Killing civilians, burning villages, torturing people -
Americans committed many atrocities in Vietnam and killed over 2,000,000 people - about 40 deaths for every American killed. We poisoned the land.
The people did not want us. Children used bombs against us.
Even the old people hated us.
Senator Kerry has done us a favor. We were like Nazis in Vietnam.
As a contrast, in France during WWII, we helped and befriended the civilians. My wife was a child then in Normandy and remembers the American soldiers as kind and generous. The Germans, however, had beaten up her father and stolen food. They were like the Americans in Vietnam.
It’s Senator Kerrey. Senator Kerry is the junior senator from Massachusetts, and also a decorated Vietnam vet, although he has not been implicated in anything involving civilian deaths, to the best of my knowledge.
Not by a long shot. Our troops were in a difficult situation, and generally performed admirably. There were atrocities on both sides, and no clear direction from above. The men in Washington completely abdicated their responsibility to the men they sent overseas to fight the war.
While incidents such as My Lai were clearly wrong, there is scant evidence to indicate that they were anything other than rare exceptions to the general conduct of our troops.
The reason that the Vietnamese hated us was because we were meddling in their affairs, supporting an unpopular dictator, and fighting a war against them, or at least people close to them. Likewise the French liked us because we liberated their country, while the Germans conquered it. In both cases, much of the rest was projecting hatred for the country and its policies onto the individual soldiers.
That’s a fairly harsh judgment, wouldn’t you say, Berdollos?
War is war, man. There’s nothing pretty about it. You have to have a hard heart indeed to condemn people who just wanted to stay alive. I feel for the civilians of Vietnam, who did not actively participate in the war and were harmed. But that’s the nature of war.
But condemning your own countrymen for mistakes made in a shitty little war? Naw.
They made the mistakes, and now have to live the rest of their lives with that knowledge. That’s enough of a burden to bear, IMO.
Which, of course, is why several hundred thousand of them tried to get to this country when the whole southern regime collapsed, right?
Even if the current accusations against Kerrey turn out to have more substance than simply conflicting memories of a horribly confusing night action, your blanket condemnation and the simplistic arguments used to support that condemnation are not valid.
Even if, after considered examination, one comes to the conclusion that the actions of the U.S. in Southeast Asia were fundamemtally flawed, making the fairly stupid analogy that the U.S. was just like the Nazis is simplistic in the extreme–and generally wrong on most points.
It is, however, amusing to see Godwin’s law invoked by the Op and in the title.
It seems to me that if we were like the Nazis in Viet Nam we would have kicked some serious ass, at least for the first 3 or 4 years. Then we would have been done with the situation and home in time to deal with the British invasion.
the murder of innocents (old men, women and children) and the destruction of their homes and villages is just fine with you who have responded to this thread.
Where is your conscience?
What about the Biblical injunction against murder.
killing innocents is murder or at least negligent homicide.
Where is your conscience?
Senator Kerry, at least, seems to experience remorse.
Why? Because he did something wrong.
I think Nazi is a little strong, but to claim that “incidents” such as Mai Li (spelling?) were isolated isn’t being very realistic either. It’s about as honest as still maintaining that we weren’t messing around in Laos and Cambodia when it’s common knowledge now that we were. Too many of our men have come home and told of the terrible acts committed against civilians during the war. Just last night we had Vets all over the news making “apologies” and “excuses”. We’re talking again about “sympathizers” and children with bombs strapped to their backs. Let’s not try to rewrite history on this, it was a nasty, up close and personal war.
I think the problem now lies not in what we did or even how went went about doing it. It’s very easy to say that our young men didn’t have adequate leadership, were unskilled and lacked the direction or let’s say patriotism that was present in our previous wars. All of these things are most definately true. The problem now is that the Vietnam War was the beginning to a change in the way the world viewed the American military presence. It may have even been a turning point for the way we viewed ourselves.
I am glad this subject has come up again. I hope it does not fade away quite as quickly as so many of the media’s sound bites do these days. We need to talk about the role our country plays as a military power. We need to take a look at how we want to conduct ourselves in the future as the most militarily powerful country on the planet.
It seems that in current American culture, Nazi = bad people. If that is the case, then yes, Americans behaved like Nazis in Viet Nam. If we’re more picky about “Nazi” and include the political, social, and genocidal aspects intrinsically linked with Third Reich Germany, then no, we didn’t behave like Nazis in Viet Nam. I, for one, don’t like the use of Nazi to denote bad people or bad actions, and chafe when people who should know better perpetuate this view.
As for American behavior in Viet Nam, berdollos, I don’t think anyone arguing that we didn’t behave like Nazis (using definition #2 above) is just peachy-keen with the loss of innocent lives or the destruction of their homes and villages. War is ugly, and as Needs2Know points out, Americans should (I would argue that we do) have a clear view of how we should conduct ourselves when we take our armed forces onto the world stage.
You have accepted the “sound bite” version of a single event (which has not yet been proven to be true) and expanded that version of that event to purport to be the “truth” about the entire conduct of the war from the U.S. perspective, going so far as to equate it to a country that deliberately murdered 12,000,000 people, 5,000,000 to 8,000,000 of them systematically, and which began a war of aggression against its neighbors leading to around 40,000,000 dead.
It is quite possible to have opposed the U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia without agreeing that the U.S. behaved in any way “like Nazis.”
It is quite possible to recognize that individual incidents in which U.S. forces did act in morally reprehensible ways does not establish that the entire conduct of the war was simply another little foray into genocide.
