Bloodbaths in Indochina: Constructive, Nefarious and Mythical
The sheer scope and intensity of the violence imposed on Indochina by the U.S. war machine forced a great deal of information into the public domain and consciousness. The public was, nevertheless, spared a full picture of the war’s true nature, and was kept in a state of confusion by a steady flow of allegations of enemy terror, assertions of Washington’s benevolent intentions, and the pretense that the enormous destruction of the civil societies of Indochina resulted from the fact that “war inevitably hurts many innocent people.” Enough got through the propaganda filter, however, to open many eyes to the ugly reality and to shatter the complacent faith of large numbers of Americans in the competence, humanity, and integrity of their leaders.
In reconstructing the faith it has been necessary to expunge from many memories the brutalities and lies of the war, and to transform the historical record so as to obfuscate its causes, minimize the toll it exacted upon its victims, and discount its meaning and historic significance. Much progress has been made along these lines by a simple process of non-discussion and suppression, allowing the war to fade, except where anti-Communist points can be scored. The propagandists have proven their mettle already on the crucial issue of cause and intent; they have succeeded in wiping the record clean of the substantial documentary evidence of rational imperial planning that provided the framework for the U.S. interventions, interpreting them more comfortably in terms of neutral categories such as “error” or “ignorance” in a framework of concern for freedom. A renewed effort has also commenced to show that the policies of search-and-destroy, harassment-and-interdiction fire, and napalming and high level bombing of densely populated areas were really not intended to kill civilians.1 Rather, as Sidney Hook had already emphasized back when the U.S. was blowing up villages “suspected” of harboring “terrorists,”2 the resulting casualties were not “deliberate American atrocities” but merely “the unfortunate accidental loss of life incurred by the efforts of American military forces to help the South Vietnamese repel the incursions of North Vietnam and its partisans”; or in a later version, “unintended consequences of military action.’’3
In volume II, we will consider the process of historical reconstruction in the context of analysis of Western reactions to developments in postwar Indochina. Here we will only review very briefly some salient features of the U.S. onslaught, soon to be lost in the mist of obfuscation and deceit as the propaganda system turns to the tasks that lie ahead. We will restrict the discussion to South Vietnam4 and will not make any effort to touch on more than a few issues and examples. We have written on the subject extensively elsewhere, as have many others.5
5.1 Constructive Bloodbaths in Vietnam
5.1.1 French and Diemist Bloodbaths
Although the only pre-1965 bloodbath recognized in official doctrine is that which occurred in North Vietnam during its land reform of the mid-50s, there were others. In 1946, without warning, the French bombarded Haiphong, killing an estimated 6000 civilians,6 perhaps more than the number of victims of the well publicized North Vietnamese land reform episode (see section 5.2.2). But as part of the French recolonization effort, and with Vietnam of little interest to the American leadership, this bloodbath was ignored and has not been mentioned by U.S. official or non-official propagandists in their historical reconstructions of terror in Indochina.
Diem’s bloodbaths also were impressive, but as they were in the service of anti-Communism and the preservation of our client, they fall into the constructive or benign categories. Under our tutelage, Diem began his own “search-and-destroy” operations in the mid- and late 1950s, and his prison camps and the torture chambers were filled and active. In 1956 the official figure for political prisoners in South Vietnam was fifteen to twenty thousand. Even Diem’s friend and adviser, P. J. Honey, concluded on the basis of talks with former inmates, that the majority of these were “neither Communists nor pro-Communists.”7 The maltreatment and massacre of political prisoners was a regular practice during the Diem period, although these problems became much more acute in later years.8 The 1958 massacre of prisoners in Diem’s concentration camp Phu Loi led to such an outcry that P. J. Honey was dispatched to inquire into these events; according to Lacouture, Honey could not verify more than twenty deaths at Phu Loi.9
“Pacification” as it developed from the earliest Diem period consisted in “killing, or arresting without either evidence or trials, large numbers of persons suspected of being Vietminh or ‘rebels’.”10 This resulted in many small bloodbaths at the local level, plus larger ones associated with military expeditions carried out by Diem against the rural population. One former Vietminh resistance fighter gave the following account of the Diemist terror and bloodbath in his village:
My village chief was a stranger to the village. He was very cruel. He hunted all the former members of the Communist Party during the Resistance to arrest and kill them. All told, he slaughtered fourteen Party members in my village. I saw him with my own eyes order the killing of two Party members in Mau Lam hamlet. They had their hands tied behind their backs and they were buried alive by the militia. I was scared to death.11
Another former resistance fighter in Central Vietnam claimed that
in 1956, the local government of Quang Nam started a terrorist action against old Resistance members. About 10,000 persons of the Resistance Army were arrested, and a good many of them were slaughtered. I had to run for my life, and I stayed in the mountains until 1960. I lived with three others who came from my village. We got help from the tribal population there.12
The general mechanics of the larger bloodbaths were described by Joseph Buttinger, a former Diem supporter and advisor.13
In June 1956 Diem organized two massive expeditions to the regions that were controlled by the Communists without the slightest use of force. His soldiers arrested tens of thousands of people...Hundreds, perhaps thousands of peasants were killed. Whole villages whose populations were not friendly to the government were destroyed by artillery. These facts were kept secret from the American people.14
According to Jeffrey Race, a former U.S. Army advisor in South Vietnam who had access to extensive documentation on recent Vietnamese history,
...the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement—for example, by liquidations of former Vietminh, by artillery and ground attacks on “communist villages,” and by roundups of “communist sympathizers.” Yet it was just these tactics that led to the constantly increasing strength of the revolutionary movement in Long An from 1960 to 1965.15
During the period 1955-60 the Vietminh mission was political, and “though it used assassinations and kidnapping,” according to the Pentagon Papers historian it “circumspectly avoided military operations.”16 A USMAAG report of July 1957 stated: “The Viet Cong guerrillas and propagandists...are still waging a grim battle for survival. In addition to an accelerated propaganda campaign, the Communists have been forming ‘front’ organizations...seeking to spread the theory of ‘Peace and Co-existence.’”17 On the other hand, Diem, at least through 1957, was having “marked success with fairly sophisticated pacification programs in the countryside.”18 In a precise analogy to his sponsor’s pacification efforts of 1965-72, “By the end of 1956, the civic action component of the GVN pacification program had been cut back severely.”19 The Pentagon historian refers to “Diem’s nearly paranoid preoccupation with security,” which led to policies that “thoroughly terrified the Vietnamese peasants, and detracted significantly from the regime’s popularity.”20
According to the Pentagon historian, “No direct links have been established between Hanoi and perpetrators of rural violence.”21 The phrase “perpetrators of rural violence” is applied by the Pentagon historian only to the Vietminh, who admittedly were concentrating on political activities, and not to the Diem regime, which as he notes was conducting a policy of large-scale reprisals and violence, so extensive and undiscriminating as to be counterproductive. It is not difficult to establish “direct links” between Washington and perpetrators of the Diemist repression, incidentally. Once again it is clear that “constructive” bloodbaths can never involve “violence” for establishment propagandists and scholars; the word is reserved for those seeking social change in an illegitimate direction and under improper auspices.
Diem’s extensive use of violence and reprisals against former Resistance fighters was in direct violation of the Geneva Accords (Article 14c), as was his refusal to abide by the election proviso.22 The main reason for Diem’s refusal to abide by this mode of settlement in 1955-56 was quite evident: the expatriate mandarin imported from the United States had minimal popular support and little hope of winning in a free election. (This sequence of events has not prevented the liberal establishment from claiming that our intervention in South Vietnam was to assure “self-determination”.) Diem was a typical subfascist tyrant, compensating for lack of indigenous support with extra doses of terror. Violence is the natural mode of domination for those without local roots or any positive strategy for gaining support, in this instance the United States and its client regime. It is striking that irrespective of the facts, American officials and journalists throughout the succeeding struggle formulated the issues in terms of “control of the population” (how can we wrest areas from Viet Cong “control”?, etc.), projecting their own inability to conceive of “support” on the hated enemy, who was not so limited in either policies or programs that might yield political successes without violence.
Diem’s immediate resort to violence was in marked contrast to the behavior of those designated in the Pentagon Papers as “perpetrators of rural violence;” we return below (5.2.1) to Race’s detailed and well-documented study of how the Communist Party rejected the use of violence “even in self-defense, against the increasing repressiveness of the government” (p. 104), while winning popular support through its social programs, until driven by Diem’s repression to resorting to force in order to survive. Wherever detailed studies have been carried out, the conclusions are rather similar.
As for the toll exacted among the South Vietnamese during the Diem period, there are no firm estimates. Bernard Fall reports figures, which he seems to regard as realistic, indicating a death toll of over 150,000 “Viet Cong” from 1957 to April 1965—that is, before the first North Vietnamese battalion was allegedly detected in the South. These South Vietnamese, in his words, had been fighting “under the crushing weight of American armor, napalm, jet bombers and, finally, vomiting gases.”23 These 150,000 (or whatever the actual numbers may be) have also never been counted among the victims of a pre-1965 “bloodbath.” Rather, they were physically eliminated in a classic exercise of constructive violence, and are now being eliminated from the historical record in a no less classic exercise of a hegemonic system of ideology and propaganda.
5.1.2 The Overall U.S. Assault as the Primary Bloodbath
In a very real sense the overall U.S. effort in South Vietnam was a huge and deliberately imposed bloodbath. Military escalation was undertaken to offset the well-understood lack of any significant social and political base for the elite military faction supported by the United States. Despite occasional expressions of interest in the welfare and free choice of the South Vietnamese, the documents in the Pentagon Papers show that U.S. planners consistently regarded the impact of their decisions on the Vietnamese as a peripheral issue at most, more commonly as totally inconsequential. Nonintervention and an NLF takeover were unacceptable for reasons that had nothing to do with Vietnamese interests; they were based on an assumed adverse effect on our material and strategic interests. It was assumed that an American failure would be harmful to our prestige and would reduce the confidence of our satellite governments that we would protect them from the winds of change.24 The Thai elite, for example, might “conclude that we simply could not be counted on” to help them in suppressing local insurgencies. What is more, there was the constant threat of a “demonstration effect” of real social and economic progress in China,25 North Korea,26 and North Vietnam.27
In spite of official reiterations of the alleged threat of Chinese and North Vietnamese “expansionism,” it was recognized by U.S. policy makers that a unified Communist Vietnam probably would have limited ambitions itself, and would provide a barrier to any Chinese moves further South.28 It is not the threat of military expansion that official documents cite as the justification for the huge assault on Vietnam. Rather, it was feared that by processes never spelled out in detail, “the rot [might] spread to Thailand”29 and perhaps beyond. The “rot” can only be the Communist “ideological threat;” that is, the possibility of social and economic progress outside the framework of U.S. control and imperial interests, which must be fought by U.S. intervention against local Communist organizing or uprisings, whether or not any Communist armed attack is involved. This is the rot that might spread to Thailand and beyond, inspiring Communist-led nationalist movements. But no skillful ideologists would want such implications spelled out too clearly to themselves or to others. Consequently, the central factors involved remain vague, their place taken by rhetoric about aggression, threatened bloodbaths, and our interest in self-determination.
It is important to bear in mind that these concepts—in fact, even the terminology in which they were expressed—were not invented by Vietnam planners. Rather, they merely adopted a standard mechanism of proven effectiveness in mobilizing support for U.S. intervention. When Dean Acheson faced the problem of convincing the “leaders of Congress” (his quotes) to support the Truman Doctrine in February, 1947, he outlined the threat to them as follows:
In the past eighteen months, I said, Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.30
As Acheson well knew, Soviet pressure on the Straits and Iran had been withdrawn already and Western control was firmly established. Further, there was no evidence of Soviet pressure on Northern Greece—on the contrary, Stalin was unsympathetic to the Greek guerrillas. Still the rot might spread unless the U.S. undertook to rescue the terrorist regime in Athens, and a “Soviet breakthrough” was a useful propaganda device with which to mobilize domestic support. Acheson was concerned with the more remote dominoes—the Middle East and the industrial societies that were subject to the “threat” of internal democratic politics that might bring Communist parties to power, thwarting U.S. intentions. Similarly in the case of Indochina, it was the potential exit from the Free World of Indonesia with its rich resources, and ultimately industrial Japan, that obsessed U.S. planners as they contemplated the threat of falling dominoes and rotting apples.
