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On March 16, 1968, Major General Samuel W. Koster was near the peak of a brilliant Army career. At the age of forty-eight, he was a young two-star general whose next assignment, he thought correctly, would be as superintendent of the military academy at West Point. After that would come a third star, perhaps as a corps commander in Germany or even again in South Vietnam. Another promotion, to the rank of full general, would quickly follow along with an assignment possibly as commander of one of the overseas United States Armies. By the middle or late 1970s he would be among a group of ambitious, competent generals seeking Presidential appointment as Army Chief of Staff. Like most future candidates for the job of Chief of Staff, Koster had been earmarked as a “comer” by his fellow officers from his days at West Point. In 1949 he had served as a highly prestigious tactical officer at the Point, assigned to a cadet company as the man responsible for their training. By 1960 he had served in the sensitive operations office at both the Far East Command in Tokyo and at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE), in Paris. His career was patterned after that of his chief benefactor and supporter, General William C. Westmoreland, who by 1968 was the head of all military operations in South Vietnam. Westmoreland and Koster had served together in the Pentagon during the mid-1950s, both in key staff jobs. Westmoreland later became Superintendent of West Point.
Koster’s assignment in the fall of 1967 as commanding general of the Americal Division could be underestimated at first by outsiders: the Americal, a hastily thrown together conglomerate of independent infantry units, was far from an elite outfit. But the job was extremely important to the young two-star general, as the Peers investigation learned: he had been hand-picked by Westmoreland after a sharp debate inside military headquarters in Saigon. As initially set up, the Americal was composed of three separate 5,000-man infantry brigades, each with its own support units such as artillery and cavalry. The concept had been effectively utilized by General Douglas MacArthur in World War II. Lieutenant General Bruce Palmer, then deputy commander of the U. S. forces in Vietnam, explained it this way to the Peers Panel: “In the earlier days [in South Vietnam], where there were fewer troops, the separate brigade was quite useful because you could send it to a new area. It was self-sustaining, complete. You didn’t have to tear up a division to pull a brigade-sized force out of the division. General Westmoreland very much liked the idea of the independent brigades in the early days. Then when we had enough troops where they didn’t have to do this fire brigade business—some units were like a yo-yo, going up and down the coast of Vietnam, he conceived the idea of pulling three brigades together … The division headquarters and so-called division base was an ad hoc thing to start with.”
In later months the Americal would be restructured to make it more conventional and provide more centralized control, a factor that Palmer and others thought highly desirable. But when Koster took over, it was a new kind of fighting unit highly endorsed by Westmoreland; the pressure on the new commander was inevitable.
Adding to the pressure was the low caliber of officers initially assigned to the Americal by other units. Lieutenant Colonel Cecil E. Granger, Jr., who served briefly in the important operations office (known as G3 in the military) of the new division in late 1967, testified about his personnel problems: “In the G3 section, the quality of the personnel was not what one would ask in a division, to be perfectly honest. Among the field grade officers [major and above] there was only one major in the entire section who graduated from Leavenworth [the Army Command and Staff School in Kansas], and of all of them, there were only two who had not been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel. That would indicate that in some cases not the highest caliber of people were being provided …”
Koster responded to the staff problems by running a virtual one-man show. He trusted no one to make decisions on the operations and maneuvers of the division. Every military engagement or tactic had to be personally approved by him, including such details as the allotment of helicopters for combat assaults. He filled the two most important positions in his headquarters, chief of staff and head of G3 operations, with artillery officers, highly unusual positions for such men in a combat infantry division. Colonel Nels A. Parson, Jr., the chief of staff, was one of the two West Pointers in a key headquarters slot, but his inexperience in infantry tactics inhibited him: he spent much of his time, according to testimony, ensuring that fences were painted and grass was kept closely cropped. The other West Pointer, Lieutenant Colonel Jesmond D. Balmer, the operations officer, was more ambitious than Parson, but ended up more frustrated. He testified: “I was not a textbook G3, either as taught at Leavenworth or throughout the Army or practiced at any other divisions. The commanding general was in fact his own G3 … I was not operating that division. I was doing certain planning and trying to keep the TOC [tactical operations center] going … I can’t visualize that any staff officer there would visualize Balmer, even now, as being a key mover in that division. I was far from it.” Balmer thought, however, that Colonel Parson had even a worse relationship with the general: “It was very evident to all concerned that General Koster had no confidence or did not trust much responsibility, except answering the telephone in the headquarters and doing the normal headquarters chief of staff job, to Colonel Parson, and to a similar degree this went down to the staff … It was the most unhappy group of staff officers and unhappy headquarters that I have ever had any contact with and certainly ever heard tell of.”
