Читать книгу Veteran Narratives and the Collective Memory of the Vietnam War - John A. Wood - Страница 10

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Combat Conditions and the Vietnamese People

Of the hundreds of memoirs written by American veterans of the Vietnam War, And a Hard Rain Fell: A GI’s True Story of the War in Vietnam is perhaps the most bitter, unromantic, and depressing. Its author, John Ketwig, developed an apolitical, instinctual abhorrence of the growing war in Southeast Asia as he approached draft age. It was only because of a lack of options that he enlisted in the army in late 1966. A recruiter assured Ketwig that volunteering would keep him out of Vietnam, but he was shipped off to Southeast Asia not long after basic training anyway. He worked mostly as a mechanic on an army base in Vietnam, but had several combat experiences that left deep psychological scars. While driving a truck that was part of a convoy tasked with resupplying combat troops, Ketwig was nearly killed when the vehicle in front of him was destroyed by a landmine.¹ When his convoy finally reached the battlefield, he was met with the nightmarish scene of dispirited GIs “kneeling in the mud, peering into the shadows and awaiting death.”² The soldiers were under constant enemy harassment and, owing to sniper fire, the only way they could retrieve their slain comrades was to chain their corpses to the back of an armored vehicle and drag them out of the line of fire.³

For days after his stint with the convoy, Ketwig “shook,” went into rages, and “shivered,” haunted by the memory of the “string” of American bodies being dragged through the mud.⁴ The most damaging experience of his tour, however, did not come on the battlefield, but at an encampment of US Army Special Forces soldiers, the famous “Green Berets.” Ketwig went to the camp hoping to barter for black market goods, but when he got there the Green Berets and their Vietnamese allies were torturing a woman they suspected had played some part in the death of a comrade. He describes the torture and the woman’s eventual murder in sickening detail, and recalls the crushing guilt he felt afterward at not having done something to stop it.⁵ Ketwig even questioned at the time whether he would “ever be able to return to everyday life in” the United States after witnessing such a horrible episode.⁶

Ketwig openly denounces the war in And a Hard Rain Fell. Additionally, the despairing tone of the book and its graphic descriptions of combat and atrocities amount to an implicit indictment of the war. It therefore seems odd that another reoccurring theme in the book is his contempt for the war’s greatest victims: Vietnamese civilians. Ketwig perceived the Vietnamese to be greedy, untrustworthy, and ungrateful. He disdainfully describes Vietnamese cities as dangerous, trash-strewn centers of vice,⁷ and South Vietnam in general as “a society of murderers, thieves, [and] carnival hucksters.”⁸ Ketwig was shocked that civilians, such as children who pelted US Army buses with garbage, were openly contemptuous of Americans.⁹ During his last day “in country” his wallet was stolen and he saw an old woman brazenly selling a US military rifle in the marketplace.¹⁰ After these events it suddenly became clear to him that “the Vietnamese people didn’t care about our noble mission, and until they cared it was hopeless.”¹¹

The portrayal of the Vietnam experience in And a Hard Rain Fell may seem peculiar, but it is actually typical. Most memoirists, like Ketwig, describe combat as terrifying and exhausting rather than glorious, and they render battlefield wounds and deaths in graphic detail. Veteran-authors also accurately depict the great difficulty American forces experienced in their attempts to counter the Vietcong’s unconventional tactics. Veterans make it clear that the war was fought among civilians who were indistinguishable from the enemy, a situation that led to death and injury for countless innocent bystanders, including women and children. Memoirs also show that a profound anti-Vietnamese racism existed among American troops; the use of racial slurs such as “gook,” “dink,” and “slope” was commonplace. Such racial hatred was obviously the driving force behind some of the most heinous atrocities chronicled by veterans, including the practice of keeping enemy body parts, chiefly ears and skulls, as souvenirs.

Most authors, also like Ketwig, portray the Vietnamese as covetous of American dollars, yet unappreciative of American sacrifices. Such depictions lead to the formation of an unlikely theme in veteran narratives: Vietnamese civilians as the victimizers of US troops. Sharing the role of victimizer with civilians in narratives are Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers, America’s chief military allies in Vietnam.¹² These “ARVNs” are portrayed as lazy cowards who were inexplicably disdainful of the GIs who fought to defend South Vietnam’s freedom. All Vietnamese—friends and enemies, civilians and combatants—usually appear in narratives as racist caricatures.

If most veteran-memoirists explicitly or implicitly condemn the war, why do most also depict Vietnamese civilians in unsympathetic ways? The reason for the coexistence of these two seemingly incompatible themes is directly related to the fundamental weakness of personal narratives: limited and biased perspective. Veteran narratives provide valuable information about how American troops experienced combat in Vietnam. But since veteran memoirs represent the experiences of only one specific group of people, they are inherently limited in their outlook on the war. American soldiers generally arrived in Vietnam with little knowledge of the country’s language, culture, or history. They likewise lacked a nuanced understanding of the conflict in which they fought, knowing only the US government’s oversimplified conception of the war as a battle between Communist aggression and the forces of democracy. Most American soldiers, moreover, largely due to communications problems, had no meaningful contact with local people during their tours. No wonder few veterans knew the real reasons for Vietnamese actions that they despised.