And it is quite possible to recognize that Kerrey may have acted in the manner of which he is accused, but show enough restraint to actually wait until evidence has been presented and judged before deciding that we should tar and feather him or lock him up in Leavenworth for life.
Strong cases can be made that the U.S. actions in Southeast Asia were wrong and it is possible that Kerrey is guilty of crimes.
Your particularly hysterical approach to the subject, however, does nothing to help us discover the “truth” or to reach a valid judgment.
It sounds to me like you are taking the perfectly rational viewpoints that we have expressed, and twisting them around. No one has excused the murder of innocents in this thread. We have commented that such actions are not typical of our involvement in Vietnam. It is possible to condemn specific actions without comparing all of our troops to Nazis.
Did Senator Kerrey do something horrible and wrong? Perhaps. There are some conflicting stories, so I’ll wait until all the evidence is in. Was My Lai an atrocity? Certainly, and Lt. Calley deserved more than the three years of house arrest that he got. That, however, covers only a small fraction of US involvement in Vietnam, and it is rather a stretch to extend that to the hundreds of thousands of soldiers involved there.
My father did two two tours in Vietnam in the late 60s as a Recon Marine. One tour was as a Forward Observer, and the other was as a Sniper.
He went because his Country called and he served his duty with honor.
My father had admiration for both the Vietnamese regulars he served with (who most definitely wanted him there,) as well as respect and fear for the Vietcong who fought with a terrible ferocity and brutality, routinely slaying entire villages where Americans had received support.
My father saw acts of brutality, but he saw many more things which convinced him of the goodness of the American soldier.
American soldiers had to be warned against giving away their food and First-Aid materials to help those they saw who were in terrible need. Most ignored this and continued to supply what aid they could.
My father, as well as the vast major of our soldiers served under trying circumstances with both honor and distinction. They deserve the respect of their countrymen for doing so.
My father was there Berdollo. That’s where I get my information.
I can see none of you people were in the Nam. While I in no way condone what “Kerreys Raiders” did…I can truly understand it.
You had to watch your back every minute everywhere in Nam. Danger came from everyone…young, old, male, female. You even had to be carefull recovering bodies. The cong loved to booby trap them. And remember, they wore no uniforms no signs on their back saying “I am a VC”. They had no age limits. I feel for Sen Kerrey. It was not easy over there. Young men scared to death fighting a war no one but the rich cared about. In a place no one at home cared about at all. Most being there by no choice of their own. In war all suffer. No one goes away without scars.
It’s easy to criticize while you sit in your comfortable home in front of your computer relatively safe. These guys were in a jungle not knowing who could or would take them out.
Killing the innocent is wrong. Being a soldier in Vietnam might not have been a choice for many people, but it is well known that those who sent our boys over realized that many would kill and die for a war that was not ending.
You can read McNamara’s autobiography in which he admits his self-deceipt and his deception of the public. LBJ was so remorseful that he stepped out of the Presidency; he could not live with the horror of what he continued to unleash. Admittedly, he felt trapped.
I have no anger for our soldiers; I admire them and their nobility - unless they willingly engaged in atrocities.
The intentional slaughter of innocents is hard to imagine forgiveness for; perhaps God’s grace will be forgiving.
It looks like Kerrey unintentionally killed people; he feels terrible just as you would if you ran over someone and killed them after they darted out in the street. An accident, yes, but one that could torment you for the rest of your life.
As a Forward Observer, my father called in artillery fire from ships that were a 100 miles away at sea. Vietnam was much like the American Revolution in that there was a not a definable boundary between the military and civilian elements in many cases. An ammo dump might be in a village. It was a common tactic to disguise a military installation with civilian elements. Surely innocent people died as a direct result of his actions.
As a sniper he might keep an enemy force pinned down while it was encircled. Most often they fought and died to a man.
My father also told me that the VietCong would stake out a man, and torture him in the hope that his screams would would bring a rescue attempt that could be ambushed.
I don’t think things were exactly cut and dried over there.
Despite what you read, I doubt there were cut and dried in WWII either.
berdollos, I’d just like one thing clarified. When all the fighting was going on in Vietnam… when all those young american men and women (yes women died there too) died for a country that, according to you, our people were raping and pilaging - where were you? Were you one of those men who went to war as they were called to do, and put their lives on the line? Or were you one of those men who ran as fast as they could go to Canada to avoid the draft or who dropped acid and protested the war - a war they weren’t fit to fight anyway?
If I sound bitter about it, I am. My father served in the AF during Nam, he was there. Because of the Agent Orange there, he’s no longer alive. He gave his life for his country. Maybe not on the battlefield at the time of the war, but surely as those brave men did, he gave his life. I have other men in my life who went to Nam when they were called. A very dear friend who introduced me to this board spent time in Nam. My cousin barely missed being killed when his daughter was born with severe defects that required that he go back state side so he could see her before she died. While he was stateside, his entire unit was wiped out. Do you know what it’s like to see a grown man who has been a paramedic and medic in Nam, and looks like a linebacker cry like a baby just because he saw the names of his friends on that black granite wall? I don’t think you do.
Did my father, or my best friend, or my cousin do any of those things that you said all American soldiers did? No. In fact, John helped a lot of the civilians who were hurt when he came upon them. There are a lot of people in Nam who are alive because of him.
Please don’t generalize about the military in Vietnam. You don’t know half the story of what went on. I doubt that Sen Kerrey did what they said he did either.