Beyond My Lai : New Revelations of Vietnam Atrocities

From the Nation:

The 1968 My Lai massacre became public in 1969, but officials at the time said My Lai was an "isolated incident"--the same thing we hear about atrocities today in Iraq and elsewhere. After that, GIs described dozens of other My Lai-style atrocities in which they said they had taken part. Those GIs were called liars and traitors, and no one was ever punished for any of the events they described.

Now the Los Angeles Times has published a page one story, "Vietnam Horrors: Darkest Yet," based on official government documents detailing 320 incidents of Vietnam war atrocities that were confirmed by army investigators. The documentation, according to the Times, comes from "a once-secret archive assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s." This "Vietnam War Crimes Working Group" archive, 9,000 pages long, was discovered by Nick Turse, who was doing research for a Ph.D. dissertation as a student at Columbia University. Turse shares the byline on the Times report with staff writer Deborah Nelson.

The stories are terrible. "Kill anything that moves" – that's what one company of American soldiers was told when they set out on a sweep of the rice paddies on Vietnam's central coast in February 1968, according to Jamie Henry, at the time a 20-year old medic.

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"Kill anything that moves" sounds a hell of a lot like "kill all military age males," a statement apparently given as rules of engagement for some US soldiers in Iraq who are now on trial for murder. The fact that we left Vietnam over thirty years ago and our atrocities there are still being revealed today may be telling us all we need to know about what's happening in Iraq right now. That is, the Pentagon has been consciously sitting on this information until an academic dug it up: clearly, this is how they do business; if they're continuing to hide the truth about a war that ended over a generation ago, then they must be hiding the truth about the war we're in right now. Okay, my reasoning doesn't actually prove anything, but these rapes, torture sessions, and murders are making the headlines every other week, and it's not because the Pentagon likes the press. It is very unlikely, as the article observes, that these are all "isolated incidents."

Other than "this is horrible and it should stop right now" I don't know what else to say.

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