Gabriel Kolko comments accurately that “translated into concrete terms, the domino theory [previously invoked with regard to Greece and the Middle East, as he notes] was a counterrevolutionary doctrine which defined modern history as a movement of Third World and dependent nations—those with economic and strategic value to the United States or its capitalist associates—away from colonialism or capitalism and toward national revolution and forms of socialism.”31 In its specific application to Indochina, the falling dominoes led inexorably to Japan, the “superdomino” in the nightmare of the planners, investing their effort to prevent an unwelcome form of independence in Indochina with cosmic significance.32 Again, mainstream scholarship is assiduously at work removing this no less unwelcome issue from the realm of discussion.
As the Pentagon Papers and other documentary evidence show beyond question, top-level U.S. planners never had any doubt that in backing French colonialism and later intervening directly they were placing themselves in opposition to the main currents of Vietnamese nationalism, though a show of rage about aggression directed from Moscow or “Peiping” was always considered necessary for public relations purposes, and was always saleable to the mass media and important segments of academic scholarship. Illusions about a unified International Communist movement responsible for events in Indochina were not only fostered by propagandists, but also came to be accepted doctrine among high level planners themselves, even surviving the China-Soviet schism that was apparent by the late 1950s. A similar mixture of pretense for the population and internal delusion was standard with regard to the situation in South Vietnam, as we can see from the account of the Pentagon Papers historians and the government documents they provide.33
The U.S. leadership knew that in Vietnam the “primary sources of Communist strength in the South remain indigenous,” with a corresponding “ability to recruit locally;” and it was recognized that the NLF “enjoys some status as a nationalist movement,” whereas the military government “is composed primarily of technicians” lacking in “positive support from various key segments of the populace” and determined “to remain the real power in South Vietnam” without any “interference from the civilians in the conduct of the war.”34 The experienced pacification chief, John Paul Vann, writing in 1965, puts the matter more brutally:
A popular political base for the Government of South Vietnam does not now exist....The existing government is oriented toward the exploitation of the rural and lower class urban populations. It is, in fact, a continuation of the French colonial system of government with upper class Vietnamese replacing the French....The dissatisfaction of the agrarian population...is expressed largely through alliance with the NLF.35
It was thus well known to U.S. authorities in 1965, as before, that they were fighting a nationalist mass movement in the name of a corrupt oligarchy that lacked popular backing. The Vietnam War was fought to return this nationalist mass movement to that “measure of passivity and defeatism” identified by Pool as necessary for “stability” in the Third World (see chapter 3, note 5). It must be brought under comprador-military control of the sort that the U.S. has imposed or supported in Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Bolivia, Thailand, etc. As we have noted, however, the power to rationalize self-interest is great, and some U.S. leaders may have been able to keep their minds from being cluttered with inconvenient facts. In so doing, they preserved the belief that because we were the “good guys” our purposes must be benign and democratic and must have some positive relationship to the interests of the South Vietnamese people. Even the evidence that we were directing a large part of our military effort to assaulting and uprooting the rural population of the South, already overwhelming before 1965, was easily assimilated into the Orwellian doctrine of “defense against aggression.”
The decision to employ technologically advanced conventional weaponry against the southern countryside made a certain amount of sense on two assumptions: first, that the revolutionary forces were predominant in the rural areas, so that the war had to be a true anti-population war to force submission; and second, that the “demonstration effect” is important to U.S. interests, so that our job was to terrorize, kill and destroy in order to prove that revolution “doesn’t pay.” The first assumption was true in fact and must be assumed to have contributed to the gradual emergence of a full-fledged policy of search-and-destroy and unrestrained firepower, whatever the human consequences. The second assumption was evidently important in the thinking of high level U.S. planners and advisers and also contributed to the evolution of policy.36
The very terminology of the planners reflected these accurate perceptions, as is noted occasionally by the Pentagon Papers analysts. A U.S. official commented that “essentially, we are fighting Vietnam’s birth rate,” in accordance with Westmoreland’s concept of a “meatgrinder” (“where we could kill large numbers of the enemy, but in the end do little better than hold our own,” in the words of the Pentagon Papers historian). Some in the U.S. remained optimistic. Robert (“Blowtorch”) Komer, who was in charge of the “other war,” cheerfully reported in early 1967 that “we are grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass” in what he correctly perceived as a “revolutionary, largely political conflict,” though he never drew the obvious conclusions that follow from these conjoined observations.37 Komer went on to recommend, rationally enough from the point of view of a major war criminal, that the United States must “step up refugee programs deliberately aimed at depriving the VC of a recruiting base” (his emphasis). Thus the United States could deprive the enemy of what the Combined Campaign Plan 1967 identifies as its “greatest asset,” namely, “the people.”
In January 1966, the well-known humanitarian Robert McNamara, now a passionate spokesman for the world’s poor in his capacity as head of the World Bank, introduced evidence in Congressional testimony on the success of air and artillery attacks, including B-52 raids (“the most devastating and frightening weapons used so far against the VC”), in forcing villagers “to move where they will be safe from such attacks...regardless of their attitude to the GVN.” One can gain certain insight into the mentality of pro-war intellectuals from the fact that McNamara’s evidence was reprinted in the pro-war journal Vietnam Perspectives (May 1966) to show how well things were going for our side. A month earlier, General Westmoreland had predicted “a tremendous increase in the number of refugees,”38 an expectation that was soon fulfilled as a result of B-52 bombings and other tactics. Meanwhile other humanitarians (e.g., Leo Cherne, chairman of the International Rescue Committee) thoughtfully explained how refugees were fleeing from Communism. (See Volume II, chapter 6, for references).
The character of U.S. policy was also influenced by the gradual recognition of two additional facts: first, that the South Vietnamese victims of “pacification” were essentially voiceless, unable to reach U.S. or world opinion even as effectively as the North Vietnamese, with the result that the population being “saved” could be treated with virtually unrestrained violence. The second fact was that relevant U.S. sensitivities (i.e., those of politically significant numbers of people) were almost exclusively related to U.S. casualties and costs. Both of these considerations encouraged the development of an indiscriminate war of firepower, a war of shooting first and making inquiries later; this would minimize U.S. casualties and have the spin-off benefit of more thoroughly terrorizing the population. The enhanced civilian casualties need not be reported—the enormous statistical service of the Pentagon always had difficulty dredging up anything credible on this one question—or such casualties could be reported as “enemy” or “Vietcong.” Years of familiarity with this practice did not cause the news services to refrain from transmitting, as straight news, Saigon and Pentagon handouts on “enemy” casualties.
The retrospective judgment of the generals themselves on the accuracy of casualty reports makes interesting reading. General Douglas Kinnard published a study based on responses of Army Generals who had been commanders in Vietnam to a variety of questions, including one on the accuracy of “body counts.” Only 26% of the respondents felt that body count figures were “within reason accurate.” The query elicited such responses as these: “The immensity of the false reporting is a blot on the honor of the Army;” “They were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like MeNamara and Westmoreland;” “A fake—totally worthless;” “Gruesome—a ticket punching item;” “Often blatant lies.”39 Most generals felt that the body count was exaggerated, but that reaction must be coupled with a recognition that much of the air and artillery barrage was directed against targets where casualties would never be known or counted. Kinnard, for example, reports that when he returned to Vietnam in May, 1969 as Commanding General of II Field Force Artillery he discovered that targets were being selected at random in areas where nighttime firing was authorized—quite substantial areas, as we know from other sources. Who might be killed by such random fire will never be known in the West. Reporters on the scene have made similar observations. Katsuichi Honda of Asahi Shimbun, perhaps the only pro-Western correspondent to have spent any time in the liberated areas of South Vietnam, described the incessant attacks on undefended villages by gunboats in the Mekong River and helicopter gunships “firing away at random at farmhouses”:
They seemed to fire whimsically and in passing even though they were not being shot at from the ground nor could they identify the people as NLF. They did it impulsively for fun, using the farmers for targets as if in a hunting mood. They are hunting Asians...This whimsical firing would explain the reason why the surgical wards in every hospital in the towns of the Mekong Delta were full of wounded.40
In the Mekong Delta, there were virtually no North Vietnamese troops when Honda reported in the fall of 1967. The victims of these hunting trips were not listed in the “body counts” and are not included in any accounting of “bloodbaths”.
Still other factors were involved in making the entire U.S. enterprise in Vietnam a huge bloodbath; faith in technological solutions, racism reinforced by the corruption of “our” Vietnamese and the helplessness of the victimized population, and the frustrations of war. But essentially the initial high level decision to bomb freely, to conduct search-and-destroy operations, and to fight a war against the rural population with virtually unlimited force were the source of the bloodbath. The essence of the U.S. war in “saving” South Vietnam was well expressed by a U.S. Marine, in a 1967 letter to Senator William Fulbright:
I went to Vietnam, a hard charging Marine 2nd Lieutenant, sure that I had answered the plea of a victimized people in their struggle against communist aggression. That belief lasted about two weeks. Instead of fighting communist aggressors I found that 90% of the time our military actions were directed against the people of South Vietnam. These people had little sympathy or for that matter knowledge of the Saigon Government...We are engaged in a war in South Vietnam to pound a people into submission to a government that has little or no popular support among the real people of South Vietnam. By real people I mean all those Vietnamese people who aren’t war profiteers or who have [not] sold out to their government or the United States because it was the easy and/or profitable thing to do.41
The immensity of the overall U.S. imposed bloodbath can be inferred to some degree from the sheer volume of ordnance employed, the nature of the weaponry, and the principles which governed their use. Through the end of 1971 over 3.9 million tons of bombs were dropped on South Vietnam from the air alone—about double the total bomb tonnage used by the United States in all theaters during World War II—with ground ordnance also employed in historically unprecedented volume.42 A large fraction of the napalm used in Indochina was dropped in South Vietnam, an illustration of the abuse visited on the voiceless South Vietnamese (in protecting them from “aggression”!) by the U.S. command in collaboration with its client government in Saigon. Over 90% of the air strikes in South Vietnam were classified officially as “interdiction”,43 which means bombing not carried out in support of specific ongoing military actions, but rather area bombing, frequently on a programmed basis, and attacks on “what are suspected” to be “enemy base camps,” or sites from which a shot may have been fired.
One former military intelligence officer with the Americal Division in South Vietnam told a congressional subcommittee: “Every information report (IR) we wrote based on our sources’ information was classified as (1) unverifiable and (2) usually reliable source...The unverified and in fact unverifiable information, nevertheless, was used regularly as input to artillery strikes, harassment and interdiction fire (H&I), B-52 and other air strikes, often on populated areas.”44 In the words of Army Chief of Staff General Johnson, “We have not enough information. We act with ruthlessness, like a steamroller, bombing extensive areas and not selected targets based on detailed intelligence.”45 This is an expression of indiscriminateness as a principle—deliberate, calculated and discriminate indiscriminateness—and it is a perfect complement to the other facets of a policy which was from the beginning semi-genocidal in purpose and method, resting in large part on the fact that the civilian population has been regarded as enemy or, at best, of no account.
The number of civilian casualties inflicted on South Vietnam is unknown, but is very likely underestimated by the Senate Subcommittee on Refugees at 400,000 dead, 900,000 wounded and 6.4 million turned into refugees.46 Conservative as these figures are, however, they mean “that there is hardly a family in South Vietnam that has not suffered a death, injury or the anguish of abandoning an ancient homestead.”47
That the overall U.S. assault on South Vietnam involved a huge bloodbath can also be inferred from the nature of “pacification,” both in general concept and in the details of implementation. We shall not here go into the general concept and the ways in which it was applied and was rapidly transformed into the wholesale killing and forced transfer of civilians.48 We shall confine ourselves to an examination of three cases: a specific operation by U.S. forces over a brief time period; a series of atrocities perpetrated over a six- or seven-year period by our South Korean mercenary allies, with the certain knowledge and tacit acceptance of U.S. authorities; and the Phoenix program of extra-legal “counter-terror” against enemy civilians. These are by no means the only bloodbaths that typify the constructive mode, but they are offered as illustrative and deserving of greater attention.
