From the National Archives: New proof of Vietnam War atrocities



U.S. military records that were classified for decades but are now
available in the National Archives back Kerry up and put the lie to his
critics.
By Nicholas Turse
The Village Voice, September 21, 2004


John Kerry is being pilloried for his shocking Senate testimony 34 years ago
that many U.S. soldiers-not just a few "rogues"-were committing atrocities
against the Vietnamese. U.S. military records that were classified for
decades but are now available in the National Archives back Kerry up and put
the lie to his critics. Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many
soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on
April 22, 1971, and said this:

"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 a 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."

The archives have hundreds of files of official U.S. military investigations
of such atrocities committed by American soldiers. I've pored over those
records-which were classified for decades-for my Columbia University
dissertation and, now, this Voice article. The exact number of investigated
allegations of atrocities is unknown, as is the number of such barbaric
incidents that occurred but weren't investigated. Some war crimes, like the
Tiger Force atrocities exposed last year by The Toledo Blade, have only come
to light decades later. Others never will. But there are plentiful records
to back up Kerry's 1971 testimony point by point.

Following (with the names removed or abbreviated) are examples, directly
from the archives:

"They had personally raped"

On August 12, 1967, Specialist S., a military intelligence interrogator,
"raped . . . a 13-year-old . . . female" in an interrogation hut in a P.O.W.
compound. He was convicted of assault and indecent acts with a child. He
served seven months and 16 days for his crimes.

"Cut off ears"

On August 9, 1968, a seven-man patrol led by First Lieutenant S. entered
Dien Tien hamlet. "Shortly thereafter, Private First Class W. was heard to
shout to an unidentified person to halt. W. fired his M-16 several times,
and the victim was killed. W. then dragged the body to [the lieutenant's]
location. . . . Staff Sergeant B. told W. to bring back an ear or finger if
he wanted to prove himself a man. W. later went back to the body and removed
both ears and a finger." W. was charged with assault and conduct to the
prejudice of good order and discipline; he was court-martialed and
convicted, but he served no prison time. B. was found guilty of assault and
was fined $50 a month for three months. S. was discharged from the army
before action could be taken against him.

"Cut off heads"

On June 23, 1967, members of the 25th Infantry Division killed two enemy
soldiers in combat in Binh Duong province. An army Criminal Investigation
Division (CID) probe disclosed that "Staff Sergeant H. then decapitated the
bodies with an axe." H. was court-martialed and found guilty of conduct to
the prejudice of good order and discipline. His grade was reduced, but he
served no prison time.

"Taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the
power"

On January 10, 1968, six Green Berets in Long Hai, South Vietnam, "applied
electrical torture via field telephones to the sensitive areas of the bodies
of three men and one woman . . . " Four received reprimands and "Article
15s"-a nonjudicial punishment meted out by a commanding officer or officer
in charge for minor offenses. A fifth refused to accept his Article 15, and
no other action was taken against him. No action was taken against the sixth
Green Beret.

"Cut off limbs"

A CID investigation disclosed that during late February or early March 1968
near Thanh Duc, South Vietnam, First Lieutenant L. ordered soldier K. to
shoot an unidentified Vietnamese civilian. "K. shot the Vietnamese civilian,
leaving him with wounds in the chest and stomach. Soldier B., acting on
orders from L., returned to the scene and killed the Vietnamese civilian,
and an unidentified medic severed the Vietnamese civilian's left arm." No
punishment was meted out because none of the "identified perpetrators" was
found to be on active duty at the time of the June 1971 investigation.

"Blown up bodies"

On February 14, 1969, Platoon Sergeant B. and Specialist R., on a
reconnaissance patrol in Binh Dinh province, "came upon three Vietnamese
males . . . whom they detained and then shot at close range using M-16
automatic fire. B. then arranged the bodies on the ground so that their
heads were close together. A fragmentation grenade was dropped next to the
heads of the bodies." B. was court-martialed, convicted of manslaughter, and
sentenced to a reduction in grade and a fine of $97 per month for six
months-after which time he re-enlisted. R. was court-martialed and found not
guilty.

"Randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of
Genghis Khan"

While a U.S. "helicopter hunter-killer team . . . was on a recon mission in
Cambodia," its members fired rockets at buildings and "engaged various
targets [in a small village] with machine-gun fire. Gunship preparatory fire
preceded the landing of a South Vietnamese army platoon, which had been
diverted from another mission. A U.S. captain accompanied the platoon on the
ground in violation of standing orders. The South Vietnamese troops,
reconnoitering by fire, did not search bunkers for enemy forces, nor were
enemy weapons found. . . . Civilian casualties were estimated at eight dead,
including two children, 15 wounded, and three or four structures destroyed.
There is no evidence that the wounded were provided medical treatment by
either U.S. or South Vietnamese forces. . . . Members of the South
Vietnamese platoon returned to the aircraft with large quantities of
civilian property. . . . The incident was neither properly investigated nor
reported initially." Letters of reprimand were issued to a lieutenant
colonel and a major. The captain received a letter of reprimand.