Koster’s relationship with Brigadier General George H. Young, Jr., his deputy division commander, was less frosty but far from warm. Young, then two years older than his superior, had graduated from the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina. He, too, was restricted in the degree of command authority he could exercise, although he had been placed in administrative control of the aviation and supply sections of the division. He could recommend decisions but not implement them. Most of the other headquarters officers were either “non-ring-knockers,” men who either had begun their careers as enlisted men or graduates of college ROTC programs, or graduates of private military schools such as the Citadel, which are considered second-rate by many West Pointers.
For most of the officers and men, the commanding general was an aloof and cold figure who compelled respect—with a touch of fear. “General Koster was so smart, he was too smart for the rest of us,” recalled retired Lieutenant Colonel Charles Anistranski, who served as the Americal Division G5 (in charge of pacification and civil affairs) in early 1968. Anistranski particularly remembered the general’s crisp method of barking orders: “Koster would say, ‘I don’t like that and I want you to do this and that.’ ” The general wouldn’t join the after-dinner drinking bouts at the division officers’ club, the former colonel said, choosing instead to return to his quarters. James R. Ritchie III worked as an Americal Division headquarters clerk in 1967–8 and remembered Koster during an interview with me as being “very cold: I worked near him in that office for over five months and I was never introduced to him. I passed notes to him, but really, I never knew the man. They were all afraid,” Ritchie said of the headquarters staff. “They were all afraid of Koster.” Most of the general’s contact with his staff came during the two daily briefings that were a fixture in the headquarters routine. In the morning he met with his top leadership, including the two deputy division commanders, his chief of staff, and the heads of personnel (G1), intelligence (G2), operations (G3), supplies (G4), and civil affairs (G5).
In the evening about thirty to forty officers assembled to get an up-to-date summary of combat actions during the day. “It was quite formal,” Chief of Staff Parson told the Panel. “The general walking in, everyone at attention, and sitting down and hearing the briefing. Then he would walk out.”
If life was sometimes strained at headquarters, there were many amenities. High-ranking Army officers traditionally pride themselves on the quality of the meals served at headquarters. For “comers” such as Koster, maintaining an impeccable generals’ mess was important for no other reason than to serve a memorable meal to visiting dignitaries. Nothing was spared to make General Koster’s mess an excellent one. Ritchie recalled that dinner was an elaborate affair, served by uniformed GIs wearing white waiter’s coats. There was wine, engraved china with the Americal Division emblem, a well-stocked bar, and excellent French food on occasion. Steak and lobster were often served. Up to fifteen officers would attend, including Koster, his deputy commanding generals, the key headquarters staff, and occasional guests—very often Red Cross nurses. After dinner the dining hall was darkened and those officers who chose to stay were treated to private screenings of movies.
Koster was perfectly at ease as commanding general of the Americal Division, but he showed signs of tension whenever General Westmoreland visited. “I think they were all afraid. Everyone seemed to be afraid of Koster, and Koster, whenever Westy [Westmoreland] would come to visit, he’d be jumping,” Ritchie told me. The former clerk said that along with even more elaborate meals, the whole headquarters staff, led by Colonel Parson, would conduct lengthy rehearsals of the scheduled briefings for Westmoreland.