5.1.3 Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS
The atrocities committed by Westmoreland’s killing machine as it was “grinding the enemy down by sheer weight and mass” are readily discerned even in the bureaucratic prose of the Pentagon Papers and other government reports, but it was only after the Tet offensive of December 1967-February 1968, when the Pentagon Papers record terminates, that the full force of U.S. power was launched against the defenseless population of South Vietnam. Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS, conducted in the first six months of 1969, was only one of many major pacification efforts. It is unusual primarily in that it was studied in detail by Alex Shimkin and Kevin Buckley,49 who examined the military and hospital records of the operation and interviewed South Vietnamese inhabitants and pacification officials of the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa, the target of SPEEDY EXPRESS.
For many years, the province had been “almost totally controlled” by the NLF:
For a long time there was little or no military activity in the Delta. The 9th Division [which carried out the operation] did not even arrive until the end of 1966. Front activities went far beyond fighting. The VC ran schools, hospitals and even businesses. A pacification study revealed that an NLF sugar cane cooperative for three villages in the Mo Cay district of Kien Hoa produced revenue in 1968 which exceeded the entire Saigon government budget that year for Kien Hoa.
There appear to have been no North Vietnamese units present. As late as January 22, 1968, Defense Secretary McNamara had testified before the Senate that “no regular North Vietnamese units” were engaged in the Delta,50 and while some entered after the massive killing of NLF guerrillas and civilians during the Tet offensive and after, there is no indication in the reports that the “enemy” in Kien Hoa included units of the North Vietnamese army.
Despite the success of the NLF, the “aggressive military effort carried out by the U.S. 9th Infantry Division” had succeeded in establishing some degree of government control.51 In the six months of SPEEDY EXPRESS, this control was significantly extended; “a total of some 120,000 people who had been living in VC controlled areas” came under government control. This result was achieved by application of the “awesome firepower” of the 9th Division, including air strikes using napalm, high explosives and anti-personnel bombs, B-52 bombing, and artillery shelling “around the clock” at a level that “it is impossible to reckon.” Armed helicopters “scour[ed] the landscape from the air night and day,” accounting for “many and perhaps most of the enemy kills.” Buckley’s Newsweek account describes the events as follows:
All the evidence I gathered pointed to a clear conclusion: a staggering number of noncombatant civilians—perhaps as many as 5,000 according to one official—were killed by U.S. firepower to “pacify” Kien Hoa. The death toll there made the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison...
The Ninth Division put all it had into the operation. Eight thousand infantrymen scoured the heavily populated countryside, but contact with the elusive enemy was rare. Thus, in its pursuit of pacification, the division relied heavily on its 50 artillery pieces, 50 helicopters (many armed with rockets and mini-guns) and the deadly support lent by the Air Force. There were 3,381 tactical air strikes by fighter bombers during “Speedy Express”...
“Death is our business and business is good,” was the slogan painted on one helicopter unit’s quarters during the operation. And so it was. Cumulative statistics for “Speedy Express” show that 10,899 “enemy” were killed. In the month of March alone, “over 3,000 enemy troops were killed...which is the largest monthly total for any American division in the Vietnam War,” said the division’s official magazine. When asked to account for the enormous body counts, a division senior officer explained that helicopter gun crews often caught unarmed “enemy” in open fields. But Vietnamese repeatedly told me that those “enemy” were farmers gunned down while they worked in their rice fields...
There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cong were well armed. Simple civilians were, of course, not armed. And the enormous discrepancy between the body count [11,000] and the number of captured weapons [748] is hard to explain—except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed innocent civilians...
The people who still live in pacified Kien Hoa all have vivid recollections of the devastation that American firepower brought to their lives in early 1969. Virtually every person to whom I spoke had suffered in some way. “There were 5,000 people in our village before 1969, but there were none in 1970,” one village elder told me. “The Americans destroyed every house with artillery, air strikes, or by burning them down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by bombing, others were wounded and others became refugees. Many were children killed by concussion from the bombs which their small bodies could not withstand, even if they were hiding underground.”
Other officials, including the village police chief, corroborated the man’s testimony. I could not, of course, reach every village. But in each of the many places where I went, the testimony was the same: 100 killed here, 200 killed there. One old man summed up all the stories: “The Americans killed some VC but only a small number. But of civilians, there were a large number killed...”
Buckley’s notes add further detail. In the single month of March, the Ben Tre hospital reported 343 people wounded by “friendly” fire as compared with 25 by “the enemy.” And as a U.S. pacification official noted, “Many people who were wounded died on the way to the hospitals,” or were treated elsewhere (at home, in VC hospitals or ARVN dispensaries). And, of course, unknown numbers were simply killed outright. Buckley’s actual citation about the “perhaps as many as 5,000 deaths” is that of a senior pacification official who estimated that “at least 5,000” of those killed “were what we refer to as non-combatants”—to which we may add that the “combatants,” who are considered fair game in most U.S. reporting and historical analysis, were of course also South Vietnamese attempting to resist the overwhelming power of a foreign enemy. (Do we exculpate the Nazis for the killing of Resistance fighters in Europe?)
Interviews in the “pacified” areas add to the grim picture. One medic reported that this hospital took care of at least 1,000 people in four villages in early 1969. “Without exception the people testified that most of the civilians had been killed by a relentless night and day barrage of rockets, shells, bombs and bullets from planes, artillery and helicopters.” In one area of four villages, the population was reduced from 16,000 to 1,600—which raises some questions about the official figures of casualties, largely fantasy in any event. Every masonry house there was in ruins. Coconut groves were destroyed by defoliants. Villagers were arrested by U.S. troops, beaten by interrogators, and sent off to prison camps. The MACV location plots for B-52s show that the target center for one raid was precisely on the village of Loung Phu, near the village of Luong Hoa where the village elder cited above reported that every house was destroyed. Pounding from the air was “relentless”. Helicopters chased and killed people working in fields. Survival was possible in deep trenches and bunkers, but even in bunkers children were killed by concussion, as noted in the Newsweek article.
An experienced U.S. official compared My Lai to the operations of the 9th Division:
The actions of the 9th Division in inflicting civilian casualties were worse. The sum total of what the 9th did was overwhelming. In sum, the horror was worse than My Lai. But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command’s insistence on high body counts...The result was an inevitable outcome of the unit’s command policy.
That command policy can be traced directly back to Westmoreland and his civilian overseers, and derives immediately from the conditions of a war against a civilian population, already outlined.
On the matter of My Lai, misleadingly regarded in the West as somehow particularly evil (or perhaps, a shocking exception), Buckley also has relevant comments. The My Lai massacre was one of many that took place during Operation WHEELER WALLAWA. In this campaign, over 10,000 enemy were reported killed, including the victims of My Lai, who were listed in the official body count. Buckley writes:
An examination of that whole operation would have revealed the incident at My Lai to be a particularly gruesome application of a wider policy which had the same effect in many places at many times. Of course, the blame for that could not have been dumped on a stumblebum lieutenant. Calley was an aberration, but “Wheeler Wallawa” was not.
The real issue concerning this operation, Buckley and Shimkin cabled to the U.S. office of Newsweek, was not the “indiscriminate use of firepower,” as is often alleged. Rather, “it is charges of quite discriminating use—as a matter of policy, in populated areas.”
By the standards applied at the trials of Axis war criminals after World War II, the entire U.S. command and the civilian leadership would have been hanged for the execution of this policy of discriminating use of firepower. My Lai was indeed an aberration, but primarily in the matter of disclosure. Though the press concealed evidence of the massacre for over a year, the news broke through, largely because of the pressure of mass peace movement demonstrations. In the subsequent investigation by a military panel, it was discovered that a similar massacre had taken place only a few miles away at the village of My Khe. Consider the likely density of such massacres, given this accidental discovery. Proceedings against the officer in charge at My Khe were dismissed on the grounds that he had carried out a perfectly normal operation in which a village was destroyed and its population forcibly relocated,52 with close to a hundred people reported killed. The panel’s decision to exonerate the officer tells us all we need to know about Operation WHEELER WALLAWA, and in fact, reveals more about the Vietnam War than a dozen books.
Earl Martin, a Mennonite volunteer in Vietnam who is fluent in Vietnamese, was living in Quang Ngai city near My Lai at the time of the massacre, in close and regular contact with many Vietnamese. He writes that “the tragedy at My Lai never was talked about in Quang Ngai as it was in the United States...in the succeeding months we never once heard specific mention of My Lai from any of our friends” apart from a vague reference from a young boy. “The primary reason we heard little about My Lai,” he writes, “was that the Vietnamese were afraid to tell an American—or even another Vietnamese who might have been a secret police for the Saigon government—for fear they would be accused of being than-cong, Communist sympathizers.” He writes of the “tremendous pressure to cover up such atrocities,” in the Saigon zones just as in the United States, though for different reasons, and discusses other “similar killings” that he heard about only years later from villagers near Quang Ngai, for example, a massacre at Truong Khanh where some Americans were killed when they triggered a mine and in retaliation “the troops stormed the hamlet, which was occupied mostly by old people, women and children,” going from house to house, killing everyone they found, in the end, 62 villagers. The people of the village were broom makers. When they were dead, Martin was told by a friend, “the troops put the bodies on a pile, covered them with broom-straw and set them on fire.” How many other incidents of this kind took place the West will never know, and in fact does not much care.53
Returning to SPEEDY EXPRESS, Newsweek reported that although John Paul Vann found that SPEEDY EXPRESS had alienated the population (a profound discovery), the Army command considered its work well done. After all, “the ‘land rush’ succeeded. Government troops moved into the ravaged countryside in the wake of the bombardments, set up outposts and established Saigon’s dominance of Kien Hoa”—a notable victory for “our Vietnamese.”
Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS was regarded by the Army as a “stunning success.” Lauding the Commanding General on the occasion of his promotion, General Creighton Abrams spoke of “the great admiration I have for the performance of the 9th Division and especially the superb leadership and brilliant operational concepts you have given the Division.” “You personify the military professional at his best in devotion and service to God and country,” Abrams rhapsodized, referring specifically to the “magnificent” performance of the 9th Division, its “unparalleled and unequaled performance.” During Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS, for example. On another occasion, when awarding him the Legion of Merit, Abrams referred to George Patton III, one of the men best noted for converting “pacification” into plain massacre, as “one of my finest young commanders.”54
While the 9th Division was at work in the field, others were doing their job at home. One well-known behavioral scientist who had long deplored the emotionalism of critics of the war and the inadequacy of their empirical data penned the following observations as Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS ground on: “The only sense in which [we have demolished the society of Vietnam] is the sense in which every modernizing country abandons reactionary traditionalism.”55
SPEEDY EXPRESS, as noted, was unusual in that it was investigated and publicly reported, not in the fact that it occurred. Most of our information about comparable operations is derived by accident, when U.S. observers happened to make an effort to find out what had happened (the same is true of My Lai, incidentally). For this reason, something is known about U.S. operations at the same time in areas where Quaker relief groups were operating, for example, Operation BOLD MARINER in January 1969. In the course of this campaign, some 12,000 peasants (including, it seems, the remnants of My Lai) were driven from their homes in the Batangan Peninsula after having lived in caves and bunkers for months in an effort to survive constant bombardment,56 and were then shipped to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner which said, “We thank you for liberating us from communist terror.” After the population was forcibly removed, the land was levelled with artillery barrages and bombing and then cleared by “Rome Plows,” one of the most destructive weapons in the U.S. campaigns of ecocide in Vietnam. Since the dikes protecting rice paddies from the sea had been bombed, it was impossible to grow rice; rice purchased elsewhere was confiscated, according to inhabitants, since the population was regarded as sympathetic to the enemy and likely to give them rice. As of April 1971, the dike—which had been purposely destroyed to deny food to the enemy—had not been repaired. Refugees who returned lived under guard in camps surrounded by ten-foot rows of bamboo, from which they might look over the flooded paddies to the hills where their huts had been, now a ruin of bomb fragments, mines, unexploded artillery shells and B-52 craters nearly 20-feet deep.57 All of this, just another episode in which this “modernizing country abandons reactionary traditionalism” under the guidance of its benevolent big brother.
