But I feel there’s a significant difference between personal responsibility and national responsibility.
The individual people who held military and political power at the time of the Gnadenhutten massacre in 1782 were not the same individual people who held power at the time of the Sand Creek massacre in 1864. And the individual people who held power at the time of the Sand Creek massacre were not the same individual people who held power at the time of the My Lai massacre in 1968.
Now Americans as a people should acknowledge that these massacres happened and it was our country which did them. But we shouldn’t go so far in the direction of national responsibility that we ignore the personal responsibility that was a factor. There were individual people who gave the orders. There were individual people who committed the killings. And there were individual people who carried out the cover ups. Part of our responsibility as a nation is to identify those individuals and, if nothing else, to ensure they don’t remain in a position to cause more massacres.
Yeah, it was common knowledge that the NVA feared the ROK forces. They were ruthless in battle. Even the Vietnamese workers on my base avoided the Korean civilian contract workers, many of whom were former ROK soldiers. They refused to work together.
As for the killing of civilians: I can well imagine it happened more often than anyone might think. I was part of a Seabee maintenance work center on a Marine supply base during my tour, so pretty much rear echelon. We caught the occasional rocket and mortar attacks, and each time it happened, many of the Vietnamese workers would not show up the next day as they feared retribution from friends and comrades of those who had been killed or wounded. The ones who did show up would keep their eyes averted and go about their business as quietly as possible. Imagine the rage that could overwhelm those whose comrades were killed right in front of them out in the boonies. It’s not a justification, but it is certainly a human reaction to living under duress for months on end.
for whatever reason you want to blame these events as isolated individual actions when in fact it was always policy–de jure or de facto–of the US to wipe out the Native population by any means, by massacre, starvation, disease blankets, et al. Not to mention obliterating Native culture
No, quite the opposite. I feel that when we say everyone is to blame, we avoid assigning particular blame. And that ironically can be part of the cover-up. The people who were most directly responsible will start by saying the crime never occurred. And then when that falls apart, they try to immediately move to saying it was society’s fault and everyone is guilty.
I feel that part of expiating our collective guilt is to learn what happened and then take steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again. In a situation like the My Lai massacre, that would have been to identify who in the military chain of command participating in the massacre, who gave orders that led to the massacre, and who was involved in the cover-up afterwards. And then all of those individuals should, at a minimum, have been removed from any position of military responsibility.
Preventing crimes that might happen in the future is more important than feeling bad about crimes that happened in the past.
In extreme situations, the adrenal gland secretes epinephrine, the fight or fight hormone. If committed to fight, norepinephrine, the get angry and focus hormone, is added to the mix, but never more than one-seventh. Put one way, the 7-foot monster is only a 1-foot tall rager sharing a body with a 6-foot terrified mess.
Somewhere along the line it all runs out and the subject experiences an adrenaline dump. They will seek relief in a dopamine source. This is when things get dicey for captives and women.
Militaries are able to send men into these situations in the first place by imposing even worse alternatives. They should also be able to control their behavior with that same power. But in Vietnam the officers and senior NCOs didn’t have that.
I feel the critical error in Vietnam was adopting attrition as the main strategy. That led to success being defined by the number of enemy casualties. And in a conflict with substantial guerilla warfare occurring it was always difficult to determine who was or was not a combatant.
So we had a situation where troops were being told that the success of their mission would be determined by how many enemies were killed while also leaving it for the most part up to those same troops to determine who were enemies. It was inevitable that there would be massacres of innocent civilians.
Officers and senior NCOs could not control their own men because… why? The officers were all incompetent?
I remember reading about General Sherman’s capture of Savannah in Georgia. His occupying army did not get into trouble like raping or killing, because anyone pulling anything like that was subject to summary execution.
The French Foreign Legion had tried it in Vietnam, and as in Syria and Algeria they indulged in torture and atrocity. Eventually that extended into making themselves a self-sanctified pack of traitors. de Gaulle, a target of theirs, wisely saw that as not coincidental and when they were re-constituted in 1963 they were given given a code of conduct.
Article 7: Au combat, tu agis sans passion et sans haine, tu respectes les ennemis vaincus
“In combat, you will act without passion and without hate, you will respect the vanquished enemy”
Of course the culture of France could draw up its past for a foundation, upon Charles Martel; who elevated a Germanic tribe into the birth of Chivalry that mandated soldiers be the protectors of women and children, not their enemies. Americans could also look back for a similar guiding principle themselves. Something about “inalienable rights.”
wiki- It is documented that ex-SS soldiers both joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in the French Indochina War[2] until approximately 1947 when France began to crack down. But there is no evidence to support the book’s claim that a battalion-sized unit composed solely of Germans ever existed
If you actually read that wiki page- you would see it has a long, involved and well written section on the books Historicity. Note that the author claimed it was non-fiction.