This chapter compares memoirist representations of warfare and the Vietnamese to what other sources, chiefly historical scholarship and nonveteran narratives, say about these topics. Using this approach shows that veterans’ representations of combat often correspond to how historians and other writers depict Vietnam War combat. Outside sources also provide information, missing from veterans’ memoirs, that explains the cultural, social, economic, and historical reasons for the attitudes and behaviors of South Vietnamese living during what they called the “American War.”

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Memoirists regularly explain that their conception of combat before Vietnam was largely based on the staged battles they saw played out in war movies, especially those about World War II. Such films often inspired future soldiers to mimic the exploits of John Wayne and other celluloid warriors in the woods, backyards, and vacant lots of their hometowns. Ron Kovic, who cheered on Wayne in the The Sands of Iwo Jima,¹³ and W.D. Ehrhart, who killed imaginary “Krauts and Japs”¹⁴ as a boy, realized early in their tours that their boyhoods had ill prepared them for actual warfare. GIs should have learned during training that mimicking the flashy maneuvers they saw in movies usually led to death or injury, not glory. But some soldiers apparently did not get the message. A young, inexperienced marine in Lewis Puller’s platoon, for instance, was immediately hit by Vietcong gunfire when he “suddenly stood up and began firing his rifle John Wayne fashion from the hip” during a firefight.¹⁵ Larry Heinemann explains that the term “John Wayne” was a “flat-out insult” in Vietnam, used to refer to “hot-dog, hero wannabes” not smart enough to realize the foolishness of performing cinematic-style stunts in real-life combat.¹⁶

Many GIs also discovered that movies and training had not prepared them for the most gruesome and unavoidable aspects of warfare: wounds and corpses. Real battlefield deaths and injuries were far removed from movie scenes of soldiers who grimaced and fought on with bloodstained shirts after getting shot, or doomed men who let out a final yell or an inspiring slogan before they slumped to the ground and died. Philip Caputo observes that the devastating gunshot wounds suffered by a Vietcong soldier killed by US troops were nothing like “the tidy holes as in the movies.”¹⁷ Charles R. Anderson soberly relates that “what happens to human beings in mechanized warfare has absolutely no poetic or theatrical possibilities.”¹⁸

After commenting on the falseness of movie war wounds, Caputo goes on to describe the dead Vietcong’s injuries, noting that his body lay in “a crimson puddle in which floated bits of skin and white cartilage.”¹⁹ Two pages earlier he writes of another dead Vietcong with “brains spilling out of the huge hole in its head like grey pudding from a cracked bowl.”²⁰ Such hideously realistic descriptions are one of the defining elements of Vietnam veteran memoirs. In stark contrast to the war movies veterans watched as children, their narratives are full of descriptions of battlefield gore that are graphic, disgusting, and difficult to read. The purpose of this technique is clearly not exploitative, but a symptom of memoirists’ desire to “tell like it was” in their narratives; to do so necessitates authentic descriptions of even the most horrible aspects of warfare.

Using World War II (either in its film or real-life incarnations) as a basis for understanding warfare led GIs to hold other preconceptions about combat that did not apply to the war in Vietnam. The Second World War featured, for the most part, battles waged by conventional armies for control of territory, but America’s Vietnamese adversaries, in contrast, frequently employed guerrilla tactics. The Americans tried to draw their elusive enemies into fighting traditional battles that the US military, with its vastly superior firepower, was sure to win. This approach was taken by General William Westmoreland, the commander of US forces during the opening phases of major American military operations in Vietnam.²¹ He devised a strategy in which US patrols conducting “search and destroy” operations in the countryside “would . . . locate the enemy and then call in artillery and airpower to eliminate him.”²² In theory, such operations would eventually drive “large enemy units . . . from populated areas,” giving US troops the opportunity to secure and “pacify” these locales by rooting out remaining “local guerillas” and Vietcong political leaders.²³ These tactics were also part of a “war of attrition” strategy that entailed using the massive resources of the American military to kill as many enemy troops as possible.²⁴