In one of the postwar efforts to diminish the significance and scale of the U.S. war in Vietnam, historian Guenter Lewy, describing the “spectacular” results of operation SPEEDY EXPRESS, writes that “the assertion of Kevin P. Buckley of Newsweek that perhaps close to half of the more than 10,000 killed in Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS were noncombatants remains unsubstantiated...”58 The assertion was not Buckley’s; he cited it from a high U.S. pacification official. But it is true that it remains “unsubstantiated,” as does the official record of 10,899 dead, which is, of course, an ugly joke, down to the last digit. The U.S. command had no idea how many people were killed by their B-52 and helicopter gunship attacks or the artillery barrage, napalm and anti-personnel weapons. Perhaps 5,000 “noncombatants” were killed, or perhaps some other number. An honest review of the matter would at least have mentioned some of what Buckley and Shimkin discovered concerning civilian casualties in their detailed investigation, and would have considered the significance of the operation, casualties aside, under the circumstances just reviewed. Lewy, however, prefers to keep to official sources, merely expressing some skepticism as to whether what he calls “the amazing results of Operation SPEEDY EXPRESS” should “be accepted at face value,” avoiding the question of what is implied by this successful operation of “pacification” in an area where South Vietnamese had successfully resisted the U.S. invasion.
5.1.4 The 43-Plus My Lais of the South Korean Mercenaries
South Korean mercenary forces were contracted for and brought into South Vietnam by the Johnson Administration in 1965, and they remained there into 1973.59 News reports in 1965 and 1966 described these South Korean forces as “fierce” and “effective,” but only in January, 1970 was it disclosed publicly that their effectiveness rested on a policy of deliberate murder of South Vietnamese civilians. At that time it was reported that they had carried out a policy of simply shooting one of ten civilians in villages which they occupied.60
Not until 1972, however, did the scale of South Korean civilian murders become public knowledge (although still of little interest to the mass media—these murders fall into the “constructive” category).61 Two Vietnamese-speaking Quakers, Diane and Michael Jones, carried out an intensive study of a portion of the area that had been occupied by the South Koreans for half a decade. To summarize their findings:
(a) The South Korean “rented soldiers,” as the South Vietnamese describe them, committed a whole series of My Lai-scale massacres. Twelve separate massacres of 100 or more civilians were uncovered in the Jones’s study. These soldiers carried out dozens of other massacres of twenty or more unarmed civilians, plus innumerable isolated killings, robberies, rapes, tortures, and devastation of land and personal property. The aggregate number of known murders by the South Koreans clearly runs into many thousands; and the Joneses examined only a part of the territory “pacified” by these “allied” forces.
(b) The bulk of the victims of these slaughters were women, children and old people, as draft-age males had either joined the NLF, had been recruited into the Saigon army, or were in hiding.
(c) These mass murders were carried out in part, but only in part, as reprisals for attacks on the South Korean forces or as a warning against such attacks.62 Briefly, the civilians of the entire area covered by the South Koreans served as hostages; if any casualties were taken by these mercenaries, as by an exploding mine, they often would go to the nearest village and shoot twenty, or 120, unarmed civilians. This policy is similar to that employed by the Nazis, but South Korean hostage murders of civilians were relatively more extensive and undiscriminating than those perpetrated by the Nazis in Western Europe during World War II.
(d) These mass murders were carried out over an extended time period, and into 1972, with knowledge by U.S. authorities.63 There is no evidence that U.S. officials made any effort to discourage this form of “pacification” or that any disciplinary action was ever taken in response to these frequent and sustained atrocities. In fact, there is reason to believe the South Korean policy of deliberate murder of civilians was not merely known and tolerated but was looked upon with favor by some U.S. authorities. Frank Baldwin, of Columbia University’s East Asia Institute, reports that the Korean policy was “an open secret in Korea for several years.” U.S. officials admitted to Baldwin that these accounts were true, “sometimes with regret, but usually with admiration.”64
(e) In its request for $134 million for fiscal 1973 to support the continued presence of South Korean troops in Vietnam (raising the 1966-73 total to $1.76 billion), the DOD pointed out to Congress that South Korean troops “protect” an important section of South Vietnam. It is a fact that South Koreans “protected” and gave “security”65 to people in South Vietnam in precisely the Orwellian-official U.S. sense in which Nixon, Westmoreland and the pacification program in general did the same.66
The acceptability of this form of pacification, and the now well established and consistent propensity of U.S. forces and each of their “allies”—not merely South Koreans67 —to carry out systematic acts of violence against South Vietnamese civilians, suggest that such atrocities and bloodbaths were “built in” to the U.S. effort and mission; they constituted an integral part of the task of “pacifying” a poor, virtually defenseless, but stubbornly uncooperative, foreign population.
5.1.5 Phoenix: A Case Study of lndiscriminate “Selective” Terror
With unlimited resources available for killing, one option fitfully pursued by the U.S. invaders of Vietnam—supplementing bombing, search-and-destroy and the organization of forces of mercenaries—was selective “counter-terror.”68 If the NLF had a political infrastructure that was important to its success, and if their own terror responding to that of the Saigon political machine effectively had made a shambles of the latter, why not duplicate and better their program of selective force? By doing so we would, as in providing them with the South Koreans and the U.S. Ninth Division, help “to protect the Vietnamese people against terrorism” (to quote William Colby),69 and thus bring “security” to the peasantry, threatened by the terror employed by their relatives among the NLF cadre.
Phoenix was a late-comer on the stage of selective counter-terror. It points up the ease with which U.S. programs were absorbed into (and added further corrupting impetus to) a system of rackets and indiscriminate torture and killings, and the willingness of the U.S. political-military bureaucracy actively to support and rationalize the most outlandish and brutal systems of terror. The defense of this degenerate program by Komer, Colby, Sullivan and other U.S. officials is also noteworthy in the quality of the rationalizations offered for U.S.-planned and financed bloodbaths.70
The immediate predecessor71 of the Phoenix program was the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation (ICEX) programs initiated in mid-1967,72 under the direction of Westmoreland and Komer, and involving CIA, U.S. civilian and military personnel, and the Saigon military-intelligence-police apparatus. Early internal directives describe the Phoenix program as a U.S. effort of advice, support, and assistance to the Saigon Phung Hoang program. Later modifications delete reference to “Phoenix” and refer merely to the Saigon Phung Hoang program, in line with the approach of “keep[ing] the GVN foremost in the picture presented to its own people and the world at large.”73 On March 4, 1968, the U.S. Secretary of Defense recommended that “Operation Phoenix which is targetted [sic] against the Viet Cong must be pursued more vigorously in closer liaison with the U.S.” while “Vietnamese armed forces should be devoted to anti-infrastructure activities on a priority basis.”74
After Westmoreland’s and Komer’s ICEX became Phoenix, the coordinated U.S.-Saigon intelligence-military-police program succeeded in “neutralizing”75 some 84,000 “Viet Cong infrastructure,” with 21,000 killed, according to one set of reported official figures.76 The Saigon government claims that under Phoenix, 40,994 suspected enemy civilians were killed, from its inception in August, 1968 through the middle of 1971.77 Just who these victims were is not entirely clear to William E. Colby, former head of Civil Operations and Rural Development [sic] Support Program (CORDS), later head of the CIA and now a respected figure on the campus and community lecture circuit. Colby told a Congressional Committee that he had “never been highly satisfied with the accuracies of our intelligence efforts on the Vietcong infrastructure,” conceding that “larger numbers” than the thousand suggested to him by Congressman Reid “might have been improperly identified” as Vietcong Infrastructure in the course of Phoenix operations.78 However, he assured the Committee that things are steadily “improving” (everyone’s favorite word), and while we have not yet reached perfect due process or comprehensive knowledge of VC Infrastructure, Phoenix has actually improved the quality of U.S.-Saigon counter-terror by its deep concern with accurate intelligence and its dedication to “stern justice.”79 Most of the Vietnamese killed, Colby (like Sullivan) assured the Committee, were killed “as members of military units or while fighting off arrest.”80 Conveniently these dead enemy have usually had incriminating documents on their person to permit identification. (“What they are identified from is from documents on the body after a fire fight.”)81 Thus although things are not perfect, South Vietnam is not the “pretty wild place” it was at one period “when the government was very unstable.” Though there are “unjustifiable abuses,” “in collaboration with the Vietnamese authorities we have moved to stop that sort of nonsense.”82
Colby’s suggestions that intelligence concerning VC Infrastructure had improved, that such intelligence had been relevant to Phoenix operations, and that deaths had occurred mainly in combat were contradicted by substantial nonofficial testimony on the subject. The program initially was motivated by the belief that U.S. forces were developing much valuable information that was not being put to use.83 Actually, much of this intelligence was unverified and unverifiable even in the best of circumstances. And Komer and his colleagues were aware of the fact that the “primary interest” of Saigon officials “is money,”84 with the potential, therefore, that a counter-terror program using Saigon machinery would be corrupt, indiscriminate, and ineffective, except for the “spinoff’ from mass terror. Potential corruption would be further heightened under a body quota system, which was quickly installed and subsequently enlarged with specific prize money of $11,000 offered for a live VCI and half that for a dead one. Corruption would be maximized by using dubious personnel to carry out the assassinations. And, in fact, assassinations were carried out regularly by former criminals or former Communists recruited and paid by the CIA, by CIA-directed teams drawn from ethnic minorities, U.S. military men, and Nationalist Chinese and Thai mercenaries. A U.S. IVS volunteer reports picking up two hitchhikers in the Mekong Delta, former criminals, who told him that by bringing in a few bodies now and then and collecting the bounty, they could live handsomely.85
The quota system was applied at many levels. Michael J. Uhl, a former military intelligence (MI) officer, testified that a Phoenix MI team “measured its success...not only by its ‘body count’ and ‘kill ratio’ but by the number of CD’s [civil detainees] it had captured...All CD’s, because of this command pressure...were listed as VCI. To my knowledge, not one of these people ever freely admitted being a cadre member. And again, contrary to Colby’s statement, most of our CD’s were women and children...”86 Quotas were also fixed for local officials in an effort to produce “results” on a wider front; and as one U.S. adviser noted, “They will meet every quota that’s established for them.”87
Torture, a long-standing policy of the Saigon regime, was greatly encouraged by quotas and rewards for neutralizing “Vietcong Infrastructure.” A sardonic saying favored by the Saigon police was: “If they are innocent beat them until they become guilty.”88 According to Uhl, “Not only was there no due process... but fully all detainees were brutalized and many were literally tortured.”89 A woman interviewed by Tom Fox after her release from a Saigon interrogation center in July, 1972 claimed that more than 90% of those arrested and taken to the center were subjected to torture.90 K. Barton Osborn, who served in a covert program of intelligence in Vietnam, not only testified to a wide variety of forms of torture used by U.S. and Saigon personnel, but also made the startling claim that “I never knew an individual to be detained as a VC suspect who ever lived through an interrogation in a year and a half, and that included quite a number of individuals.”91
By mid-1971, when the Saigon government had reported over 40,000 eliminated, the pacification program was being accelerated with “top priority” reportedly being given to neutralization of the VC political apparatus, at a reported cost of over $1 billion to the U.S. and an undisclosed amount to the Saigon government.92 A rare statistic for April, 1971 reveals that in that month, of 2,000 “neutralized” more than 40 percent were assassinated.93 According to British journalist Richard West, a U.S. intelligence officer assigned to the Phoenix program stated that when he arrived in his district, he was given a list of 200 names of people who were to be killed; when he left six months later, 260 had been killed, but none of those on his list.94
In some respects the Phoenix system was biased in favor of the NLF and its cadres and against the ordinary citizen. The former were more elusive and better able to defend themselves and sometimes established a modus vivendi with local officials. But Phoenix was “widely used to arrest and detail [sic] non-Communist dissidents,” according to Theodore Jacqueney, a former AID and CORDS employee in Vietnam.95 The Phoenix program also reportedly served for personal vendettas or for obtaining cash rewards for producing bodies. Meeting quotas was always possible in Free Vietnam by simply committing violence against the defenseless.
