The Secret History of the Vietnam War
If you thought you knew all there was to know about the Vietnam War, you were wrong. For example: ever heard of the "Mere Gook Rule," a code of conduct the US military came up with in order to make it easier for soldiers to murder Vietnamese civilians without feeling too bad about it? ("It's only a mere gook you're killing!")
Well, few people knew about this bit of history either until author Nick Turse discovered it in secret US military archives, which he used as the primary sources for his new(ish) book, Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The book is based on Turse's discovery of theretofore secret internal military investigations of US-perpetrated atrocities alongside extensive reporting in Vietnam and among American veterans, and it reminds us that the most significant fact about the Vietnam War is its most overlooked: massive and devastating Vietnamese civilian suffering.
The debate over the US's war in Vietnam continues to hang over this country's most recent and techno-futuristic imperial adventures. Nick's book makes for timely if extraordinarily painful reading, and I sat down with him recently to talk about the ongoing relevance of Vietnam, massacres, and secretly photocopying whole US government archives.
VICE: Your book documents how the American war in Vietnam was a fight systemically waged against the civilian population. How does this account that you documented differ from the Vietnam war as it's popularly remembered in the United States today?
Nick Turse: We have 30,000 books in print on the Vietnam War, and most of them deal with the American experience. They focus on American soldiers, on strategy, tactics, generals, or diplomacy out of Washington and the war managers there. But I didn't see any that really attempted to tell the complete story of what I came to see as the signature aspect of the conflict, which was Vietnamese civilian suffering. Millions of Vietnamese were killed, wounded, or made refugees by deliberate US policies, like the almost unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling across wide swaths of the countryside. That is, deliberate policies dictated at the highest levels of the US military. But any discussion of Vietnamese civilian suffering is condensed down to a couple pages or paragraphs on the massacre at My Lai.
This isn't the book that you initially intended to write. Tell me about the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the documents that you found.
I was working on a project on post-traumatic stress disorder among US Vietnam veterans. I would go down to the National Archives and I was trying to find hard data, military documents, to match up to the self-reports that we had from veterans about their experiences during the war. And on one of these trips I hit dead ends at every turn. After two weeks I had nothing to show for my research. I went to an archivist I worked with. I told him I couldn't go back to my boss empty handed. He thought about it for a second. He asked me, "do you think witnessing war crimes could cause post-traumatic stress?' I told him, "excellent hypothesis" and asked what he had.
Within an hour I was going through this box, many boxes actually, these reports of massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault, mutilation. Records put together by this Vietnam War Crimes Working Group impaneled in the Army Chief of Staff's office in the wake of the My Lai massacre, to track any war crimes cases or allegations that bubbled up from the field, to make sure that the Army wasn't caught flat footed again. And whenever it could it tried to tamp down these allegations.
So the War Crimes Working Group was not created to prevent or punish atrocities and war crimes?
That's exactly right. They didn't try and punish wrongdoers. They didn't try and put guidance out in the field. They didn't do anything to prevent war crimes. It operated out of [Chief of Staff] General [William] Westmoreland's office. He had been the supreme commander in Vietnam a couple years before, so he had a vested interest in the war and how it was portrayed. They just tracked things so they could make reports to the Secretary of Defense and to the White House to keep them appraised of possible scandals that were on the horizon.
So this group put together this massive collection of files. And after I found it I wrote my dissertation on these documents, and after I defended my dissertation I went to Vietnam.
Your reporting attempted to match up the atrocities you'd read about in these files with the actual villages where they had allegedly been committed. What did you find?
It was actually a lot easier than I expected to find witnesses and survivors of these particular incidents. Generally because the Vietnamese are so tied to their land, even people who were bombed out of the countryside into the shantytowns and slums and refugee camps, after the war they returned to their home villages, and were living there when I got there. But it really transformed my project, because I went to talk to Vietnamese about this one spasm of violence that I had in the records but what they would talk to me about was ten years of living under bombs and shells and helicopter gunships, and what it took to negotiate every aspect of their lives around the American war.
What I was told in the countryside was beyond my ability to grasp, something that I could have never have gotten from the records. And I would talk to Vietnamese who would tell me about what it was like just to try and eke out an existence in the war zone. About having their home burned down five, six seven times. And then finally giving up rebuilding and starting to live a semi-subterranean life in their bomb shelter. About how they figured out ways to get out of that shelter, to get water or food or relieve themselves. And how their entire lives were just predicated on figuring out a way not to get killed. They would talk about artillery called down on a hamlet, and they would run into the bomb shelter. And stay there. And then this whole calculus would begin where they would try and figure out exactly when the right time to leave that shelter was. You had to wait until the artillery shelling stopped, but you couldn't leave too soon or you were apt to be cut down by a helicopter gunship that was flying overhead. You had to make sure you weren't caught in a crossfire between departing guerrillas and the onrushing Americans. But you couldn't stay down there too long because the Americans were coming, and they would start rolling grenades into the bomb shelters because they saw them as possible enemy bunkers, fighting positions. There all of these decisions to be made, and it wasn't just your life that depended on making it, but maybe your entire family. The whole family could get wiped out if you left a second too early or a second too late.
Your academic advisor suggested that you copy those archives in a hurry before they disappeared?
I couldn't get the documents out of my head, and I went to a couple Vietnam War historians that I knew and tried to interest them in the project. I said, "You really should get down to the National Archives and work on these." And everybody at that time, they were burned out on the War or working on a different project. And one of them suggested that I ought to pursue it. I went to my advisor at Columbia, David Rosner, and I said to him, "Do you think I could write a book and my dissertation at the same time?" I was 200 pages in on another dissertation. He said that I was nuts. If the documents were that important, then I should get down to the National Archives and get the documents.
I was just a grad student at the time, I didn't have the money for this endeavor. I said to him, "I'm going to have to put together a grant proposal and it would be months before I got down there." And he just pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check on the spot and said, "Go down there and get these documents."
Within 24 hours I was down at the Archives. I went in first thing in the morning and I copied until they threw me out at night. I put every cent that he gave me into copying. I slept in my car in the Archives parking lot and I collected this entire collection.
I always thought he was a little paranoid. I didn't think there was a real need to get all the documents. It turned out that it was a smart move because these documents, sometime after I first published from the files, they were pulled from the Archives' shelves and they haven't been publicly available in the same way since. Now you have to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Your book describes, I think you call it, "suffering on an almost unimaginable scale." Artillery shelling, bombing, the destruction of villages by infantry, revenge missions, massacres, incredibly sadistic rapes, the gunning down of Vietnamese of farmers and fisherman from helicopter gunships, free fire zones. You cite an estimate of 3.8 million war deaths, the majority Vietnamese civilians. What turned so many young American men into such monsters?
It's a difficult question to answer. I went out and interviewed well over 100 American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of many more. I don't know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for several hours. He was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.
But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames. And she's angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off, and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt. And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, "Do you know that GI was me?" He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the time he didn't think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn't help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him. And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking to with his 19-year old self.
He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn't think of them as human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how "I didn't become exactly like a robot but it was like that." You're trained to kill, you chant "Kill, kill kill." It psychologically readies you for this.
There was even a "Mere Gook Rule?"
There was a shorthand in Vietnam: the MGR, or Mere Gook Rule. The idea is that the Vietnamese weren't real people. They were subhumans. Mere gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them.
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