Westmoreland’s tactics, however, often failed to produce the desired results, and many memoirs feature stories that confirm this. Former infantrymen who took part in search and destroy patrols often describe these operations as bewildering, exasperating affairs. Some recall long stretches with no enemy activity, and when contact was finally made it was usually in the form of a Vietcong ambush. These accounts represent the experience of most US infantrymen. Studies show that US small-unit patrols infrequently made contact with the enemy,²⁵ and that when they did it was usually initiated by the Vietcong.²⁶ A common theme in the description of these actions is the idea that Americans in Vietnam, from privates to generals, did not really know what they were doing. Anderson consistently uses words like “blunder,” “idiocy,” and “chaos” in his memoir, The Grunts, to portray the infantry operations in which he participated.²⁷ Rod Kane describes his own unit’s patrols as follows: “we wander around, bumping into things. Things bump into us.”²⁸

Another symbol of the futility of US tactics was the fact that GIs, no matter how many enemy soldiers they killed, did not permanently take control of territory. Nathaniel Tripp says that because US forces did not “hold” the land they struggled over, it “didn’t take long to figure out that [the Vietnam conflict] was a hopeless war.”²⁹ The ostensible irrationality of this strategy was compounded by the fact that regions deemed officially “pacified” did not always live up to that designation. This phenomenon infamously occurred following Operation Cedar Falls, a 1967 US attempt to clear out a Vietcong enclave near Saigon dubbed the “Iron Triangle.” American troops evacuated all the civilians in the area, destroyed all the villages contained within it, and supposedly cleared it of enemy fighters. Six months later the Vietcong was again operating there.³⁰

The best depiction of the hopelessness of American tactics is found in a chapter of A Rumor of War called “Officer in Charge of the Dead.” For part of Caputo’s tour in Vietnam he was put in charge of tallying casualties.³¹ This task put him right in the middle of the war of attrition, a war in which the performance of an American unit was evaluated “by the number of enemy soldiers it had killed (the body count) and the proportion between that number and the number of its own dead (the kill ratio).”³² Caputo kept track of these statistics on a “scoreboard” that the commander of his battalion consulted in order to determine which companies needed to increase their body counts.³³ GIs, under pressure to perform, were not scrupulous in the identification of enemy remains, going by the maxim: “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.”³⁴

GIs were infuriated by many Vietcong tactics, but the use of booby traps, especially landmines, was perhaps the most maddening enemy tactic of all. It was bad enough to fight an enemy who attacked and then fled before any revenge could be exacted, but it was even worse when casualties were inflicted by inanimate objects. The most vivid account of the demoralizing effect that booby traps could have on US soldiers is found in Puller’s Fortunate Son. Puller, maimed by a booby trap himself, describes the weeks before his wounding as a “living hell” in which his men were constantly being taken out by landmines. The platoon felt that every step they took might be their last, and their morale was sapped by not being able to retaliate for such attacks.³⁵ Puller and his men struggled to answer a question posed by a veteran in another narrative: “How do you fight back against a booby trap?”³⁶

Though a cynical attitude predominates in memoirists’ depictions of combat, a number of authors express pride in their service. Such veterans do not suggest that their tours were a waste of time, or that American efforts in Vietnam were ridiculously futile. Virtually no memoirs, however, even those that present a generally positive view of the war, depict their authors’ tours as having achieved much of anything. The majority of veterans portray the months they spent in Vietnam as one long series of firefights interrupted by brief periods of rest and inactivity. Almost never is the impression given that the actions of the authors and their comrades, including killing scores of “VC” and NVA, somehow contributed to an ultimate victory. At the end of most memoirs, the author leaves Vietnam and the war continues on without him, as if nothing changed at all since he arrived a year earlier.

Added to this sense of low achievement is the admission of some veterans that they eventually gave up caring about who won or lost the war. Tripp purposely kept his platoon out of an area with a strong Vietcong presence in order to avoid enemy contact.³⁷ Such examples of “combat avoidance” reportedly occurred throughout the war, but were especially common in the final years of US involvement.³⁸ Memoirist Matthew Brennan served three tours in Vietnam between 1965 and 1969. The war seemed so hopeless by his last tour that he decided his only mission would be to make sure he and his men made it home alive.³⁹ Most American troops, unlike Brennan, did not serve in Vietnam longer than the required yearlong tour, but like him, many decided at some point that their sole duty was not to defeat the enemy, but to stay alive long enough to make it back to the United States.⁴⁰

A hallmark of guerrilla warfare is that it is fought amongst the people, and for this reason, civilians are inevitably caught in the crossfire and become unintentional casualties. The exact number of civilians killed in Vietnam is disputed and probably unknowable, but in 1975, the US Senate “subcommittee on refugees” estimated that approximately “430,000 South Vietnamese civilians were killed between 1965 and 1974 and more than 1 million were wounded.”⁴¹ The Senate’s estimate is probably too low because it does not account for the thousands of slain civilians erroneously added to the enemy body count.⁴² Mostly because of their “heavy reliance on firepower in and near populated areas,” as much as 80 percent of the civilian casualties in South Vietnam were caused by US and allied forces, rather than their foes.⁴³ Though the bombing of North Vietnam has received more attention, US aircraft also dropped millions of tons of explosives on South Vietnam. It is likely that a high percentage of Southern civilians killed in the conflict were caught in these air raids.⁴⁴

