Doesn’t anyone think that Kerrey’s version of the story sounds, well, unbelievable? They approached a village at night, shot at random into it, and then discovered they had killed every last person in the village? (Well, except for the two witnesses, if the CNN report cited above is true.)
Have you ever seen a SEAL team in action? They don’t tend to leave a lot of live adversaries behind.
They probably went from hooch to hooch, ‘clearing’ each one by simply shooting anything that moved before looking at what they were shooting.
But there’s a larger issue here - at what point does killing a civilian become a war crime? If they had called in a napalm strike instead and killed everyone in the village, is it any different?
The crucial difference between this and something like My Lai is that it would appear that the civilians posed a serious threat to both the mission itself and the to the lives of the men. That makes them military targets in a way.
These are tough moral questions, and I don’t proclaim to have an answer. Civilians have been intentionally targeted for strategic purposes in every war in this century. At what point does doing that become a war crime? When you can look in their eyes first?
Before we discuss this further, perhaps we should come up with an agreement as to exactly what constitutes a war crime.
Hell yes! Being recklessly indifferent (without an excuse) to whether you kill innocent people is manslaughter. Intentionally killing innocent people with premeditation (and without an excuse) is first degree murder.
So based on the possibility that a civilian might threaten the mission, it’s okay to slaughter them in cold blood? I don’t think so. The guy in Kerrey’s squad who says they committed a massacre just said on 60 Minutes that they intentionally shot an infant. If true, that’s a war crime, and the guy who pulled the trigger should be convicted of murder, even 35 years later.
A few points, if I may.
Kerrey says they snuck up on a “hooch”, and there were five men inside, presumably VC. These were killed by knives. How? Were these Navy Seals such masters of combat that they could creep up on five armed guerillas and kill them without any casualties of thier own? In fact, IIRC, there was only one combat veteran in the group.
Did these five guerilla leave their weapons somewhere else? Unlikely, at best. So what became of thier weapons?
“Free fire zone” A war crime of its own, taking a unique place in the history of human cynicism. The peasants were trapped. If they stayed in thier homes, the Americans might come and kill them. If they attempted to leave, the VC would kill them. We knew this. By this policy, we transmuted hostages into enemy combatants.
After WWII, we tried a General Yamashita for war crimes, citing atrocities committed by his troops. The defense showed that there was no evidence whatsoever that Yamashita condoned or even knew about these things. No matter, said the prosecution, a commander in the field is responsible for what his subordinates do, regardless. If he doesn’t know, it is his duty to find out. Yamashita was found guilty and hanged.
By this principle, the war criminals were not Kerrey, Kerry, or (Scylla’s Dad). They were Nixon, Kissinger, McNamara, Westmoreland, et al.
Never again. Never!
I dunno. I think we were pretty civilized in Vietnam, comparatively speaking.
In WWII we had mathematicians trying to figure just how many bombs we need to drop on a city to create a firestorm effect and burn the whole thing.
I remember reading that Life magazine once stated in regards to carpet-bombing of Tokyo that properly ignited, the Japanese and their cities will burn like fall kindling.
We did this all over Japan, Dresden, etc.
What’s a killing a few villagers just to be on the safe side compared to deliberately targetting the civilian populations of entire cities?
Never again?
I wish, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
But here
http://www.journalstar.com/nebraska?story_id=3158&past=
is an article on teh subject from my local newspaper. Bob Kerrey is actually a former Governor/Senator from Nebraska, and is now the President of a University in New York. Nebraskans are proud of him. He did a lot for his country, here and in Vietnam (side note: he lost part of his leg in the war).
chris
Getting back to the OP, it seems to me there are three levels one should look at.
Firstly there is the Kerrey/My Lai/small arms/close up massacre of civilians or surrendering combatants stuff. I suspect that occurs in every war, and always has. I’m certainly not excusing that sort of thing, far from it, but I don’t think that those sort of incidents put the US into the same category as the Nazis.
Secondly there is the mass killing and spraying thing. All the My Lai massacres were but tiny sideshows compared to the use of carpet bombing and defoliants, causing megadeath, not only directly but through starvation. Large areas of North Vietnam were turned into a moonscape.
Thirdly there is the whole question of the decision of the US to fight the Vietnam war at all. There is a good argument to be made that Vietnam was used as a convenient battleground (and its people as irrelevant bombfodder) for an idealogical battle between east and west, capitalism and communism, with no concern for the Vietnamese as people. Although I accept that the average US citizen probably truly believed that the US was saving the locals from the nasty commies I seriously wonder if the locals would have been treated so badly and their wishes so quickly discounted if they had been white, christian and english speaking.
Imagine this scenario if you will: a superpower many times stronger than the US decides that your economic system is evil, and then fights a war to impose upon the US a dictator (who will enforce the superpower’s preferred economic system) using weapons that kill a very high percentage of your population not deliberately as such but as “collateral damage”. How would you feel towards that superpower?
I don’t think that Vietnam put the US on the same level as the Nazis. The US was not simply attempting to conquer and subjugate all its neighbours through pure greed and aggression. Nor did the US embark on a policy of wiping out the Vietnamese for no reason other than to remove them from the face of the earth.
But the US’s behaviour at the 2nd and 3rd levels discussed above comes closer to Nazi like behaviour than many are prepared to admit, and I’d love to hear a North Vietnamese view on the subject, I think you might find them less willing to believe that the US at least meant well than I am.