A system of terror-run-amok was facilitated by the incompetence and chronic irrelevance of the “intelligence” system that Colby claimed to be “improving” and which gave him hopes of “stern justice.” According to Michael Uhl, Colby’s claim of increasingly adequate intelligence as a basis for the huge number of Phoenix victims simply reflects Colby’s “general lack of understanding of what is actually going on in the field.”96 According to Uhl, the MI groups in South Vietnam never had the capacity to do such a major intelligence job. “A mammoth task such as this would greatly tax even our resourceful FBI, where we have none of the vast cross-cultural problems to contend with.” In the reality of practice:
We had no way of determining the background of these sources, nor their motivation for providing American units with information. No American in the team spoke or understood Vietnamese well enough to independently debrief any “contact”....Our paid sources could easily have been either provocateurs or opportunists with a score to settle. Every information report (IR) we wrote based on our sources’ information was classified as (1) unverifiable and (2) usually reliable source. As to the first, it speaks for itself; the second, in most cases was pure rationale for the existence of the program.
The unverified and in fact unverifiable information, nevertheless, was used regularly as input to artillery strikes, harassment and interdiction fire (H & I), B52 and other air strikes, often on populated areas.97
Osborne testified that the Phoenix bureaucracy unofficially encouraged killing on the spot rather than going through the required administrative procedure:
After all, it was a big problem that had to be dealt with expediently. This was the mentality. This carries a semi-official or semi-illegal program to the logical conclusion that I described here. It became a sterile depersonalized murder program...There was no cross-check; there was no investigation; there were no second options. And certainly not whatever official modus operandi had been described as a triple reporting system for verification. There was no verification and there was no discrimination.98
The indiscriminateness of the Phoenix murders was so blatant that in 1970 one senior AID advisor of the Danang City Advisory Group told Jacqueney that he refused ever to set foot in the Provincial Interrogation Center again, because “war crimes are going on there.”99 A UPI report of November, 1971 cites another U.S. adviser, who claims that local officials in the Delta decided simply to kill outright 80% of their “suspects,” but U.S. advisers were able to convince them that the proportion should be reduced to 50%.100 This is the “selective counter-terror” by which the United States and its clients brought “security” to the peasants.101
For all its lack of discrimination in selection of victims, the Phoenix program and other techniques of “pacification” were not without impact on the Southern resistance movement. In fact, they may have been so successful as to guarantee North Vietnamese dominance over the wreckage left by the U.S. war. We return to this topic in Volume II, chapter 1.
5.1.6 The Last Years of the Thieu Regime
As the war ground to a bloody end, the Saigon system of counterrevolutionary “stabilization” continued to function with new atrocities. The end product of “Vietnamization” was a centralized, corrupt, and exceptionally brutal police state. It became the ultimate satellite—the pure negative, built on anti-Communism, violence, and external sustenance. The base of the Thieu regime was a huge foreign-organized and -financed military and police apparatus; the population under its control was increasingly brutalized and “pacified” as enemy.
With U.S. “know-how” placed in the hands of the most fanatic and vicious elements of the dying order in South Vietnam, the modes and scope of torture and systematic police violence in the Thieu state reached new heights.102 Electrical and water torture, the ripping out of fingernails, enforced drinking of solutions of powdered lime, the driving of nails into prisoners’ bones (kneecaps or ankles), beatings ending in death, became standard operating procedure in the Thieu prisons.103 In Quang Ngai, for example, Dr. Marjorie Nelson saw “dozens of patients who had coughed up, vomited, or urinated blood after being beaten about the chest, back and stomach.”104 In another AFSC report: “A 17 year old boy, near death, had been unable to urinate for four days and was in extreme pain. After treatment by a Quaker doctor, we were informed that the prisoner had been tortured by electrical charges to his genital organs. A young girl had seizures, stared into space and exhibited symptoms of loss of memory. She said she had been forced to drink a lime solution many times while being interrogated.”105
Following the release of ten students from Thieu’s jails, these students put themselves on display in a college laboratory. One of them was in a state of semi-shock and was still being fed dextrose intravenously. His fingernails were blackened as a result of pins and slivers of wood being inserted under them. His hearing had been impaired by soapy water having been poured into his ears. Luu Hoang Thao, Deputy Chairman of the Van Hanh Student Association, described what happened to him after his arrest, as follows:
For the first three days, the police beat me continuously. They didn’t ask me any questions or to sign anything. They just beat my knee caps and neck with their billy clubs. Then they beat me with chair legs. When a chair leg broke, they took another one. I was beaten until I was unconscious. When I regained consciousness, they beat me again. Finally, after three days, they asked me to sign a paper they had already written. They read the paper but would not let me see it. I wouldn’t sign it, so they beat me some more.
They put pins under my fingernails. They attached electrodes to my ears, my tongue and my penis. They forced soapy water into my mouth, tramping on my stomach when it became bloated with water. They then hung me from the ceiling and extinguished lighted cigarettes m my nipples and penis.106
In a 1972 study of the treatment of prisoners in South Vietnam, the Quaker team from Quang Ngai reported that there had been a further increase in torture in that stricken province.107 Ngo Cong Duc (former Catholic deputy and president of the Saigon publishers association and now returned to Vietnam as publisher of the journal Tin Sung) claimed that the typical prisoner in South Vietnam “undergoes three torture sessions at the arresting agency,” with the most brutal designed to force the divulgence of names.108 The evidence that was streaming in from all over the Thieu state indicated that it was probably the torture capital of the world.
Under Vietnamization the previously tenuous rule of law was terminated completely; the other side of the coin was the rise and triumph of essentially unrestrained police powers to seize, imprison, and molest. We have already quoted former military intelligence officer Michael Uhl, who pointed out that large numbers of detainees, the majority women and children, were “captured” in repeated dragnet operations, “and whatever looked good in the catch, regardless of evidence, was classified as VCI... Not only was there no due process” applied to these prisoners, “fully all detainees were brutalized and many were literally tortured.”109 In 1972 arrests were proceeding at an estimated rate of 14,000 to 15,000 persons per month.110 The victims of this process had no protection in the U.S.-Thieu state, especially if they were ordinary citizens seized in countryside villages.
The breakdown of anything resembling a “legal system” was paralleled by a huge increase in the numbers of police. The National Police Force, which was only one of a dozen agencies legally authorized to make arrests, was enlarged from 16,000 in 1963, to 88,000 in 1969; under Vietnamization the numbers rose to 122,000 in 1972. Concurrently, a pervasive police-intelligence network spread throughout South Vietnam.
A police state is a prison state, and the Thieu state may have led all others (even Indonesia) in the number of political prisoners. Over 200 national prisons and hundreds of local jails in South Vietnam housed a prisoner population that many estimated at over 200,000.111 A great many of these prisoners were middle-of-the-road students, clergy, intellectuals, and labor leaders who showed some interest in political affairs and therefore constituted a threat to the leaders of the police state. One should add that the prisoners were drawn from that sector of the population that was more favorably treated by the U.S.-Saigon system; those beyond its reach were subjected to the full rigors of mechanized war. Under Vietnamization the Thieu government engaged in a determined effort to destroy any non-Communist opposition to its rule, largely by means of intimidation and violence. The vast repressive machinery of the Thieu regime was employed to a great extent against these center elements, which it properly regarded as threatening to its rule. The degeneration of this state was so extreme that a great many subjects of police terror were essentially “random” victims—brutalized as a matter of course once they fell into police hands (as in the dragnet seizures described by Uhl, above).
Many of the maltreated were victims of attempts at shakedowns. Staff of the American Friends Service Committee reported speaking with a young woman who had been imprisoned and tortured for rejecting the advances of an ARVN officer who had friends in the police.112 And many arrests had payoffs in bribes from the families of the imprisoned, solicited or offered with knowledge that these might be useful in reducing the severity of tortures to be applied.113
As the threat of a political settlement became manifest in 1972-73, the repression intensified. The reason was simple. The Saigon diplomatic representative in Phnom Penh in 1959 told a reporter: “You must understand that we in Saigon are desperate men. We are a government of desperadoes.”114 True enough, though Diem was an authentic nationalist and relatively benign in comparison with the collaborationist regimes that followed as the U.S. intervention grew to full-scale war against rural South Vietnam where the vast majority of the population had lived. The desperation stemmed in part from the fact that, as each successive U.S. client found, terror does not build popular support, but on the contrary, generates more “Communists,” or at best leaves demoralization and apathy. More violence was always required to give the people “security”. Thus, after many years of U.S.-sponsored protective terror, Thieu acknowledged to Saigon officials in January, 1973 his continued inability to compete with the Communists on a purely political basis: “If we let things go the population may vote for the Communists, who know how to make propaganda.”115 The occasion was the signing of the peace agreements that were to establish parallel and equivalent authorities in South Vietnam (Thieu and the PRG) which were to reach a peaceful political settlement. But Thieu did not have to fear that the United States would help expedite any such arrangement. Recognizing no less than Thieu the hopelessness of political competition,116 the U.S. government unilaterally rescinded these provisions.
But even the possibility of political competition sent shivers through the Thieu government. In June, 1972 several thousand persons were arrested and shipped to Con Son island, many of them “merely relatives of political suspects” and many of them women and children.117 George Hunter reported that
special Branch Police swooped down on houses all over South Vietnam and arrested anyone under the remotest suspicion of being ‘left wing’...The government has a blacklist of suspects, but I understand that wives, mothers and fathers—anyone with the slimmest association with those on it are being caught in the net.118
Another roundup took place during the period of the threat of a Peace Agreement in October and November of 1972. On November 9, Hoang Duc Nha (Thieu’s closest adviser) announced to a group of Vietnamese journalists the seizure of over 40,000 “Communists” over the previous two-week period, thanks to a vast network of police.119 The mammoth scale of arrests to which Free Vietnam had been accustomed was sharply intensified, at just the time that Thieu and Nixon were theoretically readying themselves to sign an agreement committing them to a policy of national reconciliation.
After the agreements were signed, measures were taken that laid the basis for imprisonments with the potential of simple extermination—whether realized or not, it is hard to determine. In an official telegram sent by the Commander in Chief of Thieu’s police and the Saigon head of Phoenix on April 5, 1973, police and other arresting agents were advised as follows on the proper classification of detainees:
Do not use the expression “condemned communist or communist agent.” Write only: “Disturbs the peace.”120
Disturbers of the peace might be regarded as common crimi- nals; a Communist agent would be a political prisoner covered by the January 27th Agreement. This practice was supplemented by the reclassification of current prisoners to common-law status. For example, Mme. Ngo Ba Thanh, president of the Saigon-based Women’s Committee Struggling for the Right to Live, with a law degree from Columbia University, was among those transferred to a prison for common-law criminals in Bien Hoa Province. Documents from inside the prisons alleged that prison authorities incited common-law prisoners to provoke and even to kill reclassified political prisoners.121
Another technique used by the Thieu government was the alleged release of political prisoners, not to the PRG and DRV as stipulated in the January Agreements, but at large within South Vietnam. In early February, Thieu announced the release of 40,000 prisoners, with no specifics as to names and places of release.122 The media failed to perceive the most significant aspect of this action, portrayed as a magnanimous act although in technical violation of the Agreements. The crucial point missed was that, by this device, prisoners who were murdered could be alleged to have been “released” and thus no longer a Thieu responsibility.123 Previously, families of prisoners held at Phu Quoc whose terms had expired were informed of the prisoners’ release, yet these individuals had disappeared.124
Accelerated mistreatment of political prisoners was also reported as the threat of peace mounted, including further sharp reductions in the rice ration (which had already been reduced severely in January, 1972), the practice of mingling healthy prisoners with others in advanced stages of contagious diseases such as tuberculosis—another happy innovation in pacification—and direct physical violence.125 Jean-Pierre Debris, who had recently been released from Chi Hoa prison, wrote that “the aim of the Thieu regime is to break the prisoners physically so that they will never be able to take any part in national life again...The conditions under which thousands are held is critical and becoming more dramatic at the present time.”126
Finally, reports of the direct killing of prisoners began filtering through with increased frequency. The two French prisoners released in December reported that just prior to their departure “there were massive deportations to the Paulo Condor [Con Son] camp,” the scene of numerous reported atrocities in the past. They speculated that their sudden release might have been motivated by concern that they might witness what they expected would then take place, “a liquidation operation which might begin in the prisons.”127 Amnesty International cited “evidence that selective elimination of opposition members had begun” in the prisons, and a report that 300 prisoners being moved from Con Son to the mainland were killed.128 On Sunday, March 25, NBC Monitor News transmitted a report from the Swedish office of Amnesty International that observers had sighted thousands of bodies in prison uniforms floating in the area off South Vietnam. The PRG and DRV reported a steady stream of killings and disappearances, impossible to verify but frequently specific as to place, and hardly to be ruled out in the light of processes then at work in the Thieu state.
