Have We Learned Anything From My Lai?
March 15, 2018
By Barbara Myers
Bodies of some of the 504 Vietnamese killed by
U.S. soldiers in the 1968 My Lai Massacre.
My Lai. The images of women and
children clinging together in their last living moments on that March day, a
half century ago, still sear our collective memory. While we harbor no doubts
that My Lai was a crime, there has been no accountability for the atrocity, or
a national reckoning for the wider holocaust that was Vietnam.
On March 16, 1968, 504 women, children and old men were
shot at point-blank range by American soldiers over the course of a few hours
in Son Myvillage—407
were killed in the “My Lai 4” hamlet and another 97 were slaughtered in the
hamlet known on U.S. military maps as “My Khe 4,” about a mile from My Lai. The
soldiers’ mission: to “search and destroy.”
It would take another 20 months for news of the atrocity
and subsequent cover-up to reach the public, after exposure by
journalist Seymour Hersh.
Calls for war crimes trials for My Lai and for the broader
war exploded in the public arena. One such call came from New York Times
reporter Neil Sheehan, remembered recently in Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” for
his role in the release of the Pentagon Papers,
which resulted in a landmark Supreme Court decision on prior restraint of the press after
President Nixon tried to enjoin publication.
Sheehan opened with his own journey, from a journalist who
dismissed the charges of young demonstrators who queried “Hey, hey, LBJ, how
many kids did you kill today?” as “just too much” to one who had to conclude
that “if you credit as factual only a fraction of the information assembled
here about what happened in Vietnam, and if you apply the laws of war to
American conduct there, then the leaders of the United States for the past six
years at least … may well be guilty of war crimes. There is the stuff of five
Dreyfus affairs in that thought.” Then, he proceeded to cover the substance of
the charges.
A wealth of newer books on the subject have been written
since, but those written as events were unfolding catch the moment in history
as nothing else can. So let’s take a look at a few of the works offered in 1971
to consider the broad and devastating implications of that horrific March day.
The
War for Quang Ngai, Jonathan Schell and Richard Falk
Context is everything.
Jonathan Schell’s reporting for “The Military Half” occurred
just months before My Lai. Schell spent a month in Quang Ngai, the province
where My Lai is located and that is known for its resistance against both the
French and the Americans. He flew daily missions with pilots in forward air
control planes designed to guide bombers to their strike targets and in what he
described as “bubble” helicopters that could fly within the landscape at
altitudes as low as six or eight feet. He used that unique vantage point to
methodically survey the land beneath him, shading destroyed areas on military
maps and corroborating his findings with ground commanders.
He saw airstrikes in real time and observed from the air
as troops burned villages to the ground in zippo raids. The settled portions of Quang
Ngai were not in danger of future destruction, he said, but had in fact already
been nearly totally destroyed. Seventy percent of the homes in the province
were completely decimated by late 1967, along with the normal fabric of
Vietnamese life. Quang Ngai was being emptied, its inhabitants resettled in
refugee camps as part of what was termed “the civilian half,” or “pacification,” as it was euphemistically
called. The American command thought it had to empty the sea (the population
base) to deny sustenance to the fish (the Viet Cong). Once emptied, the
villages became “free-fire” zones, where U.S. forces were instructed to shoot “anything that moved.”
But the resettlement camps proved unable to absorb the
influx of refugees. Part-way through his Quang Ngai reporting stint, Schell
observed that commanders were told to stop generating refugees, even as they
continued destruction of the villages. Schell recounted one air
operation—Operation Benton—where out of a population of approximately 17,000
people, only 115 were evacuated. The airstrikes went forward, omitting the
evacuation step mandated in prior raids. Benton, like the other air operations
Schell witnessed, was carried out in the absence of ground combat.
Finally, at the end of “The Military Half,” Schell
revealed that (based on a report from a Quang Ngai-based civilian physician) an
estimated 50,000 people had been killed in Quang Ngai each year since American
troops first arrived. This is the terrible context of My Lai.
Destruction of the civilian population from the air was
routine, with non-combatants the intended targets of an unprecedented array of
weaponry. Sheehan cited the air war as perhaps the gravest war crime of all,
deeming it a “distinct weapon of terror [used] to empty the countryside.” My
Lai can be differentiated from other crimes only in that it involved the
face-to-face massacre of hundreds of civilians over the course of a few hours.
As international law expert Richard Falk testified
before Congress in 1970 and as recorded in “War Crimes and the American
Conscience” (another title in the bibliography), Vietnam was characterized by
“battlefield policies that openly deny the significance of any distinction
between civilians and combatants, between military and non-military targets.
