#turse

Hobukastan

In the mid-1960s, when the first American troops arrived, the densely populated coastal plains of Quang Nam and Quang Ngai provinces were renowned for their rich rice lands. The rustic landscape featured meandering rivers and streams, thick stands of bamboo, and white sand beaches on the shore of the South China Sea. But in short order, the Americans turned this peaceful countryside into a land of endless carnage. A whole village could be completely wiped off the map in minutes by a single aircraft sortie or in a few hours by ground troops on a search-and-destroy mission. Few reporters were around to witness the annihilation, so what went on in Vietnam’s killing fields often stayed there. Tiny hamlets whose own inhabitants sometimes used just a numeric designation to differentiate them from their neighbors were battered in obscurity, their suffering largely unnoticed by the outside world. Still, the sheer volume of death and destruction has meant that some traces of the near-constant civilian suffering have made it into the historical record.

Until the My Lai revelations became front-page news, atrocity stories were routinely disregarded by American journalists or excised by stateside editors. The fate of civilians in rural South Vietnam did not merit much examination; even the articles that did mention the killing of noncombatants generally did so merely in passing, without any indication that the acts described might be war crimes. Vietnamese revolutionary sources, for their part, detailed hundreds of massacres and large-scale operations that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, but those reports were dismissed out of hand as communist propaganda.And then, in a stunning reversal, almost immediately after the exposure of the My Lai massacre, war crime allegations became old hat — so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking into. In leaflets, pamphlets, small-press books, and ‘underground’ newspapers, the growing American antiwar movement repeatedly pointed out that U.S. troops were committing atrocities on a regular basis. But what had been previously brushed aside as propaganda and leftist kookery suddenly started to be disregarded as yawn-worthy common knowledge, with little but the My Lai massacre in between.

Perhaps the purest expression of the effect of the rules of engagement I ever found was on the death certificate of Nguyen Mai, an unarmed Vietnamese man who died from a ‘penetrating wound’ to the face. The official military paperwork in the U.S. National Archives was written up by an American medical officer. Sparse in its details — Nguyen’s date of birth, marital status, religion, and next of kin are all missing — the certificate does, however, list the official ‘external cause[s]’ of death: ‘Running from U.S. forces.’