Accounts of civilian casualties are common in veterans’ narratives, but not in the form of deaths caused by American air or artillery bombardments. Instead, the most common civilian casualties recounted by veterans are those that were inflicted by American ground troops, even individual soldiers. In such cases the memoirist knew who was directly responsible for the accidental killing of a civilian, often saw it take place and, in a few instances, is among those responsible. Such episodes are invariably described as moments of horror for the soldiers at fault, especially when women and children were the victims. Brennan writes of a GI in his platoon who wept after shooting an unarmed man he mistook for a Vietcong fighter.⁴⁵ Puller tells the story of a marine who was no doubt inflicted with “psychic wounds” when he accidentally shot a young girl during a skirmish in a village.⁴⁶ Perhaps the most memorable episode of this kind was recounted by Kovic in his famous memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. Kovic’s platoon opened fire on a village it believed housed enemy troops, but when the shooting stopped the marines discovered that they had “shot up a bunch of kids.” After Kovic and his comrades made the harrowing discovery, they cried, fell to the ground, and prayed for God’s forgiveness as they desperately tried to help the children they had wounded.⁴⁷

American troops in Vietnam, as Marilyn B. Young explains, “fought different wars depending on when they arrived and where . . . they were in combat.”⁴⁸ South Vietnamese insurgents opposed to the US-backed regime in Saigon announced the establishment of the National Liberation Front (NLF) in late 1960. The NLF was dominated by Communists, but it was “an umbrella organization that included non-Communist individuals and organizations.”⁴⁹ The military forces of the NLF were “formally organized into the People’s Liberation Armed Force (PLAF)” in early 1961.⁵⁰ The PLAF was made up of “main force” units “which operated like a regular army throughout” South Vietnam, and local militia groups that operated in their home regions or villages. The NLF was composed almost wholly of native Southerners, but its “overall strategy” was determined by the Communist leadership of North Vietnam, officially known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). The DRV, in response to escalated US military involvement, started sending its own troops south to aid the PLAF in 1965.⁵¹

GIs stationed in the thinly populated northern regions of South Vietnam often squared off against the DRV’s troops, officially known as the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). Referred to as the NVA by Americans, these were conventional, uniformed troops.⁵² US troops in South Vietnam’s lower latitudes, however, fought PLAF guerrillas, or as they were called by Americans, the Vietcong. VC fighters usually wore “traditional peasant garb” instead of uniforms, which generally made them indistinguishable from civilians.⁵³ GIs became justifiably paranoid because of this situation, learning not to trust any Vietnamese. Several veterans recount instances in which outwardly friendly civilians turn out to be Vietcong. William Broyles Jr., for instance, knew a twelve-year-old boy who joked with Americans one day and helped to kill them the next.⁵⁴ Memoirists focused a lot of attention on stories of women and children fighting for the Vietcong. Accounts of toddler suicide bombers and enemy assassins disguised as prostitutes that circulated amongst GIs were undoubtedly rumors. But a significant minority of Vietcong fighters were indeed women,⁵⁵ and children were used by the guerrillas to relay messages, act as lookouts, and plant booby traps.⁵⁶ Tim O’Brien’s assertion that there was no way “to distinguish a pretty Vietnamese girl from a deadly enemy” because “often they were one and the same person,” is not hyperbole.⁵⁷

War crimes or atrocities occur during every war, and the Vietnam conflict was no different. It is impossible to determine the exact number of atrocities committed in Vietnam, but it is safe to say that they were widespread and committed by all sides in the conflict. Atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam first became an issue of nationwide concern in the United States with the 1969 revelations concerning the My Lai Massacre, an event in which US Army soldiers murdered over two hundred Vietnamese civilians, most of them women and children.⁵⁸ The horrors of My Lai are important to the history of the war in many ways, but one of its most important, if little known, consequences is that it sparked a secret five-year study conducted by the US Army into American atrocities. Only declassified in 1990 through the Freedom of Information Act,⁵⁹ the study compiled about eight hundred cases of possible “rapes, torture, murders . . . and other illegal acts” committed by army personnel, three hundred of which were substantiated by further investigation.⁶⁰ There is no way of knowing how many other war crimes never made it into the investigation because perpetrators, witnesses, and victims stayed silent.

