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