Although it was sometimes said that the Thieu government was “a coalition of the extreme Right” (a description by the pro-Thieu Saigon Daily News), this characterization was rejected by informed Vietnamese, who preferred the term “Mafia” to describe the Thieu coalition; they pointed to the huge thievery, the common involvement in the heroin trade, and the long and parasitic dependence of this tiny faction on a foreign power for survival. The repressive character of the Thieu state epitomized the long-term incapacity of the Diem regime and its increasingly militarized successors to respond to grievances except by violence. With Thieu the blend of egotism, fanatical anti-Communism and a life of professional military service under foreign sponsorship brought repression and police state violence to a new level of refinement.
The U.S. role in the police repression apparatus of the Thieu state was straightforward. In the broadest sense, the long U.S. intervention was the only reason that a Thieu-type regime could exist in the first place; more specifically, the U.S. financed, advised, provided technological improvements and afforded a public relations cover for the direct instruments of terror. From the time of Diem the United States placed great weight on the police and intelligence; the funding and advising of the prison-police-intelligence ensemble of South Vietnam began at once, as the United States entered the scene directly after the Geneva Accords of 1954. A spokesperson for AID told Congress:
AID and its predecessor agencies have supported public safety programs [essentially police] in Vietnam since 1955... AID’s task has been to assist the National Police in recruiting, training and organizing a force for the maintenance of law and order.129
AID provided police specialists to train Saigon’s police and advise them at all levels, and to work in Thieu’s “Public Safety” programs. Over $100 million was spent on Public Safety in Vietnam from 1968 through 1971.130 The Provincial Interrogation Centers, which were reported by Americans on the scene to have uniformly employed torture, were funded directly by the United States.131 The pacification programs in general, including Phoenix, were paid for by the United States, at a cost estimated conservatively at about $5 billion for the period 1968-71.132 AID put more money into South Vietnamese prisons than schools, and even after the discovery and notoriety of Tiger Cages, it funded the construction of additional Tiger Cages for Con Son prison, even smaller than those already located on the island.133
Advice was also continuous, extending both to general strategy and specific tactics. William Colby indicated: “The function of U.S. advice and support was to initiate and support a Vietnamese effort which can be taken up and maintained by the Vietnamese alone...[and] a considerable degree of advice and support of the GVN pacification program has come from the U.S. side over the years.” In later years, in addition to Phoenix, U.S. advice and funds went toward
provision of commodity and advisory support for a police force of 108,000 men by the end of Fiscal 1971;...assisting the National Identity Registration Program (N.I.R.P.) to register more than 12,000,000 persons 15 years of age and over by the end of 1971; continuing to provide basic and specialized training for approximately 40,000 police annually; providing technical assistance to the police detention system, including planning and supervision of the construction of facilities for an additional 8,000 inmates during 1970; and helping to achieve a major increase in the number of police presently working at the village level.135
Advice included the introduction of Western technology to improve Third World “security”. Some examples are mentioned in the AID statement quoted above. Another illustration was provided by a former prisoner in the Con Son Tiger Cages, who reported on the ingenuity of U.S. advisers in improving the technique of torture.136
It is not in question that the United States played the decisive role in the evolution of South Vietnamese political life from 1955-75. U.S. authorities did not merely accommodate to events thrust upon them from the outside; as adviser, controller of the purse strings, and occupying power, the United States had critical leverage, which it exercised time and again to make specific choices. The character of the Thieu regime reflected a series of consistent decisions made in Washington, and expressed a preference and choice as to the nature of a client state that is not confined to South Vietnam. The Saigon authorities, in general, went along with U.S. advice, partly because of their proclivities, partly because they were dependents, but also because each new policy innovation meant an additional inflow of cash which the Saigon leadership knew could be absorbed readily into the existing system of corruption.
In addition to funding, advising and providing the equipment and know-how, the United States provided a moral cover for the Thieu state. This resulted in part from the fact that the United States is a democracy; its officials pretend that democracy and an open society are among its serious objectives in intervening. Thus moderate scholars and others determined to think well of the United States have found it possible to employ the argument from long-run benefit. This mystification was furthered by the constant reference of U.S. officials to “encouraging developments” in their client police states, and to the fact of “our working with the Vietnamese government,” which is making “very substantial strides” toward eliminating the unjustifiable abuses that we all recognize and are doing our level best to eradicate.137
The apologetics include more or less continuous lying, especially at the higher levels of officialdom, as when Colby and Sullivan suggested that many of the 21,000 or 41,000 killings under Phoenix might be combat deaths. Or in Colby’s constant reference to pacification as a program for the “defense of the people” against somebody else’s terror. Or the statement of Randolph Berkeley, chief of the Corrections and Detention Division of AID: “Generally speaking we have found the Vietnamese very light in their punishment.”138 Or the statement of Frank E. Walton, Director of the AID Public Safety Program, that Con Son prison is “like a Boy Scout Recreational Camp.”139 The same Frank Walton who denied any knowledge of the Tiger Cages in 1970 signed a report dated October 1, 1963, which stated that:
In Con Son II, some of the hardcore communists keep preaching the ‘party’ line, so these ‘Reds’ are sent to the Tiger Cages in Con Son I where they are isolated from all others for months at a time. This confinement may also include rice without salt and water—the United States prisons’ equivalent of bread and water. It may include immobilization—the prisoner is bolted to the floor, handcuffed to a bar or rod, or leg irons with the chain through an eyebolt, or around a bar or rod.140
The Paris Agreements of January, 1973 brought no reprieve to the suffering people of South Vietnam. As already noted, the United States announced at once that it would disregard the central provisos of the Agreements it had signed in Paris and proceeded to do so, a fact effectively concealed by the press. (See Volume II, chapter 1). The Thieu Regime, as always a creature of the United States, persisted in the sole program that it was equipped to conduct: violence and terror. The evidence is voluminous. We will give only one illustrative example as the appendix to this chapter, a discussion of the activities of the U.S.-Thieu regime after the January, 1973 ceasefire, presented by two U.S. relief workers in Quang Ngai Province. In the next volume, we will turn to the subsequent history. Here we only emphasize the obvious: the many years of U.S. savagery in South Vietnam devastated the land, tore the society to tatters, decimated both the popular resistance and the non-Communist opposition, and left a legacy of horror that may never be overcome and will certainly have bitter consequences for many years, long after the true story of the U.S. war has been excised from history and safely forgotten in the West. But those elements in United States society and political life that could impose such suffering on South Vietnam and the rest of Indochina will not hesitate to organize another constructive bloodbath if needed to save people elsewhere from any foolish attempt to exit from the Free World.
5.2 Nefarious and Mythical Bloodbaths
5.2.1 Revolutionary Terror in Theory and Practice
The Vietnamese revolutionaries shed considerable blood over the years in individual acts of terror, some deliberate and calculated, others reflecting sporadic breakdowns in the discipline of cadres under enormous pressure, along with occasional sheer vengeance killing. There are very few authenticated cases, however, in which the insurgents killed significant numbers of unarmed civilians in deliberate acts of mass murder.141 This appears to have been a result of a long-standing revolutionary philosophy and strategy, their relationship to the underlying population and superior discipline.
Despite the widely held belief to the contrary, a product of decades of officially inspired propaganda, the Vietnamese revolutionary movement always gave force and violence a lower rating in the spectrum of means than did the Diem government and its successors or their U.S. sponsors. This was in close accord with classical Maoist principles of revolutionary organization, strategy and behavior. The NLF view in early 1960 was:
Armed activities only fulfill a supporting role for the political struggle movement. It is impossible to substitute armed forces and armed struggle for political forces and political struggle. Formerly we erred in slighting the role of armed activity. Today we must push armed activity to the right degree, but at the same time we must not abuse or rely excessively on armed activity.142
Douglas Pike, the official United States government authority on the NLF, confirmed the great weight given by it to the political struggle as opposed to “violence”:
It maintained that its contest with the GVN and the United States should be fought out at the political level and that the use of massed military might was itself illegitimate. Thus one of the NLF’s unspoken, and largely unsuccessful, purposes was to use the struggle movement before the onlooking world to force the GVN and the United States to play the game according to its rules: The battle was to be organizational or quasi-political, the battleground was to be the minds and loyalties of the rural Vietnamese, the weapons were to be ideas;...and all force was automatically condemned as terror or repression.143
The United States and the Diem regime would not play by the rules of any such game, and as Pike states, in the end “armed combat was a GVN-imposed requirement; the NLF was obliged to use counterforce to survive.”144
According to Jeffrey Race, before 1960 the South Vietnamese revolutionaries carried out an official policy of “non-violence” which led to a serious decimation of their ranks, as violence was monopolized almost entirely by the U.S.-sponsored Diem regime. Race contends:
By adopting an almost entirely defensive role during this period and by allowing the government to be the first to employ violence, the Party—at great cost—allowed the government to pursue the conflict in increasingly violent terms, through its relentless reprisal against any opposition, its use of torture, and particularly after May 1959, through the psychological impact in the rural areas of the proclamation of Law 10/59.145
The idea that the success of the Vietnam revolutionaries was based on “terrorizing” the population is shown by Race to be a serious misperception; in fact, it was the Saigon government, sponsored and advised by the United States, that in the end helped destroy itself by its inability to respond to problems and threats except by terror. Race’s discussion is worth quoting at length:
The lessons of Long An are that violence can destroy, but cannot build; violence may explain the cooperation of a few individuals, but it cannot explain the cooperation of a whole social class, for this would involve us in the contradiction of “Who is to coerce the coercers?” Such logic leads inevitably to the absurd picture of the revolutionary leader in his jungle base, “coercing” millions of terrorized individuals throughout the country146 ...The history of events in Long An also indicates that violence will work against the user, unless he has already preempted a large part of the population and then limits his acts of violence to a sharply defined minority. In fact, this is exactly what happened in the case of the government: far from being bound by any commitments to legality or humane principles, the government terrorized far more than did the revolutionary movement...[and] it was just these tactics that led to the constantly increasing strength of the revolutionary movement in Long An from 1960 to 1965.147
Race indicates that official Communist executions “actually were the consequence of extensive investigation and approval by higher authority.” Furthermore, many careless executions during the resistance prior to 1954 had had adverse effects on the Party, so that after it became stronger it “exercised much tighter control over the procedures for approving executions...”148 This concern for the secondary effects of unjust executions sharply contrasted with the policies of the Saigon regimes under U.S. sponsorship, and even more with the policies of the United States itself from 1965-75.
Race’s study shows how the Communist Party’s refusal to authorize violence “except in limited circumstances...even in self-defense, against the increasing repressiveness of the government,” while at the same time it was gaining support through its constructive programs, gave rise to an “anomaly”; “the revolutionary organization [was] being ground down while the revolutionary potential was increasing.”149 In response to angry demands from southern Party members who were being decimated by U.S.-Diem terror, a May 1959 decision in Hanoi authorized the use of violence to support the political struggle.150 From this point on the threat of terror was “equalized” and violence was no longer a government monopoly. In the province near Saigon that Race studied intensively (Long An), the result was that the revolutionary forces quickly became dominant while the government apparatus and its armed forces dissolved without violent conflict, undermined by Party propaganda and disappearing from the scene.151 The revolutionary potential had become a reality. By late 1964 parts of the province were declared a free strike zone and by early 1965, when the full-scale U.S. invasion took place, “revolutionary forces had gained victory in nearly all the rural areas of Long An.”152 As for the “North Vietnamese aggressors,” their first units entered the province at the time of the 1968 Tet offensive.153
Revolutionary success in Vietnam both in theory and practice was based primarily on understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses. Race noted that government officials were aware of the fact that “communist cadres are close to the people, while ours are not.”154 Yet they appeared to be unaware of the reasons, which he believes were traceable to a recruitment pattern for government office that systematically “denied advancement to those from majority elements of the rural population.” The reasons also were related to a total failure on the part of the government to meet the real needs of the rural masses, in contrast with the revolutionary forces who “offered concrete and practical solutions to the daily problems of substantial segments of the rural population...”155 A movement geared to winning support from the rural masses is not likely to resort to bloodbaths among the rural population. A government recruiting wholly from an elite minority centered in the cities and admittedly “out of touch” with its own people, dependent on a foreign power for its existence and sustenance, generously supplied with weapons of mass destruction by its foreign sponsor—this type of government could well be expected to try to “pacify” its own people and to rely on its foreign protector to do so more effectively, while both speak of their objective as “protecting” the rural masses from “revolutionary terror.”