The normal work schedule of General Koster and his key aides, like that of their social life, seemed to have little relationship to the realities of the guerrilla war going on a few miles away. Koster lived in an air-conditioned four-room house on a hill at division headquarters in Chu Lai; he was served by a full-time enlisted aide and a young officer. A few yards away was a fortified bunker with full communications in case of attack. Most of his workday was spent in a helicopter visiting the brigades and battalions under his command. Every morning he would give a short speech to the inevitable batch of new soldiers who were arriving at the division replacement center. Generally he tried, his aides testified, to be where the action was—to monitor his troops in combat. For Koster, just like a young company commander, was being judged largely on the basis of how many enemy soldiers his men claimed to have killed. But by early 1968 the Vietnam war had become a focal point in the campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination being waged by Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, Minnesota Democrat, and the overt emphasis on killing the enemy was being muted.
Major John D. Beasley, III, the division’s assistant chief of staff, told the Peers Panel about a potentially significant change concerning the concept of search-and-destroy missions: “… we received some additional guidance on that, through messages … This got to be a pretty big thing about that time, sometime in the spring. I think this was pretty important that we stop saying this kill, kill, kill, destroy, destroy, destroy, and working with the people … Working with the Vietnamese became a little bit bigger about this time. There was a new word—pacification, I think was the word I got on my first tour [in Vietnam] in 1965, and we later started—somebody came up with some new words that meant work with the Vietnamese and pacify the hell out of things …” Despite the new emphasis, when Koster left Vietnam he was praised enthusiastically by his superior, Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, commanding general of the Third Marine Amphibious Force (III MAF) in South Vietnam, for the high number of enemy kills recorded by the Americal Division; it was the only praise that mattered.
Koster’s arrival by helicopter at local units would create as much of a flurry—and as much fear—as a visit from Westmoreland to division headquarters, although certain battalions and brigades were visited more often at lunch-time because they had better messes.
Even with these visits, the general was far removed from the problems and fears of the “grunts,” the ground soldiers assigned to squads, in platoons of companies attached to battalions in one of the three brigades under his command. When problems and complaints did arise, they often would be deliberately withheld from the general by his aides. James Ritchie, assigned as one of the chief administrative clerks in division headquarters, and working directly for Colonel Parson, recalled that he was ordered to screen all of the mail personally addressed to Koster: “Parson wanted to know anything that was on Koster’s desk other than routine stuff. A lot of stuff I know never got to Koster,” but was instead handled by Parson.
Most of the senior staff officers at headquarters knew of the practice but did not complain, even when a letter they addressed to Koster would be returned with a response from Colonel Parson. The reason: Parson was their rating officer, and for an ambitious lieutenant colonel who had not attended West Point, one bad rating could be the end of a career. This kind of reasoning went up the chain of command: in May, 1968, a Special Forces camp in the Americal Division’s area of operations was overrun, with heavy losses to one of the Americal battalions that attempted to relieve the camp. Koster ordered an investigation, but as the Peers Panel was told, never filed it with higher headquarters “because it made the division look bad.”*
The net effect of such practices was a form of self-imposed ignorance: few things were ever “officially” learned or reported. By March, 1968, for example, murder, rape, and arson were common throughout many combat units of the Americal Division—particularly the 11th Brigade, which operated in hostile Quang Ngai Province—without any “official” reports of them at the higher levels. Most of the infantry companies had gone so far as to informally set up “zippo” squads, groups of men whose sole mission was to follow the combat troops through hamlets and set them on fire. Yet Koster, during one of his lengthy appearances before the Panel, calmly reported that “we had, I thought, a very strong policy against burning and pillaging in villages. Granted, during an action where the enemy was in there, there would be some destruction. But I had spoken to brigade commanders frequently, both as a group and personally, about the fact that this type of thing would not be tolerated. I’m sure that in our rules of engagement it … [was] emphasized very strongly.” The rules of engagement was a formal seven-page codification of the division’s “criteria for the employment of firepower in support of combat operations.” It provided stringent restrictions on the use of firepower and called for clearance before firing on any civilian areas. The rules, unfortunately for the Vietnamese, had little to do with the way the war was being fought.†
Ironically, their publication allowed commanders to treat brutalities such as murder, rape, and arson as mere violations of rules, and in any event, such serious crimes were rarely reported officially. Lieutenant Colonel Warren J. Lucas, the Americal Division provost marshal (chief law enforcement officer), testified that most of the war crime investigations conducted by his unit involved the theft of goods or money from civilians or, occasionally, a charge that GIs had raped a prisoner of war at an interrogation center. The concept of murder during a combat operation simply wasn’t raised. Sometimes, Lucas said, he or his men would hear rumors or reports of serious incidents in the field, but “if it was declared a combat action, I did not move into it at all with my investigators.” Of course, the men who could declare such incidents as being combat-related were the officers in charge; in effect, their choice was between a higher body count or a war crime investigation. Murder and similar combat violations of international law were never “reported through military police channels,” Colonel Lucas said. If they were, he could still not begin an investigation of such incidents without express approval of Chief of Staff Parson or General Koster.