The most spectacular of these practices are the B-52 pattern raids against
undefended villages and populated areas, free-fire zones, harassment and
interdiction fire, Operation Phoenix, search and destroy
missions, massive crop destruction and defoliation, and forcible transfer of
the civilian population.”
Indeed, he said, “the wrongdoers at My Lai, whether or not
they were carrying out specific command decisions, were fulfilling the basic
and persistent United States war policies in South Vietnam.”
“Nuremberg
and Vietnam,” Telford Taylor
No one exerted more authority on the subject of war crimes
than the chief prosecutor and co-author of the trial rules for
Nuremberg, Brig. Gen. Telford Taylor,
author of “Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson had opened Nuremberg
with the declaration that theirs would not be a victor’s justice; that the
imposition of the rules of war would thereafter be equally applicable to the
victor and the vanquished. Jackson and his fellow prosecutors thought
application of the Nuremberg principles would usher in a new era of world
peace, as world leaders were called to account for their actions. That the U.S.
would prove unwilling to adjudicate its own later conduct constituted a tragedy
for the Nuremberg prosecutor, considering our country’s role in Vietnam.
The exposure of My Lai had forced a semblance of
accountability. Twenty-four officers and soldiers were charged for the massacre
or its cover-up. Just two of them faced courts-martial. Only one, Lt. William
L. Calley, would be convicted and sentenced to life in prison, only to have his
sentence commuted after serving just three months in jail.
Taylor didn’t know the trial’s outcome as he wrote his
treatise on the applicability of Nuremberg and Tokyo (the Tokyo War Crimes
Trials, 1945-1948) to Vietnam. Offering a legal matrix for decision, Taylor
thought the burden of superior orders mitigated the responsibility of low-level
soldiers facing charges for My Lai and shifted responsibility up the chain of
command.
In perhaps the most telling case Taylor cited as
precedent, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the Japanese army
commander in the Philippines, was prosecuted by a U.S. Military Commission for
atrocities committed against civilians and prisoners of war, despite the fact
that he had not ordered the atrocities and there was no evidence that he even had
direct knowledge they had occurred. In a verdict upheld by Gen. Douglas
MacArthur and the U.S. Supreme Court, Yamashita was found guilty for failing to
“provide effective control of his troops” and sentenced to hang.
Civilian leaders were also liable under Nuremberg and
Tokyo, placing American presidents and cabinet members alike at risk of
prosecution if the same terms were applied to Vietnam.
Taylor declined to name names of potential civilian
defendants for a war crimes trial, arguing that the extent of their knowledge
of the war’s effect on civilians was still too speculative. (Presumably,
Taylor, who had cited “The Military Half” in his own work, didn’t know that
Schell had reported his findings on Quang Ngai to
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara late in 1967 and had
given him a copy of his notes. Schell agreed to keep their meeting off the
record, an agreement he upheld until McNamara’s death.)
Taylor had no such reticence about naming military
leaders. His list of potential defendants included Gen. William
Westmoreland and the chain of command leading as high as the
chiefs of staff in Washington. He would later go on the record, naming both Presidents
Johnson and Nixon as potentially culpable for war crimes.
The
Aggression Test
Most damning then, and 50 years hence, is that Taylor’s
treatise raised the specter of the gravest of war crimes: aggression.
The “crime against peace” had never before been
prosecuted. But the Nazis’ undisputed aggression in Europe and Japan’s in Asia
made it central to Nuremberg and Tokyo. It was American jurists’ conviction
that German and Japanese aggression could be proven that secured their
leadership of the tribunals. With the “aggression test” applied, self-defense
became the only legitimate basis for war.
While the legal standard endured, application of the
aggression test would prove challenging. Taylor noted its prominence in the
dueling narratives of the Vietnam era—the Johnson and Nixon administrations
both claimed North Vietnamese aggression, while the Vietnamese insurgents and
American anti-war protesters claimed American aggression. The official U.S.
narrative has proven the most persistent and continues to stymie analysis of
the war.
U.S. war planners framed Vietnam as a war that pitted
“North” against “South,” with the U.S. bringing its weight to bear in support
of a democratic South Vietnam. North Vietnamese invasion and aggression was key
to the official narrative. Aggression had to be demonstrated to make a legal
case for war.
But the official narrative fails the truth test—and the
aggression test—as amply documented by the Pentagon’s own historians.