Numerous cases of atrocities have been attributed to the NLF or DRV,156 and several were nurtured by U.S. government propaganda as cornerstones of the justification for United States intervention. We focus briefly on the two most important mythical bloodbaths:157 that associated with the North Vietnamese land reform of the mid-1950s, and the Hue massacres of 1968.
5.2.2 Land Reform in the Mid-Fifties
In an address on November 3, 1969, President Nixon spoke of the DRV Communists having murdered more than 50,000 people following their takeover in the North in the 1950s. Six months later, in a speech given on April 30, 1970 he raised the ante to “hundreds of thousands” who had been exposed in 1954 to the “slaughter and savagery” of the DRV leadership. Then, one week later, on May 8, 1970, apparently in some panic at the public’s response to his invasion of Cambodia, Mr. Nixon invoked the image of “millions” of civilians who would be massacred if the North Vietnamese were ever to descend into South Vietnam. Subsequently, in the calm of a press interview on April 16, 1971, President Nixon reported that “a half a million, by conservative estimates...were murdered or otherwise exterminated by the North Vietnamese.”
It is obvious that a credibility problem exists with periodic variations in numbers of alleged victims, but there are three elements in this particular bloodbath myth worthy of discussion. First, whatever the numbers involved in the DRV land reform abuses, they had little or nothing to do with retaliatory action for collaboration with the French. Even in the sources relied on by official propagandists, the intended victims were identified primarily as landlords being punished for alleged past offenses against their dependent tenants, rather than wartime collaborators. Thus the attempts to use this episode as proof of a probable bloodbath in retaliation for collaboration with the U.S. or noncooperation during the continuing fighting was somewhat strained.
Second, the North Vietnamese leadership was upset by the abuses in the land reform, publicly acknowledged its errors, punished many officials who had carried out or permitted injustices, and implemented administrative reforms to prevent recurrences. In brief, the DRV leadership showed a capacity to respond to abuses and keep in touch with rural interests and needs.158 It was a “bitter truth” for Professor Samuel Huntington that the “relative political stability” of North Vietnam, in contrast with the South, rested on the fact that “the organization of the Communist party reaches out into the rural areas and provides a channel for communication of rural grievances to the center and for control of the countryside by the government.”159 What Huntington missed is that the DRV and NLF leadership were not prevented by class interest, as were the successive regimes in Saigon, from responding constructively to rural grievances. In the South, as Jeffrey Race points out, even when the reactionary elites came into possession of captured documents that stressed rural grievances which the insurgents felt they could capitalize on (and for which they offered programs) “the government did not develop appropriate policies to head off the exploitation of the issues enumerated in the document.”160
Third, and perhaps most important for present purposes, the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land reform were persons affiliated with the CIA or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry. According to a Vietnamese Catholic now living in France, Colonel Nguyen Van Chau, head of the Central Psychological War Service for the Saigon Army from 1956 to 1962, the “bloodbath” figures for the land reform were “100% fabricated” by the intelligence services of Saigon. According to Colonel Chau, a systematic campaign of vilification by the use of forged documents was carried out during the mid-1950s to justify Diem’s refusal to negotiate with Hanoi in preparation for the unheld unifying elections originally scheduled for 1956. According to Chau the forging of documents was assisted by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, who helped gather authentic documents that permitted a plausible foundation to be laid for the forgeries, which “were distributed to various political groups and to groups of writers and artists, who used the false documents to carry out the propaganda campaign.”161
The primary source of information on the land reform for many years was the work of Hoang Van Chi, formerly a substantial landholder in North Vietnam, and employed and subsidized by the Saigon Ministry of Information, CIA, and other official U.S. sources for many years.162 D. Gareth Porter undertook the first close analysis of his work and demonstrated that Chi’s conclusions were based on a series of falsehoods, nonexistent documents, and slanted and deceptive translations of real documents. For example, Chi stated that the DRV authorities fixed a minimum quota of three landlords to be executed in each village, when in fact they placed an upper limit of three who could be denounced and tried, not executed.163 In another passage Chi quotes Giap as saying, “Worse still, torture came to be regarded as normal practice during Party reorganization,” when in fact Giap actually said: “Even coercion was used in carrying out party reorganization.” Other passages cited by Chi as evidence of a plan for a “deliberate excess of terror” were shown by Porter to be “simply cases of slanted translation for a propaganda purpose.”164
His estimate of 700,000, or 5% of the population of North Vietnam, as victims of the land reform, Chi eventually conceded to be merely a “guess,” based largely on experience in his own village where ten of 200 persons died, although only one was literally executed.165 This admission came after Porter had made Chi’s falsifications public. Given Chi’s proven willingness to lie, his figure of ten deaths attributable to the land reform can hardly be taken at face value, but his extrapolation of this sample to the entirety of North Vietnam, which even Chi explicitly recognized as nonhomogeneous, is not even worth discussing.166 Although scientifically worthless, and surely fabricated for propaganda purposes, Chi’s “guess” served well for many years in providing authoritative and “conservative” estimates, not only for political leaders and their media conduits, but even for serious students of the war. Bernard Fall was taken in by Chi, and Frances FitzGerald in her influential Fire in the Lake followed Fall in giving a “conservative estimate” that “some fifty thousand people of all economic stations were killed” in the course of the land reform.167 Because of their reputations as opponents of the war, Fall and FitzGerald played an especially important role in the perpetration of a myth that still flourishes in its third decade of life.168
On the basis of an analysis of official figures and credible documents, plus an estimate made by the Diem government itself in 1959, Porter concluded that a realistic range of executions taking place during the land reform would be between 800 and 2500.169
The North Vietnamese land reform has been subjected to a more recent and exhaustive study by Edwin E. Moise.170 To Porter’s “negative” argument, based largely on his demonstration that “the documentary evidence for the bloodbath theory seems to have been a fabrication almost in its entirety,” Moise adds “some positive evidence”: namely, he points out that Saigon propaganda contained little about land reform until Saigon had learned from international press agency dispatches in 1956 of the North Vietnamese discussions of errors and failures. Even Hoang Van Chi, in 1955 interviews, did not make any accusations about atrocities; “It was only in later years that his memories began to alter,” that is after the United States and the Saigon regime learned about the land reform problems from the discussion in the Hanoi press, which, Moise writes, was “extremely informative” and “sometimes extraordinarily candid in discussing errors and failures.” After a detailed discussion of sources, Moise concludes that “allowing for these uncertainties, it seems reasonable to estimate that the total number of people executed during the land reform was probably in the vicinity of 5,000, and almost certainly between 3,000 and 15,000, and that the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent victims, often described in anti-Communist propaganda, never took place.” These victims, Moise concludes, were not killed in the course of a government program of retribution and murder but rather were victims of “paranoid distrust of the exploiting classes,” lack of experience on the part of poorly-trained cadres, and the problems inherent in attempting to engage poor peasants and agricultural workers directly in a leadership role. “One of the most extraordinary things about the land reform,” he writes, “was the fact that its errors were not covered up, or blamed on a few scapegoats, after it was over,” but were publicly admitted by the government and party which “corrected them to the extent possible.” “Economically, the land reform had succeeded”; land was given to peasants who lacked it and agricultural production rose rapidly, overcoming the severe food shortages and famine of earlier years, and thus saving many lives. Subsequent steps towards cooperatives proceeded “without any significant amount of violence,” largely on the basis of persuasion.
However one may choose to evaluate these efforts at social reform in the countryside under harsh conditions and in the aftermath of a bitter war, the picture is radically different from what has filtered through journalism and scholarship to the Western reader and continues to be repeated today as proof of Communist barbarism. We might point out, finally, that the indiscriminate massacre in the single operation SPEEDY EXPRESS claimed as many victims as the land reform that has served U.S. propaganda for so many years, and that the perpetrators of this massacre, which was quite clearly a direct expression of high level policy aimed at systematic destruction and murder, were not punished or condemned but rather were honored for their crimes.
5.2.3 The Hue Massacre of 1968
The essential claim of the myth of the Hue massacre (see note 157) is that during their month-long occupation of Hue at the time of the Tet Offensive of 1968, NLF and North Vietnamese forces deliberately, according to an advance plan and “blacklist,” rounded up and murdered thousands of civilians, either because they worked for the government or represented “class enemies.” The basic documentation supporting the myth consists of a report issued by the Saigon government in April 1968, a captured document made public by the U.S. Mission in November 1969, and a long analysis published in 1970 by USIS employee Douglas Pike. Both the Saigon and Pike reports should have aroused suspicions on the basis of their source, their tone, and their role in an extended propaganda campaign, timed in the latter case to reduce the impact of the My Lai massacre. But, even more important, the substance of these documents does not withstand scrutiny.171
As in the case of the land reform bloodbath myth just discussed, official estimates of alleged NLF-DRV killings of civilians at Hue escalated sharply in response to domestic political contingencies, in this case, in the fall of 1969, coincident with the Nixon administration’s attempt to offset the effects of the October and November surge of organized peace activity and to counteract the exposure of the My Lai massacre in November 1969. Shortly after the Tet offensive itself, Police Chief Doan Cong Lap of Hue estimated the number of NLF-DRV killings at about 200,172 and the mass grave of local officials and prominent citizens allegedly found by the Mayor of Hue contained 300 bodies. (The authenticity of these numbers and responsibility for these bodies is debatable, as is discussed below.) In a report issued in late April 1968 by the propaganda arm of the Saigon government, it was claimed that about one thousand executions had been carried out by the Communists in and around Hue, and that nearly half of the victims had been buried alive. Since the story was ignored, the U.S. embassy put out the same report the following week, and this time it was headlined in U.S. papers. The story was not questioned, despite the fact that no Western journalist had ever been taken to see the grave sites when the bodies were uncovered. On the contrary, French photographer Marc Riboud was repeatedly denied permission to see one of the sites where the Province Chief claimed 300 civilian government workers had been executed by the Communists. When he was finally taken by helicopter to the alleged site, the pilot refused to land, claiming the area was “insecure.”173
AFSC staff people in Hue were also unable to confirm the reports of mass graves, though they reported many civilians shot and killed during the reconquest of the city.174
Len Ackland, an IVS worker in Hue in 1967 who returned in April 1968 to investigate, was informed by U.S. and Vietnamese officials that about 700 Vietnamese were killed by the Viet Cong, an estimate generally supported by his detailed investigations, which also indicate that the killings were primarily by local NLF forces during the last stages of the bloody month-long battle as they were retreating.175 Richard West, who was in Hue shortly after the battle, estimated “several hundred Vietnamese and a handful of foreigners” killed by Communists and speculated that victims of My Lai-style massacres by the U.S.-ARVN forces might have been among those buried in the mass graves.176
In the fall of 1969 a “captured document” was discovered that had been mysteriously sitting unnoticed in the official files for 19 months, in which the enemy allegedly “admitted” having killed 2,748 persons during the Hue campaign. This document is the main foundation on which the myth of the Hue massacre was constructed. At the time it was released to the press, in November 1969, Douglas Pike was in Saigon to push the Hue massacre story, at the request of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Pike, an expert media manipulator, recognized that American reporters love “documents,” so he produced documents. He also knew that virtually none of these journalists understood Vietnamese, so that documents could be translated and reconstructed to conform with the requirements of a massacre. He also knew that few journalists would challenge his veracity and independently assess and develop evidence, despite the long record of official duplicity on Vietnam and the coincidence of this new document with official public relations needs of the moment177 —the My Lai story had broken, and organized peace activity in the fall of 1969 was intense. Pike was correct on this point also, and the few indications of skepticism by foreign reporters were not allowed to interfere with the institutionalization of the official version.