The army based most of its investigation on “sworn statements from soldiers and veterans who committed or witnessed” atrocities.⁶¹ Not long after the public first heard about My Lai, over one hundred veterans publicly testified about American war crimes during the Winter Soldier Investigation, an event sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).⁶² A few months later, VVAW member and future US senator John Kerry, famously summarized the testimonials of the Winter Soldier participants before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.⁶³

Several Winter Soldier veterans alleged that the atrocities they had witnessed were not isolated incidents, but integral aspects of US operations.⁶⁴ Such allegations are supported by the experiences of journalists who covered the war. Journalist Philip Knightly writes in his book, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq, that after news of the My Lai Massacre broke in late 1969, “nearly every war correspondent who had been in Vietnam had an atrocity story to tell.”⁶⁵ These stories were not reported earlier “because the killing of civilians was not unusual either on a small or on a large scale.”⁶⁶ One journalist, for instance, saw US Army troops attack a group of women and children. He did not publicize the incident because he assumed news agencies in Saigon would reject “a story about Americans killing Vietnamese civilians” as unexceptional.⁶⁷

There is an apologist attitude towards American atrocities expressed in some prominent memoirs that runs counter to how the Winter Soldier speakers dealt with the subject. Broyles Jr. suggests that the victims of My Lai were partly responsible for their own deaths because they had “watched impassively” when their killers “had been cut to pieces by booby traps all around [their] hamlet.”⁶⁸ David Donovan was revolted by My Lai, but asserts that the atrocity issue was overblown because civilian deaths are an unavoidable consequence of war.⁶⁹ Caputo admits that two of his men executed a captured Vietcong on his implicit orders. He argues, though, that neither he nor his men were to blame for the prisoner’s death because the madness of war drove them to commit the act.⁷⁰

Even though a few memoirists minimized or made excuses for American atrocities, these sentiments are overshadowed by the huge number and wide variety of war crimes that are documented in veterans’ narratives. Perhaps the most commonly related atrocities are those committed against enemy soldiers. Numerous authors say prisoners were beaten, tortured, or executed by GIs and their Vietnamese allies. Such acts were sometimes retribution for enemy atrocities. Mason saw an American sergeant shoot a group of bound NVA prisoners because his comrades had recently been tortured and mutilated after being captured.⁷¹ In other cases, US soldiers committed atrocities against their enemies out of frustration. Two of Frederick Downs’s platoon mates slashed a corpse with knives because of the rage they felt at all their efforts resulting in only the death of “one lousy dink.”⁷² In still other cases, there is no obvious reason for such behavior. Anderson’s unit, for instance, executed a group of wounded NVA soldiers simply because there were “no witnesses in the bush.”⁷³

The most disturbing, and probably most frequent, atrocity against enemy combatants that appears in veteran narratives is the taking of body parts as souvenirs. Memoirists write about GIs who wore necklaces strung with human ears,⁷⁴ drank whiskey out of skulls, joked about tossing severed ears into mess hall soup,⁷⁵ and rigged a skull to open and close its jaw so that it appeared to sing along to music.⁷⁶ Several veterans even claim that they knew of soldiers who brought their macabre trophies back to the United States, or at least hoped to.⁷⁷ Others say that GIs did not just hack up enemy bodies for souvenirs; they also set them in lifelike poses to get a laugh out of their comrades. Bodies were propped up, cigarettes put between their fingers,⁷⁸ beer cans in their hands,⁷⁹ and Playboy magazines placed on their laps.⁸⁰ Johnnie M. Clark’s platoon mate retrieved a “spare leg” from a pile of NVA corpses, “shoved it into the crotch” of an enemy body to create the illusion that the dead man had three legs, and then laughed at his gruesome handiwork “until tears filled his eyes.”⁸¹

Twentieth-century GIs, Peter S. Kindsvatter explains, learned during training “that killing America’s enemies was not only legally sanctioned but also [their] duty.”⁸² But “this license to kill did not automatically instill willingness; soldiers also wanted to believe that the enemy deserved to die.”⁸³ Soldiers were thus told that their foes were “godless, evil, barbaric, greedy for conquest, even bestial.”⁸⁴ This propagandizing caused enemies to be dehumanized. Adversaries of various races and ethnicities received this treatment, but Asian enemies, who were “not ethnically and culturally akin to white America,” were especially dehumanized.⁸⁵ This happened when US forces fought Japanese, Korean, and Chinese troops, and it happened again when they squared off against Vietnamese fighters. Vietnam-era GIs were taught from basic training onward that the VC were inhuman “gooks” and “dinks” that had to be exterminated.⁸⁶ In light of this indoctrination, it is not surprising that US soldiers sometimes treated Vietnamese corpses more like playthings or slain animals than dead human beings.