Lucas apparently never conducted such an investigation while serving with the Americal. He expressed grave doubts, anyway, about the feasibility of such an effort: “If you try to get investigators out to a village that’s in the middle of the combat action—it was almost impossible at times, and then you might wait a week to get hold of the witnesses … and then they may be dead in the meantime because of combat action. It’s very difficult.” What happened, in effect, is that after promulgation of the rules, the military honor system went into effect. Under this system, as it was applied in the Americal Division, violations of the rules of engagement simply did not take place.
Lieutenant Colonel Anistranski, the former civil affairs officer for the division, explained how it worked in an interview with me in mid-1971: “Every time a hamlet would burn, it was reported to me. If it was in a friendly area, we’d go back and rebuild it. Sometimes it would come up at the nightly briefing [the fact that some Americal units had burned a hamlet without clearance]. General Koster would come up to me and say, ‘Check it out.’ I’d get the S5 [the lower-ranking officer in charge of civil affairs of the unit in question] and say, ‘You’d better get on it; the old man wants to know what happened out there.’ They’d come back after a little while and say it was set on fire during a fire fight. I’d go and tell the old man that.”
During the hearings, Lieutenant Colonel Balmer was asked, “In general, you relied on integrity, and the system, and the reports that came through channels, to learn what was going on?” “Yes, sir,” Balmer replied. “The normal reporting procedures—whether it be by radio, whether it be in writing, whether it be reports coming back from members of the division staff or command group who had been there—were our means of getting information.”
Koster could, of course, have court-martialed some violators of international law for their crimes. This might have limited the number of such violations, but it also would have signaled to higher headquarters that such infractions of law did occur. Koster’s efficacy as a commander would have been questioned and the name of the division sullied by the inevitable press reports. That this difficult situation exists is well known to officers throughout the Army, but the theme rarely emerges in public. One occasion when it did was during a television interview in June, 1971, with Lieutenant Colonel Anthony B. Herbert, a much-decorated Vietnam veteran who broke ranks in 1971 by filing charges against his superior officers in connection with alleged war crimes. Herbert compared the filing of formal war crime charges by an officer in Vietnam to “… one of the gunmen calling up the head of the Mafia and saying, ‘Hey, tomorrow let’s all go to the police,’ or, ‘I’d like to go to the police and talk.’ How long do you think that fellow’s going to last … I mean, really.”
Such talk wasn’t heard at the Americal Division headquarters. The men there took their jobs at face value. Father Carl E. Creswell served as an Episcopal chaplain at Chu Lai; he resigned soon after his tour with the division. He testified: “I became absolutely convinced that as far as the United States Army was concerned, there was no such thing as murder of a Vietnamese civilian. I’m sorry, maybe it’s a little bit cynical. I’m sure it is, but that’s the way the system works.” During a later interview at his parish in Emporia, Kansas, Father Creswell bitterly complained about his fellow officers: “The whole thing reminded me of World War I. The commanders would fly at day, watch the troops get killed, and then come back to a hot shower, the officers’ club, or a flick.” The priest told of an exchange he had in late 1967 with a senior colonel who was in charge of a troop voyage from Hawaii to one of the Americal Division brigades. The colonel, irritated at the ship’s slow progress due to heavy rains, was complaining about the weather with a group of fellow officers, including Creswell. “Hey, Father,” the colonel called out, “why don’t you ask our boss to do something about this?” The officers chuckled. The priest replied, “I’m not sure God is in that much of a hurry for us to get to Vietnam to kill people.” There was silence. That evening, Father Creswell recalled, his dining place was removed from the colonel’s table.