It is debatable as to whether the book is merely exaggerated fact or outright fiction. The book is presented by Elford as the words of Wagemueller, who lived in Nepal at the time of the book’s publication. In the preamble, Elford claims to have met the man and arranged for him to dictate the events of his military life into a microphone over the course of 18 days.
If you would bother to read the thread, you would see that Slithy_Tove posted about atrocities committed by the
And I pointed out that the FFL at that time had a lot of former SS veterans in it, which of course just might explain the atrocities. Unless you want to claim that the FFL never had any SS veterans in it?
Your post are irrelevant to the discussion here of the nature of wartime atrocities. The FFL wiped out Druze villages in Syria in the 1920 revolt, and tortured Algerias during the very dirty war of independence there in the 1950s. Which has nothing to do with Nazis, an aspect that you brought into this for no discernible reason.
I’m apologizing to @Little_Nemo if I’ve contributed to thread drift. If there’s any interest, I would like there to be a discussion about whether or not, or to what extent and how, violence can be separated from cruelty.
As for the Vietnam War, particularly My Lai: we may like to believe it’s as old and dusty as Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. But in 2000, Colin Powell was well-positioned to become the US’s first African American president, appreciated or at least palatable to both sides of the spectrum. Then he backed off, citing a heart-to-heart with his wife about the dreadful prospect of what a run would inflict on their personal lives.
The unstated dreadful, not widely known, was that as a mid-level officer in the same Americal Division as Calley when the story broke, Powell’s job was to go around and make sure everyone gave the same story and/or kept their mouths shut. Hardly something that harpoons a military career, but not good for a political one.
We might assume a post-9/11 world would have looked different with President Powell instead of Bush/Cheney. Although we also might a lot of us now see the War on Terror as old and dusty as Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill.
No apologies necessary. Thread drifts happen. I’ve certainly done it myself.
What caused me to start this thread was reflecting back on the My Lai massacre and thinking how the truth had eventually come out. But then I wondered if that was the case. As I noted, the military seemed to take a pretty casual attitude towards the massacre. And the circumstances that led to it weren’t unique to that unit. So I thought “Did the cover up fail? Or did the overall cover up of dozens of other massacres succeed and the only thing unusual about My Lai was that it was eventually discovered?”
So I wanted to focus on the people in that time and place rather than get into a general discussion of military massacres.
For search and destroy operations, as the objective was not to hold territory or secure populations, victory was assessed by having a higher enemy body count.
This had the predictable consequences of inflating the killed in action statistics as well as killing unarmed civilians and claiming they were Viet Cong.
flurb discussed Operation Speedy Express in post 3 upthread, but it bears repeating:
Author Alex J. Bellamy wrote that the inclusion of civilians killed led to discrepancies between weapons seized and official body counts, noting that the official “enemy KIA” body count during Operation Speedy Express, was over 10,000 enemy KIA with only 748 weapons recovered. A U.S. Army Inspector General estimated that there were 5,000 to 7,000 civilian casualties from the operation.[5] The My Lai massacre and Sơn Thắng massacre both initially reported women and children killed as “enemy combatants”.
Well, maybe the Viet Cong shared weapons. If so they were awesome. Taking the army inspection number of 6000 civilian deaths, that leaves 4000 VCs killed and 748 weapons recovered. So each recovered VC weapon was shared by 5.3 soldiers. Very impressive work: no wonder they defeated us.
Serious treatment of body count debate. No, Westmoreland wasn’t overly obsessed with it: he evaluated a range of metrics. Yes, a focus on body count produced terrible incentives on the field:
Then, as now, the Army’s organizational structure incentivized officers to rely on and artificially inflate the body count, pumping up numbers by going on unnecessary missions or double-counting enemy dead. Army officers in Vietnam generally served six- or twelve-month field command tours. But undertaking rural construction, increasing political participation, and building support for the government all take a long time, much longer than six months or a year. As field officers sought to prove their mettle to superiors who would conduct their performance evaluations, they could not rely on making progress in these long-term endeavors during their short tenures. The one metric that a unit commander could reliably affect was body count, by focusing on aggressive pursuit of the enemy at the expense of the counter-insurgency/pacification mission.
And so, even as MACV HQ tried to balance the “military war” and the “other war,” an organizational culture inclined towards aggressiveness, combined with incentives to pursue body count, created strong pressure on field-grade officers to pursue the military search-and-destroy mission at the expense of the political mission.