Americans were not the only perpetrators of war crimes in Vietnam. Many veterans say that the Vietcong tortured captured GIs to death and mutilated their bodies. Mason, for example, writes about the horrific fate of two fellow helicopter pilots who were shot down during his tour. The pilots’ corpses were found skinned and dismembered, proof that they had been “caught on the ground” by the Vietcong after they crashed.⁸⁷ Veteran memoirs, however, contain few references to enemy atrocities committed against civilians. This is appropriate because although “the Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed thousands of civilians . . . most of their atrocities were calculated assassinations of specific individuals.”⁸⁸ In 1958, two years before the NLF was even officially established, “an estimated 700 government officials” were victims of such murders.⁸⁹ In October 1966, Neil Sheehan of the New York Times reported that “over the past decade, about 20,000 persons have been assassinated by Communist terrorists.”⁹⁰ Sheehan added, though, that “the gun and the knife of the Vietcong assassin are . . . far more selective” than US bombing raids that indiscriminately killed dozens of people at a time.⁹¹

The Vietcong had to be selective in their killing because they could not afford to alienate “the people.” The guerrillas relied on South Vietnamese villagers for food and shelter and needed civilian complicity to evade their adversaries, mount ambushes, and plant booby traps.⁹² The Vietcong infamously strayed from this pattern of behavior after taking control of the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. During their brief rule the Communists attempted to “not only destroy the government administration of the city, but to establish, in its place, a ‘revolutionary administration.’”⁹³ Hundreds of Hue residents connected to the South Vietnamese government or the US “imperialists” were executed during this attempted political transformation.⁹⁴ The victims were thrown into mass graves;⁹⁵ some were buried alive.⁹⁶ But the “Hue Massacre,” as despicable as it was, did not represent typical Vietcong or NVA conduct.

American troops, on the other hand, were not desperate to cultivate the goodwill of villagers. On top of this, civilians looked like the enemy, often aided the enemy, and were generally of a different race than GIs. Veterans document a wide range of war crimes involving civilians in their narratives, including beatings, rape, and murder. Caputo says that on two occasions his platoon went “nuts,” turning into “unrestrained savages” who burned down villages in fits of rage.⁹⁷ Lee Childress, a veteran who contributed to Everything We Had, an oral history, says a fellow GI shot an old Vietnamese woman because she stole his pack of chewing gum.⁹⁸ One of the first veteran narratives published was the ghostwritten memoir of Lieutenant William Calley, the only American soldier convicted for the My Lai murders. Calley is shockingly frank about his participation in the massacre, but he asserts that killing unarmed women and children was justified because they aided the Vietcong.⁹⁹

Few narratives can be categorized as definitively antiwar. But many facets of these works put the American venture in Vietnam in a poor light, from the seemingly senseless and ineffective tactics employed by the US military, to the horrendous atrocities attributed to American troops. It seems odd, then, that another reoccurring theme in these accounts is the idea that American soldiers were victimized by Vietnamese civilians, the people who suffered the most in the war. Some reasons for this hatred of civilians are obvious. GIs became enraged when peasants did not warn them about booby traps planted in and around their villages. Many noncombatants actively aided the Vietcong and NVA, and many more were unwilling for various reasons to help American troops find their elusive enemies.

The idea of civilians as victimizers, however, goes beyond the role they played in hindering American combat operations. This concept also involves the feeling that while US soldiers were dying for South Vietnam’s freedom, the majority of its citizens were ungrateful and scornful of these sacrifices. One common manifestation of this attitude in memoirs is the portrayal of Vietnamese civilians as motivated by a single-minded desire for American dollars. The great majority of Vietnamese who appear in veterans’ accounts are people who tried to part GIs from their money: beggars, prostitutes and their pimps, sellers of shoddy souvenirs, thieves, and hustlers. The people portrayed as the greediest members of South Vietnamese society are the children who constantly swarmed US soldiers wherever they went, pleading for handouts of money, candy, and cigarettes.¹⁰⁰ During James R. McDonough’s first day in Vietnam he was initially delighted to see groups of “smiling children . . . with grinning teeth and sparkling eyes” waving at him as he passed by in a jeep.¹⁰¹ But his delight turned to shock when he leaned out of the jeep to wave back at a group of boys and they instantly grabbed onto his arm and stole his watch.¹⁰²

ARVN soldiers, according to memoirists, also ruthlessly took advantage of American soldiers. These US-allied Vietnamese troops, called ARVNs by GIs (pronounced “arvins”), were allegedly so incompetent that Americans were forced to do all the fighting. The scorn heaped upon ARVN troops in veteran narratives cannot be exaggerated. They are called “pathetic” and “chickenshit sons-of-bitches,”¹⁰³ “fucking cowards” and “babies,”¹⁰⁴ and are shown either running away from danger, avoiding the enemy, or acting like happy-go-lucky clowns who would rather lounge around than fight. Puller saw an ARVN unit whose members smoked cigarettes, chatted, and listened to transistor radios while on patrol.¹⁰⁵ Malevolent ARVNs laughed at Downs and his platoon one day as they marched off in search of Vietcong. The Vietnamese soldiers evidently thought it was funny that the Americans were risking their lives in “the bush” while they stayed behind and relaxed in hammocks.¹⁰⁶