The emphasis on killing with impunity inevitably led to a widespread lack of concern for the civilians of South Vietnam, particularly those living in such contested areas of South Vietnam as Quang Ngai Province, which had been declared in large part a free-fire zone. “A free-fire zone,” III MAF Commander Cushman testified, “… this was such hostile territory that you were allowed to fire. The people were supposed to get out of there, if they did not want to be subjected to this. They were supposed to move out.” Before such attacks, even in free-fire zones, the civilians were to be warned by propaganda leaflets and loudspeaker announcements to clear the area. Lieutenant Colonel Stanley E. Holtom, the chief psychological warfare officer (PSYOP) for the Americal Division, explained why—at least in early 1968—this rarely happened: “I believe I’d be honest in saying that … PSYOP was—if I can try and get the impression across to you, sir, that PSYOP was like the bastard child at that time. They were left out in the cold, and this was one thing that I was very concerned about when I first got there … Prior to about June of 1968, there was no liaison, no coordinated effort made to ensure that these things [loudspeaker broadcasts, etc.] were … planned prior to an operation …”
The result of such poor planning was the inadvertent murder of many civilians in violation of international law and the division rules of engagement. The statistics tell the story: a consistent problem for the military throughout the war has been the great disparity between the number of Viet Cong soldiers reported to have been killed and the number of weapons that were captured. Although the obvious answer seemed to be that Viet Cong in fact were not the only victims of American gunfire, artillery, and gunship strikes, high-ranking officers at the top headquarters commands simply could not—or would not—accept that fact. Thus, commanding officers in the Americal Division were always urging their troops to “close with the enemy” and not to rely on helicopter or artillery support, thereby increasing their chances of capturing enemy weapons.
Often the rationale for the statistical imbalance was strained. Brigadier General Carl W. Hoffman of the Marine Corps, who served as chief operations officer of III MAF in early 1968, agreed with General Peers that the March 16 report by Task Force Barker of 128 Viet Cong deaths and three captured weapons represented “a ratio that we would not normally like to see. However, we had experienced other reports in which we later found that the attacking troops had found a graveyard with fresh graves, and they determined then that these deaths had occurred on previous days because of artillery fire or gunship fire. Therefore, the total on a given day could be quite high and the weapons invariably would be very low … We did see other instances in which we had very few weapons captured and quite a number of enemy bodies counted. This is true in Marine operations and Army organizations throughout III MAF.”
“It’s like a game,” Lieutenant Colonel Anistranski remarked during my interview with him. “Everybody come on, we’re going to have a bonfire. The way Koster used to look at me—he knew they [the brigades] were lying. He tried to stop it, but there’s so much going … so much going on.” Anistranski remembered that on occasion Koster would storm out of the nightly briefing, obviously angered, after hearing reports of large numbers of Viet Cong killed by his troops, with no captured weapons. “He’d get mad,” Anistranski said of the general, “but me? I used to look at it and laugh. ‘There’s another battalion commander who’s pushing the full colonel list,’ I’d say.” He could laugh, the retired officer added, but the general was trapped by his position: “Koster’s got bird colonels working for him; he’s got to accept their word.”