The newly captured document and its interpretation by a well-known official propagandist were thus promptly accepted without question by many reporters (e.g., Don Oberdorfer, in his book Tet). Frances FitzGerald swallowed completely the official tale that “the Front and the North Vietnamese forces murdered some three thousand civilians” in their month of terror at Hue in 1968, and she took at face value all Saigon allegations of grave findings as well as the “piecing [of] various bits of evidence together” by Douglas Pike.178 In the hysterical propaganda effusions of Robert Thompson, the number of people executed by the Communists was escalated to 5,700, and we learn that “in captured documents they gloated over these figures and only complained that they had not killed enough.”179 No documents were identified, nor was any explanation advanced for such odd behavior. Senator William Saxbe insisted on no less than 7,000 murdered by “North Vietnamese,” considerably more than the total number reported killed from all causes during this period in Hue (Congressional Record, May 3, 1972).
Thus, in the fall of 1969 the press in general once again headlined the refurbished story, quoting from the captured document: “We eliminated 1,892 administrative personnel, 39 policemen, 790 tyrants, 6 captains, 2 first lieutenants, 20 second lieutenants and many noncommissioned officers.” This sentence and document were accepted as confirmation of the U.S.-Saigon version of what had taken place, despite the fact that nowhere in the document is it claimed or even suggested that any civilians had been executed. Furthermore, the quoted sentence was taken out of the context of the document as a whole, which had nothing to do with the punishment of individuals, but was rather a low-level report, describing the military victory of the NLF in a particular district of Hue. But the press was too interested in reaffirming the cruelty of the Viet Cong to pay attention to such fine distinctions.
In manipulating this document for propaganda purposes, the Vietnamese word “diet” was translated as “eliminate,” which implies killing, although the word was used by the NLF in the military sense of putting out of action (killing, wounding, capturing, or inducing to surrender or defect). If the NLF had intended to describe plain killing or deliberate executions, they would have used any number of Vietnamese terms, but not “diet”. The government propaganda version also disregarded the fact that the 2748 figure clearly included estimated numbers of enemy troops killed and wounded in combat. This deception was facilitated by mistranslating the word “te” as “administrative personnel” in the version circulated to journalists when, in fact, according to a standard North Vietnamese dictionary it has the broader meaning of “puppet personnel,” which would include both civilian administrators and the military. The propaganda operation also produced a list of fifteen categories of “enemies of the people” allegedly targeted for liquidation, when the documents in question never used the quoted phrase and suggested only that those categories of people should be carefully “watched”. Those targeted for repression, let alone liquidation, were in completely different categories.180 Finally, it was claimed that the NLF had blacklists for execution which included “selected non-official and natural leaders of the community, chiefly educators and religionists,” when in fact the testimony of Hue’s chief of secret police contradicts this. According to the latter, the only names on the list of those to be executed immediately were the officers of the secret police of Hue. Other lists were of those who were to be “reeducated”.181 Porter states that no captured document has yet been produced which suggests that the NLF and DRV had any intention of executing any civilians. Porter claims further that the general strategy of the NLF conveyed in the documents, and misrepresented by Douglas Pike and his associates, was to try to mobilize and gain support from the masses, organized religious groups, and even ordinary policemen.182
The documents uniformly attest to an NLF policy of attempting to rally large numbers with minimum reprisals. Furthermore, the killings that did take place occurred after the NLF realized that it would have to evacuate the city, then under a massive U.S. attack, and during that evacuation. In Porter’s words:
The real lesson of Hue, therefore, is that in circumstances of peace and full political control, the basic Communist policy toward those associated with the Saigon regime would be one of no reprisals, with the exception of key personnel in Saigon’s repressive apparatus (and even in these cases, officials can redeem themselves at the last moment by abandoning resistance to the revolutionary forces).183
This lesson, the opposite of that which the U.S.-Saigon propaganda machines succeeded in conveying, gains plausibility in view of the events of postwar Vietnam (see volume II, chapters 1 and 4). There is no credible evidence that the behavior of the victors resembles that of the gloating butchers who “only complained that they had not killed enough.” In fact, the long-predicted bloodbath in Vietnam did not materialize.
Apart from the “captured documents,” the most persuasive support for the alleged massacre came from the finding of mass graves—but this evidence is as unconvincing as the managed documents. A fundamental difficulty arises from the fact that large numbers of civilians were killed in the U.S.-Saigon recapture of Hue by the massive and indiscriminate use of firepower. David Douglas Duncan, the famous combat photographer, said of the recapture that it was a “total effort to root out and kill every enemy soldier. The mind reels at the carnage, cost and ruthlessness of it all.”184 Another distinguished photographer, Philip Jones Griffiths, wrote that most of the victims “were killed by the most hysterical use of American firepower ever seen” and were then designated “as the victims of a Communist massacre.”185 Robert Shaplen wrote at the time: “Nothing I saw during the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War so far has been as terrible, in terms of destruction and despair, as what I saw in Hue.”186 Of Hue’s 17,134 houses, 9,776 were completely destroyed and 3,169 more were officially classified as “seriously damaged.” The initial official South Vietnamese estimate of the number of civilians killed in the fighting during the bloody reconquest was 3,776.187 Townsend Hoopes, Undersecretary of the Air Force at the time, stated that in the recapture effort 80% of the buildings were reduced to rubble, and that “in the smashed ruins lay 2,000 dead civilians...”188 The Hoopes and Saigon numbers exceed the highest estimates of NLF-DRV killings, including official ones, that are not demonstrable propaganda fabrications. According to Oberdorfer, the U.S. Marines put “Communist losses” at more than 5,000, while Hoopes states that the city was captured by a Communist force of 1,000, many of whom escaped—suggesting again that most of those killed were civilian victims of U.S. firepower.
Some of the civilian casualties of this U.S. assault were buried in mass graves by NLF personnel alongside their own casualties (according to NLF-DRV sources), and a large number of civilians were bulldozed into mass graves by the “allies”.189 The NLF claim to have buried 2,000 victims of the bombardment in mass graves.190 Oberdorfer says that 2,800 “victims of the occupation” were discovered in mass graves, but he gives no reason for believing that these were victims of the NLF-DRV “political slaughter” rather than people killed in the U.S. bombardment. He seems to have relied entirely on the assertions of the Ministries of Propaganda. Fox Butterfield, in the New York Times of 11 April 1975, even places all 3,000 bodies in a single grave! Samuel A. Adams, a former analyst with the CIA, wrote in the Wall Street Journal of March 26, 1975, that “South Vietnamese and Communist estimates of the dead coincide almost exactly. Saigon says it dug up some 2,800 bodies; a Viet Cong police report puts the number at about 3,000.” There are no known “police reports” that say any such thing; and it apparently never occurred to Adams that the 2,800 figure might have been adjusted to the needs of the mistranslated document.
An interesting feature of the mass graves, as noted earlier, is that independent journalists were never allowed to be present at their opening, and that they had difficulty locating their precise whereabouts despite repeated requests.191 One of the authors spoke with a United States Marine present at the first publicized grand opening, who claims that the reporters present were carefully hand-picked reliables, that the bodies were not available for inspection, and that he observed tracks and scour marks indicative of the use of bulldozers (which the DRV and NLF did not possess).192 Perhaps the only Western physician to have examined the graves, the Canadian Dr. Alje Vennema, found that the number of victims in the grave sites he examined were inflated in the U.S.-Saigon count by over sevenfold, totaling only 68 instead of the officially claimed 477; that most of them had wounds and appeared to be victims of the fighting, and that most of the bodies he saw were clothed in military uniforms.193
Little attention has been paid to the possibility that massacre victims at Hue may have been killed neither by the NLF-DRV nor U.S. firepower, but rather by the returning Saigon military and political police. Many NLF sympathizers “surfaced” during the Tet offensive, cooperated in the provisional government formed by the revolutionaries in Hue, or otherwise revealed their support for the NLF. With the retreat of the NLF and DRV forces from Hue in 1968 many cadres and supporters were left in a vulnerable position as potential victims of Saigon retribution. Evidence has come to light that large-scale retaliatory killing may have taken place in Hue by the Saigon forces after its recapture. In a graphic description, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, citing a French priest from Hue, concluded that: “Altogether, there have been 1,100 killed [after ‘liberation’ by Saigon forces]. Mostly students, university teachers, priests. Intellectuals and religious people at Hue have never hidden their sympathy for the NLF.”194
One of the U.S. reporters who entered Hue immediately after the U.S. Marines had recaptured part of it was John Lengel of AP. He filed a report on February 10 concerned primarily with the extensive war damage, and then added the following intriguing comment:
But few seasoned observers see the devastation of Hue backfiring on the communists. They see as the greatest hope a massive and instant program of restoration underlined by a careful psychological warfare program pinning the blame on the communists.
It is hard, however, to imagine expertise on such a broad scale in this land.195
It seems quite possible that the “seasoned observers” whom Lengel cites gave the matter some further thought, and that contrary to his speculation, there was sufficient psywar expertise to manage the media—never very difficult for the government—and to “pin the blame on the communists.” That seems, at least, a very reasonable speculation given the information now available, and one that gains credibility from the early reaction of “seasoned observers” to the havoc wrought by the U.S. forces reconquering the city.
In any case, given the very confused state of events and evidence plus the total unreliability of U.S.-Saigon “proofs,” at a minimum it can be said that the NLF-DRV “bloodbath” at Hue was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed. It seems quite likely that U.S. firepower “saving” the Vietnamese killed many more civilians than did the NLF and DRV. It is also not unlikely that political killings by the Saigon authorities exceeded any massacres by the NLF and DRV at Hue. Porter’s analysis of the NLF documents used by U.S.-Saigon propagandists suggests that mass political killings were neither contemplated nor consistent with revolutionary strategy at Hue. The evidence indicates that “the vast majority of policemen, civil servants, and soldiers were initially on ‘reeducation’ rather than on liquidation lists, but the number of killings mounted as the military pressure on the NLF and North Vietnamese mounted.”196 It is also of interest here, as in the land reform case, that the retreating Front forces “were severely criticized by their superiors for excesses which ‘hurt the revolution’.”197 We have not yet heard of any such self-criticism coming from U.S. and Saigon superiors for their more extensive killings at Hue.
As noted earlier, the apparent absence of retributory killings in postwar Vietnam is suggestive of where the truth may lie on the question of the Hue massacre. The Pike-Thompson version led to forecasts which have been refuted by history. Nonetheless the force of the U.S. propaganda machine and U.S. influence are such that the Hue massacre (by the Communists!) is still an institutionalized truth, not only in the United States but overseas as well. For example, Michel Tatu of Le Monde has taken the Pike version as established truth. And in his letter proposing Sakharov for the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn also refers to “the bestial mass killing in Hue” as “reliably proved”—and we can be sure he is not referring to the nearly 4,000 civilians mentioned by the Saigon authorities themselves, most of whom were buried in the rubble created by U.S. firepower.
We have discussed several of the more blatant exercises of the U.S.-Saigon propaganda machines, but it must be emphasized that even their day-to-day reports, which constituted the great mass of information about Indochina, should have been treated with comparable skepticism. On the rare occasions when competent reporters made serious investigations, the information presented by U.S. and Saigon sources turned out to be no less tainted. The Japanese reporter Katsuichi Honda once undertook to investigate the weekly report of the General Information Bureau of the U.S. Army in Saigon entitled “Terrorist Activities by Viet Cong.” Pursuing “one isolated case” that interested him, he discovered
that not only was amazingly brutal and persistent terrorism occurring regularly, it was actually being shielded from public scrutiny by Saigon’s “information control.” It soon appeared that the murders were not done by the National Liberation Front at all. There were, it seemed, innumerable “terrible facts” which had been secretly hushed up behind the scenes of the intensifying Vietnam War.198
In the case in question, he discovered that the assassination of five Buddhist student volunteers, officially victims of Viet Cong terror, had apparently been carried out by government forces. In another case, “drunken soldiers of the Government army quarreling among themselves threw grenades, and some civilian bystanders were killed,” the case again being reported “as another instance of ‘Viet Cong terrorism’.”
In other cases, the facts have emerged only by accident. To mention one particularly grotesque example, the camp where the remnants of the My Lai massacre had been relocated was largely destroyed by ARVN air and artillery bombardment in the spring of 1972. The destruction was attributed routinely to Viet Cong terror. The truth was revealed by Quaker service workers in the area.199
These examples point up the fact that in the instances in question the official reports were lies and deceptions, and in some cases were converted into official myths; the more important conclusion is that official sources in general have extremely limited credibility. They raise questions, but provide no reliable answers.