There were also 'bounty' fraggings that could come at any time with no warning. Money changed hands for the removal of an officer. The underground newspaper GI Says posted a $10,000 reward for the death of Lieutenant-Colonel Weldon Honeycutt, the man responsible for the disastrous attack on Hamburger Hill in 1969. An ex-Leatherneck admitted to contributing to a bounty on a hated sergeant in the 3rd Marine Division. 'The first man with a witness who blew his ass away with a round across his eyeballs in a firefight would get $1,000,' he said. 'I personally offered approximately $25 for his head'.

  Another Marine named Charles Anderson, while stressing that no fraggings occurred in his particular company, knew of another incident concerning an old-time gung-ho sergeant who gave Anderson's buddies a hard time over spit and polish. One day the company was caught in an ambush. According to Anderson, 'When they found the sergeant there were more holes in his back than in his front'.

  Incompetent officers, such as those who got their men lost because they could not read a map, were in constant danger. Out on patrol, no one would sleep near them in case a grenade was tossed in their foxhole. These officers could only be saved if their superiors spotted they were not up to scratch and removed them. Many were threatened by their own men. In October 1972, the military police had to be flown into a camp near Da Lat to protect the commanding officer. Fraggings there had reached such epidemic proportions that attempts had been made on the officer's life two nights running and the MPs had to be in residence for a week before discipline was restored.

  Of course, soldiers have always used such methods to rid themselves of officers and NCOs who needlessly put them in danger, but by 1969, it was so commonplace that its victims could not be hidden among battlefield casualties. According to a Congressional investigation there were 239 incidents in 1969, 383 in 1970, 333 in 1971, and fifty-eight in 1972. Roughly 3 per cent of the 3,269 officer deaths in Vietnam are attributed to fragging. But these figures include only those who died by grenade and omit those who were shot, stabbed, or disposed of some other way. According to the Judge Advocate General's Corps it was estimated that only 10 per cent of fragging attempts resulted in the perpetrator coming to trial. And, like all figures coming out of Vietnam, these statistics are highly debatable.

  Another symptom of the collapse of morale was the widespread abuse of drugs. In 1969 and 1970 alone, around 16,000 GIs received a dishonourable discharge for possession. Although the overwhelming favourite was marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates and opium were all widely used. A report issued by the Pentagon in 1973 estimated that 35 per cent of all enlisted men in the Army who had served in Vietnam had tried heroin and 20 per cent had been addicted at some point during their tour. Varieties of marijuana grew wild in Vietnam and Laos. Nearby there is the 'Golden Triangle,' the area of the Shan province in Burma which, at that time, was the source of most of the opium in the world. And you could get practically any pill you fancied over the counter in a Saigon pharmacy.

  For $10 you could get a coffee jar full of grass that GIs smoked in old corncob pipes, or for $15 you could get a carton of ready-rolled joints, packaged to looked exactly like Winstons or some other proprietary US brand of cigarettes. For a few bucks extra a mama-san would paint opium on the paper.

  Some restricted their smoking to off-duty hours, while others began smoking dope as soon as they woke. Men would run the risk of going out on patrol high, hallucinating, or paranoid on weed, or even tripping out on acid. Regular potheads grew their hair long, giving birth to the hippy GI. There was the occasional shakedown, but by and large NCOs turned a blind eye, only too well aware that drugs helped their men get through their year in the'Nam.

  Many took their drug habit with them back to the US where they were confronted with a world that they barely recognised. The pace of change in fashion, behaviour, and attitude was so fast in the 1960s that even those who had not spent a year in Vietnam found it hard to keep up. Soldiers returning to the States would be greeted by stoned hippies asking, 'Howzit goin', baby killer?' or taunting them as 'army motherfuckers'. They would see protestors burning the American flag. The flag that they had fought to defend had become as debased as the Union Jack, which had sprung up everywhere since the invasion of British bands and fashions in 1963. Even out of uniform, they found it hard to blend in. Combat veterans were distinguished by a distant look in the eye known as the 'thousand-yard stare'.

  One veteran who later became the lieuten
ant-governor of Massachusetts recalled waking up yelling while on a domestic flight soon after returning home. 'The other passengers moved away from me – a reaction I noticed more and more in the months ahead,' he said. 'The country didn't give a shit about the guys who had come back, or what they'd gone through. The feeling toward them was: 'Stay away – don't contaminate us with whatever you've brought back from Vietnam'.'

  Public hostility and rejection made it hard for Vietnam veterans to reassimilate. They felt that they were being forced to shoulder the nation's collective guilt, shame, and humiliation, with very little sympathy or understanding even from friends and family. The result was that as many as 700,000 veterans experienced some sort of emotional or psychological problems after their return, recognised in 1980 as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Even the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC, unveiled in November 1982, had to be paid for by public subscription rather than government funds. Impressive though it is, visitors often note that the black marble wall carrying the names of all those listed KIA and MIA (killed in action and missing in action) is practically underground and cannot be seen from any major thoroughfare of the capital city.

  In North Vietnam a statue of a god stands undamaged amidst the ruins of his temple, destroyed by US B-52 attacks.

  9

  THE EXPANDING WAR

  NIXON'S STATED POLICY was that the war was going to be concluded by diplomacy, not on the battlefield. After his inauguration on 20 January 1969, he set about marrying diplomatic activity to troop withdrawals to bring 'peace with honour'. He brought in Harvard professor Henry Kissinger as assistant National Security Adviser to handle the diplomacy, while Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird would deliver on Nixon's campaign promise to withdraw troops, despite the protests of MACV.