Great masses of credible testimony were developed by various Vietnam veterans groups during 1970 and 1971, indicating that there were serious abuses in the treatment and interrogation of Vietnamese prisoners. The use of torture by intelligence officers in the Americal Division was common. Yet Koster, during a discussion with General Peers about the training of troops on the rules of land warfare and the Geneva Convention, could only brag about his daily talk to new arrivals to the division: “I personally talked to them for the first half-hour or so. I stressed the importance of relations with the Vietnamese; the fact that we were not only allies but that we were really guests in their country; that they had certain laws and rights and we should very definitely respect them; that they were people that needed all of the help and consideration that we could give them … I was followed … by an hour’s instruction by a JAG [judge advocate general—a military lawyer] officer who went into the rules of land warfare, the details of the handling, treating of combatants, noncombatants, PWs [prisoners of war], et cetera … I would say that I addressed ninety-eight percent of all replacements that came into the division …”
A similar disparity over talk and action existed at all levels. Lieutenant Colonel Patrick H. Dionne, chief information officer for the Americal Division, was asked about the division rules for destruction of civilian property. “There was a specific order out that it would not be done,” Dionne replied. Asked if the order was understood by troops throughout the division, the officer said, “I don’t know; it was understood at the headquarters. General Koster had issued a letter about abuse of civilian property in January, and commanders were required to bring this to the attention of all their personnel.”
The reliance on directives, rather than investigation and prosecution, wasn’t confined to the Americal Division. There was concern about reports of prisoner mistreatment even in the Pentagon, but the result—as in the Americal—was to issue further directives and increase troop training rather than order more courts-martial. In May, 1968, General Harold K. Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff, complained in a private letter to the American command in Saigon about the mistreatment of prisoners. His letter followed a wave of news stories and photographs depicting the brutal mistreatment of Vietnamese prisoners; the articles apparently were the Pentagon’s first inkling of the scope of the problem. General Palmer’s response from Saigon on June 15 acknowledged that “something more needs to be done.” He went on to note that “a review of records … reveals that most incidents of detainee maltreatment occur in forward combat areas, too frequently with the knowledge of senior noncommissioned and company grade officers present. It is at the point of capture and during the period of evacuation that our training occasionally fails.”
Given the scope of the problem, General Palmer promised that his command would attack it with “reinforced individual and troop training …” One possible reason for the large number of lapses, he suggested, was: “Instruction in the Geneva Conventions has tended to be abstract and academic, rather than concrete and practical.” Palmer recommended increased troop training on prisoner treatment, more press attention to “stories which illustrate the payoffs derived from proper PW handling,” and the production of an Army motion picture “describing and emphasizing proper handling of PWs at point of capture through evacuation from the battle area.” An additional benefit of such a movie, the general added, would be its “dual purpose of teaching the soldier and reassuring the public of Army concern for humane treatment of the captive.” As it happened, none of the recommendations stemmed the growing number of prisoner abuses by Americans in South Vietnam. And the one solution that the Army seemed unable to risk was to begin prosecution of offenders.
* The assertion was made by Colonel Jack L. Treadwell, who served as chief of staff of the Americal Division from September, 1968, until March, 1969. Treadwell told Peers that sometime late in 1968 the division historian had discovered a report dealing with the heavy losses at the Kham Duc Special Forces camp, near the Laotian border in Quang Tin Province, on the western edge of the Americal Division’s area of responsibility. Total casualties, most of them South Vietnamese, were nearly eight hundred during the three-day siege of the camp by North Vietnamese troops. Enemy losses were reported at 345. “The historian,” Treadwell said, “… wanted to know what disposition we should make of it because the word that was passed on to me, General Koster did not want this report forwarded to USARV [United States Army headquarters, South Vietnam] because it made the division look bad.” Treadwell said he took the document to Major General Charles M. Gettys, then the commanding general of the division, and recommended that it be forwarded up the chain of command.
† Although the Americal was organized in September, 1967, publication of the rules did not come until March 16, 1968 (coincidentally the day of the My Lai assault). Each brigade headquarters also was expected to publish its own version of the rules, using the division document as a basic source of policy. For Koster and the brigade commanders beneath him, the mere publication and discussion of the rules seemed to meet all of the responsibilities of enforcing them. Asked a second time about his rules of engagement by General Peers, Koster replied that his March 16 memorandum had been published in draft form months earlier and also transmitted verbally many times. “I know personally at one meeting where I had all commanders in,” Koster explained, “I made quite a point of the burning of buildings based upon the burning of a building or two in another area.”