Veterans express the most anger towards Vietnamese who initially hid their greed or contempt by treating GIs with, as Broyles puts it, “exaggerated kindness.”¹⁰⁷ Caputo writes of street children who praised Americans when they passed out money and treats, but hurled curses and insults at them when they did not.¹⁰⁸ A formerly friendly beggar child threw rocks at Broyles when he did not offer up his usual handout.¹⁰⁹ Puller was heartened when a village chief invited his platoon to sit down for a lavish meal, but was furious when the chief presented him with a bill after they finished eating.¹¹⁰ Tobias Wolff worked closely with ARVN troops, and they treated him to a farewell dinner shortly before his tour ended. When his Vietnamese hosts broke into hysterical laughter during the meal he realized that they were not honoring him. Wolff had instead been set up for a cruel practical joke; they had fed him his dog.¹¹¹

Besides being portrayed as pitiless exploiters, most of the Vietnamese who appear in veteran narratives basically serve as scenery or props. These nameless figures are the “villagers,” “people,” or “gooks” with whom GIs briefly interact as they pass through rural hamlets or urban neighborhoods. The occasional Vietnamese who rise above this status invariably speak in snippets of broken English and GI slang. Caputo, for instance, records begging children saying “Gimme cig’rette gimme candy you buy one Coka. One Coka twenty P you buy,” and a teenager who says, “Hokay, hokay. Kill buku VC.”¹¹² Readers are only rarely presented with Vietnamese who seem like real human beings with thoughts, feelings, and complex motivations for their actions.

The Vietnamese, of course, were real people, and many had good reasons for acting in ways that American soldiers found annoying or despicable. So many South Vietnamese seemed greedy because prying dollars away from comparatively wealthy American servicemen was their best option for survival.¹¹³ Before the war, the great majority of South Vietnamese lived in rural areas and relied on agriculture, principally rice production, for their livelihoods. But the countryside became increasingly dangerous as the war escalated, and US forces, as part of their “pacification” efforts, laid waste to farmland with bombs and chemical defoliants. These developments led to an exodus of people to cities,¹¹⁴ causing “the urban population of South Vietnam [to increase] from 15 to 40 percent of the total population” by 1968.¹¹⁵ The South was “normally a rice-exporting area,” but with much of its rice crop destroyed and farmers fleeing their paddies, it was forced to import rice by 1967.¹¹⁶

Deprived of their livelihoods, refugees who settled in slums or the shantytowns that surrounded US bases were forced by necessity to get what they could from the Americans. For some this meant working as laborers or maids for the Americans, but for others it meant pursuing more illicit occupations.¹¹⁷ An example of how this process played out for one South Vietnamese citizen is found in the memoir of Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places. Hayslip spent the first years of her life in a small village, but fled her home after local Vietcong cadre sentenced her to death because they mistakenly believed she was a government informant. She ended up in Saigon and became pregnant while still a young girl. Hayslip first made money peddling black market goods to US soldiers. She later lived with a series of American boyfriends who paid her expenses, a route taken by her sister and many other South Vietnamese women. On one occasion, after being offered what to her was a fabulous amount of cash, Hayslip reluctantly had sex with a GI for money.¹¹⁸

In addition to disruptions caused by the random destructiveness of war, the lives of millions of South Vietnamese were upset by their government’s “strategic hamlet” program. Initiated in 1962 by South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, this plan was designed to separate the Vietcong from civilians by forcibly removing peasants from their villages and relocating them to fortified government-run camps.¹¹⁹ Citizens conscripted into the program had to build their own new housing and were charged for building materials, including the barbed wire strung around the encampments. No matter that the construction supplies were “provided free by the United States” to the Saigon government.¹²⁰ People were “motivated as never before to support the Viet Cong” after they suffered such indignities.¹²¹

The great economic and social upheavals caused by the war also gave many South Vietnamese good reasons to treat American troops with hostility. Prior to the American War, many South Vietnamese followed a way of life that had changed little in thousands of years. Existence for such people revolved around rice agriculture and family, and to move away from one’s home village and ancestors’ graves was anathema.¹²² It is no shock that people whose villages and crops may have been wiped out by American bombs and chemicals were unfriendly towards Americans. Vietnamese were even more likely to dislike GIs if family members or friends had been killed or maimed in the fighting, as was the case for millions of people. In the early 1990s, journalist Martha Hess traveled throughout Vietnam and interviewed people about their memories of American air raids and atrocities. One man posed a question to her that was echoed by other interviewees: “With all the American soldiers did to the Vietnamese people, how can we not hate them?”¹²³

Besides their own alienating actions, American troops were tainted in the eyes of many Vietnamese because their stated mission was to protect a government that was inept, oppressive, and thoroughly undemocratic. The corrupt South Vietnamese officials propped up by American power really represented only a small class of urban elites. A majority of the population was Buddhist, but many high-level Saigon politicians and bureaucrats, including President Diem, were Roman Catholics. American troops were also a foreign army, and Vietnam had a long, proud history of resistance to invaders. Such a history led many Vietnamese, rightly or wrongly, to regard GIs as the successors to the French colonialists who were driven out of Southeast Asia in the 1950s.