Another legal treatise on the bibliography, “Vietnam and
International Law,” by the Lawyers Committee on American Policy Towards Vietnam,
put the facts simply: “[a] separate state or nation of ‘South Vietnam’ has
never existed.”
Vietnam’s division at the 17th parallel had only endured
past 1956 because the U.S. supported a client state in the south that thwarted
the popular election slated by the Geneva Accords to
reunify the country.
The problem as the U.S. saw it—and as documented in the
Pentagon Papers—was that Ho Chi Minh would have handily won the
election, putting all of Vietnam under Communist control.
The Eisenhower administration chose instead to throw its
support behind Ngo Dinh Diem, a nationalist who was thought
to represent a “third force” in South Vietnam, but who quickly demonstrated his
willingness to crush his political opposition through mass incarceration and
extermination. In the months before the Geneva-mandated election, Diem’s regime
jailed as many as 50,000 people and killed 12,000. Then, “abetted” (the term
used by the Lawyer’s Committee) by the U.S., Diem refused to participate in the
elections.
Popular opposition to Diem overwhelmed his usefulness, and
he was deposed seven years later in a CIA-backed coup. John F. Kennedy had
sanctioned the coup, but he had not anticipated Diem’s assassination. Just
three weeks later, Kennedy would meet the same fate, passing responsibility for
Vietnam to Lyndon Johnson.
In a successful bid to demonstrate North Vietnamese
aggression, the Johnson administration used the Tonkin Gulf Incident—also debunked in the
Pentagon Papers—to create a pretext for war. Congress complied with the Tonkin
Gulf Resolution, giving Johnson a congressional blank check. Tonkin would be
one in a stream of North Vietnamese aggression tales that flowed unrelentingly
throughout the course of the war.
Reports of North Vietnamese aggression were belied by the Pentagon’s own research that the
insurrection was “southern bred” and that the Viet Cong were the popular
favorite and de facto government in most of the rural south.
The North Vietnamese aggression narrative evaporates once
we’ve dispensed with the myth of two Vietnams and the ensuing illusion of the
U.S. as protector of a democratic South Vietnam. The evidence points to the
other narrative—that the U.S. was the aggressor.
In that light, the Vietnamese insurgents—southern bred,
with help from the north—become freedom fighters, not aggressors.
This is not to deny war crimes on both sides. Hue is often
mentioned as the most notable atrocity committed by
Vietnamese insurgents.
But Nuremberg held that by breaking the peace, aggression
acts as a precursor crime, creating the conditions for other war crimes. As
such, aggression is the ultimate offense. Atrocities like My Lai and Hue all
too likely result.
Calls
for Inquiry
Richard Falk, who has several offerings on Sheehan’s list,
offered the legal opinion that if Vietnam was found to have been an illegal
war—and, thus, by definition an aggressive war—the policymakers who initiated
and prosecuted the war were liable.
Taylor thought litigation of the aggression charge
impossible in 1970 since the secret papers that might have documented the
decision-making behind the Vietnam War were unavailable. After release of the
Pentagon Papers in 1971—which debunked the Tonkin Gulf Incident and documented
U.S. planners’ knowledge that Ho Chi Minh would have won the thwarted
democratic elections—Taylor called publicly for a high-level inquiry.
Sheehan also called for an inquiry. His bibliography
represented, he thought, “the beginnings of what promises to be a long and
painful inquest.”
That inquest never occurred.
While we can’t quantify the ramifications of that failure,
theorists like Robert Jay Lifton foretold the psychic
toll our war crimes complicity might take on America. Lifton testified before
Congress in 1970 (“War Crimes and the American Conscience”) that our denial of
guilt and accountability had involved America in “a malignant spiral of self-deception,
brutalization and numbing” that reverberated back to the States. He thought it
might take decades for America to recover, if we could recover at all.
If only his words weren’t so prophetic.
The
commemoration of the 50th anniversary of My Lai this month offers an
opportunity to take stock of the wider implications of that disastrous March
day and American culpability for the gravest of crimes.
Barbara Myers is an independent journalist and author of "The Other Conspirator," the story of Daniel Ellsberg’s co-defendant in the Pentagon Papers trial.
Behind Colin Powell's Legend - My Lai
From
the Archive: With media focus on the 50th anniversary of the
Vietnam War’s My Lai Massacre, Colin Powell’s role as a military adviser has
continued to elude scrutiny, so we’re republishing a 1996 article by Robert
Parry and Norman Solomon.
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