John Kerry made it clear when he testified more than three decades ago that
what he told the Senate was the cumulative testimony of well over 100
"honorably discharged and many very highly decorated" Vietnam vets who
gathered in Detroit in early 1971. Calling their gathering the Winter
Soldier Investigation, they were trying to raise awareness of the type of
war they said America was waging in Southeast Asia. They were trying to
demonstrate that the shocking My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, of 567
civilians in a Vietnamese village-a barbarism unknown to the American public
until late 1969-was not an isolated incident in which rogue troops went
berserk, but simply one of many U.S.-perpetrated atrocities.

All these years later, neither the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) nor
the media feeding their allegations about Kerry's supposedly "false 'war
crimes' charges" even broaches the subject of Vietnamese suffering, let
alone talk about Kerry's exposition of large-scale atrocities, such as free-
fire zones and bombardment of villages-gross violations of international law
cannot simply be denied or explained away.

Having worked for nearly five years doing research on post-traumatic stress
disorder among Vietnam vets, I understand the intense trauma experienced by
many of them. However, having also spent years working with U.S. government
records of investigations into atrocities committed against the Vietnamese
by U.S. soldiers, it is patently clear which country suffered more as a
result of the war, and it isn't the U.S., which tragically lost just over
58,000 soldiers. It's Vietnam. Perhaps as many as 2 million Vietnamese
civilians died during the war, and who can even guess at the number
wounded-physically and psychologically.

On its website, the SBVT tries to debunk the Winter Soldier Investigation by
using the same rhetoric that apologists for the Vietnam War have long
employed: They paint the vets who attended the Detroit meeting as a parade
of fake veterans offering false testimony. "None of the Winter Soldier
'witnesses' Kerry cited in his Senate testimony less than three months later
were willing to sign affidavits, and their gruesome stories lacked the
names, dates, and places that would allow their claims to be tested," the
SBVT claims. "Few were willing to cooperate with military investigators."

While numerous authors have repeatedly advanced such assertions, U.S.
military documents tell a radically different story. According to the
formerly classified army records, 46 soldiers who testified at the WSI made
allegations that, in the eyes of U.S. Army investigators, "merited further
inquiry." As of March 1972, the army's CID noted that of the 46 allegations,
"only 43 complainants have been identified" by investigators.

"Only" 43 of 46? That means at least 93 percent of the veterans surveyed
were real, not fake. Moreover, according to official records, CID
investigators attempted to contact 41 people who testified at the Detroit
session, which occurred between January 31 and February 2, 1971. Five
couldn't be located, according to records. Of the remaining 36, 31 submitted
to interviews-hardly the "few" asserted by SBVT. Moreover, as Gerald Nicosia
has noted in his mammoth tome Home to War, "A complete transcript of the
Winter Soldier testimony was sent to the Pentagon, and the military never
refuted a word of it."

The assertion that the vets proved uncooperative and refused to provide
useful, identifiable information has also been a typical device used to
refute the WSI. In this case, the Winter Soldiers themselves played directly
into the hands of their detractors by trying to have it both ways: They
wanted to expose atrocities as a product of command policy while denying
individual soldiers' responsibility in committing the crimes.

At the WSI, veteran after veteran told of brutal military tactics, like
burning villages and establishing free-fire zones. They offered blunt,
graphic, and often horrific accounts of murder, rape, torture, mutilation,
and indiscriminate violence. But when it came to perpetrators, the soldiers
did not name names. From the outset, they made it clear that they would not
allow their testimony to be used to, as they put it, scapegoat individual
G.I.'s and low-ranking officers when, they said, it was the war's
managers-America's political and military leadership-who were ultimately to
blame for the atrocities. Because of this stance, some veterans told
investigators after the WSI that they would not offer any further testimony
or would only speak before Congress or a congressional committee. This
stance became a convenient way for the military to stop work on cases and
ignore the charges the anti-war vets had made.

But in fact-and despite later claims to the contrary by their pro-war
critics-most of the Winter Soldier participants had publicly given accounts
with their own names, unit identifications, dates of service, and sometimes
rather detailed descriptions of locations-namely, all the information needed
to proceed with investigations. In practically all the specific Winter
Soldier cases, such probes were never done.

*Its part of official war records now.....Its the truth....Now who's lying?