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Though no other My Lai-scale massacre has yet been revealed, Americans have committed a disturbing number of atrocities in Viet Nam. Many offenders have been strictly prosecuted. In 1 Corps in 1968, for example, seven Marines summarily hanged a Viet Cong suspect and shot two others to death. At a court-martial, one defense lawyer argued that his client had gone through "hell" after seeing Marine bodies "burned and tortured, some with their testicles cut off." Nonetheless all seven Marines were convicted and imprisoned, one for life.
The Army has never suggested that the enemy's atrocities justify those by Americans. In practice, though, military courts sometimes follow the unofficial "mere gook" rule, which devalues Vietnamese lives. One Army captain was accused of murder after ordering a trooper to shoot a captured Viet Cong. The court was told that he had commanded: "I don't care about prisoners. I want a body count. I want that man shot." Nevertheless the captain was acquitted.
In a widely discussed case last spring, Army Lieut. James Duffy was tried for ordering his sergeant to kill an ARVN deserter and record him as a Viet Cong suspect. Justifying his action, Duffy explained: "I know in my case, platoon leaders never got any guidance on treatment of prisoners. The only thing we ever heard was to get more body count, kill more V.C. If you didn't have a lot of body counts, they would think you were a poor unit." The military jurors convicted Duffy of premeditated murder —then were dismayed to find that he faced a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. As a result, the jury swiftly reduced the charge to involuntary manslaughter. Sentence: six months' imprisonment.
A Strategy of Refugees
Many returned veterans have described unpunished—and allegedly routine—war crimes in Viet Nam: amputating ears for trophies, electrical torture during interrogation, pushing prisoners out of airborne helicopters. The usual explanation claims a kind of collective irresponsibility, the moral confusion of anti-guerrilla warfare. Who is responsible?
To avoid national mobilization and save lives—U.S. lives—the Johnson Administration chose a fateful Army strategy in Viet Nam. Instead of massive infantry occupation with painstaking efforts to befriend the Vietnamese, the strategy called for physical removal of the rural population from the countryside, the guerrillas' "fish-in-water" base. People were warned by leaflets or loudspeakers to leave; all those remaining were presumed to be enemies and subject to attack in "free-fire" zones. Air raids, artillery shelling and chemical crop destruction ensued. There followed search-and-destroy infantry sweeps, including gunship bombing and "Zippo" burning of villages from which troops had received sniper fire.
As a result, 5,000,000 people—nearly a third of South Viet Nam's population—have become refugees. Many, slow to leave ancestral homes, have become victims of U.S. firepower and received grimly inadequate treatment in provincial hospitals and refugee centers. The Senate Subcommittee on Refugees estimates 1,000,000 civilian