History Being Talked About Archives 12-10-03 to 12-28-03

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• NYT Reports on Vietnam Atrocities
  

• New Transcripts: What Kissinger Thought and Did About Chile
  

• Why The Nixon Library Shouldn't Be Given the Nixon Tapes
  

• Apologizing for Sterilization in the Past Isn't Enough
  

• The Real Alamo
  

• Historians Discover the Five Senses
  

• Tom Palaima: Why Do Wars Begin?
  

• When Books Are Destroyed
  

• McNamara's Deceptions in The Fog of War
  

• The Alamo--Is Anything Left of the Old Yarn?
  

• Jesus in America
  

• Indians Are Being Taken in by a Myth About Columbus
  

• The Wright Brothers Expected Their Planes to Be Used for War
  

• The Wright Brothers Weren't the First to Fly, But ...
  

• When Did Homosexuality Come to be Regarded in the West as Abhorrent?
  

• The Smithsonian Is Being Disingenuous About the New Enola Gay Exhibit
  

• Bellesiles Admits Errors, but Not Fraud
  

• Korean Historians Protest China's Claim that the Goguryeo Dynasty Was Chinese
  

• Spare Us the Dreary Science Behind Art
  

• Why's Everybody Picking on Rosa Parks?
  

• Where the Gestapo Headquarters Once Stood
  

• Historians Working to Place Women's Sites on the Map
  

• What Newly Declassified Documents Reveal About the U.S. Role in Undermining Chile's Allende
  

• Canadians Remember One of the Most Tragic Events in Their History: The Deportation of Acadians
  

• Alexander Graham Bell Saw a Working Telephone One Year Before He Invented His Own Version
  

• Her Brothers Invented the Airplane, She Wowed France
  

• How the Wright Brothers Did It
  

• Was Nathan Hale Really Naive?
  

• Did FDR Make Things Worse in the 1930s?
  

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NYT Reports on Vietnam Atrocities (postd 12-28-03)

John Kifner, writing in the NYT (Dec. 28, 2003):

Quang Ngai and Quang Nam are provinces in central Vietnam, between the mountains and the sea. Ken Kerney, William Doyle and Rion Causey tell horrific stories about what they saw and did there as soldiers in 1967.

That spring and fall, American troops conducted operations there to engage the enemy and drive peasants out of villages and into heavily guarded"strategic hamlets." The goal was to deny the Viet Cong support, shelter and food.

The fighting was intense and the results, the former soldiers say, were especially brutal. Villages were bombed, burned and destroyed. As the ground troops swept through, in many cases they gunned down men, women and children, sometimes mutilating bodies — cutting off ears to wear on necklaces.

They threw hand grenades into dugout shelters, often killing entire families.

"Can you imagine Dodge City without a sheriff?" Mr. Kerney asked."It's just nuts. You never had a safe zone. It's shoot too quick or get shot. You're scared all the time, you're humping all the time. You're scared. These things happen."

Mr. Doyle said he lost count of the people he killed:"You had to have a strong will to survive. I wanted to live at all costs. That was my primary thing, and I developed it to an instinct."

The two are among a handful of soldiers at the heart of a series of investigative articles by The Toledo Blade that has once again raised questions about the conduct of American troops in Vietnam.

The report, published in October and titled"Rogue G.I.'s Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands," said that in 1967, an elite unit, a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as"the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War."

"For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians — in some cases torturing and mutilating them — in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public," the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.

"Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers," The Blade said."Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed — their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings."

In 1971, the newspaper said, the Army began a criminal investigation that lasted four and a half years. Ultimately, the investigators forwarded conclusions that 18 men might face charges, but no courts-martial were brought.

In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.

But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a"rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.

"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Mr. Causey, then a medic with the unit,"is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."

Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.

The tactics — particularly in"free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game — arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.

Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities.

"I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported," Mr. Turse said by telephone."I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn't stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That's the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds."

Yet there were few prosecutions.

Besides the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968, only 36 cases involving possible war crimes from Vietnam went to Army court-martial proceedings, with 20 convictions, according to the Army judge advocate general's office.

Guent