All of these reasons for hating Americans also served as compelling motivations to join the Vietcong insurgency. Whereas the South Vietnamese government frequently acted imperiously, the Vietcong generally adhered to policies designed to win villagers to its side. The Vietcong also produced propaganda that successfully appealed to ordinary Vietnamese, whereas the Saigon officials were never willing or able to convince many people of their worthiness to rule.¹²⁴ One prisoner told his American interrogators that he had joined the Vietcong because he was a poor farmer. The message of Vietcong “propaganda cadres,” that he had been exploited by the government and the rich landlords it represented, appealed to him.¹²⁵ It is unlikely that many South Vietnamese fully comprehended or believed in the ideology of the Communists who predominated in the Vietcong.¹²⁶ Large numbers of Vietnamese nevertheless joined the insurgency because they, like the prisoner, saw it as the only alternative to a distasteful government seemingly controlled by the “puppets” of foreign imperialists.¹²⁷

Another significant reason why many rural South Vietnamese hated their national government was because it drafted thousands of their sons into the ARVN. Rice agriculture in South Vietnam was labor intensive, and when the young men who performed much of that labor marched off to war, peasants suffered greatly. Maintaining a force of rice workers was so important that village leaders frequently helped local men avoid military service. In 1964, farmers in the Mekong Delta blocked roads in protest against conscription policies that emptied their fields of workers. Ever eager to exploit antigovernment sentiment, the Vietcong provided peasants with workers who aided in planting and harvesting.¹²⁸

The major unrest caused by the draft is an indication that there was more to ARVN troops than the scathing portrayals included in American narratives. There is some truth in the memoirists’ depictions, as the ARVN’s twenty-year existence was marred by failure and defeat. The ARVN was born in 1955 after the United States decided to build an army for its newly formed ally, the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam).¹²⁹ By the end of 1962, after nearly a decade of American training, advisement, and funding, the ARVN counted 219,000 soldiers in its ranks and seemed to be making some headway against the Vietcong insurgency.¹³⁰ It was a shock to many Americans, then, when 1963 began with an embarrassing ARVN defeat. On 2 January, an ARVN “battalion of regulars . . . and a company of M113 armored personnel carriers complete with air and artillery support” attacked a contingent of Vietcong near the village of Ap Bac.¹³¹ The outnumbered guerrillas held off the assault “until nightfall, when they slipped away undetected.” The Vietcong, who possessed no armored vehicles or aircraft, shot down five helicopters and killed or wounded almost 200 ARVN soldiers before they retreated.¹³²

Andrew Wiest maintains that the ARVN, despite the debacle at Ap Bac, made significant gains against the Vietcong during most of 1963.¹³³ This progress, however, was wiped out virtually overnight when a November “military coup led to the downfall and assassination” of President Diem.¹³⁴ The chaos resulting from the political turmoil in Saigon allowed the Vietcong to build strength and go on the offensive throughout South Vietnam. US President Lyndon B. Johnson finally decided in 1965 that this dire state of affairs could only be rectified with the deployment of American combat troops.¹³⁵ The US military subsequently sidelined the ARVN and, in Wiest’s words, “simply decided to win the war for them.”¹³⁶

America’s next president, Richard Nixon, promised the American people that he would bring their boys home from Southeast Asia while fulfilling the nation’s promise to protect its Vietnamese allies from Communist aggression. He would achieve this feat through “Vietnamization,” a gradual withdrawal of US troops accompanied by the strengthening of South Vietnam’s military. Suddenly, fostering ARVN victories became a US priority again. Between 1968 and 1975, the US provided South Vietnam with billions of dollars in military equipment, including top-of-the-line infantry weapons, tanks, and helicopters.¹³⁷ By the end of 1972, South Vietnam’s armed forces (the ARVN plus other branches) “had grown to over one million men and women,”¹³⁸ and its air force was the fourth largest in the world.¹³⁹

Despite America’s attempt to prepare South Vietnam to fight on alone, the post-1968 ARVN was, for the most part, just as disappointing as its earlier incarnations. The Saigon government withstood the Tet Offensive in 1968, and the US was encouraged by the ARVN’s performance in the 1970 US-led invasion of Cambodia. But Operation Lam Son 719, the 1971 ARVN invasion of Laos, which quickly ended in a frantic, ignominious retreat back to South Vietnam, proved that such optimism was unfounded. News media images of terrified ARVN soldiers hanging off the skids of evacuation helicopters were broadcasted around the world. Nixon asserted that Lam Son 719 was a success,¹⁴⁰ but the demoralized “South Vietnamese forces who retreated from Laos knew they had been defeated.”¹⁴¹