Blogs > Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Deborah Nelson's The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (Basic Books, 2008)

Mar 8, 2009

Jeremy Kuzmarov: Review of Deborah Nelson's The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes (Basic Books, 2008)



[Jeremy Kuzmarov is Visiting Professor of History at Bucknell University.]

Over the course of the past decade, swift boaters and revisionist historians have tried to attack the credibility of Vietnam veterans, including John F. Kerry, who spoke out against the extensive war crimes carried out during the war. They claim that any atrocities were isolated incidents and aberrations and that the veterans who testified about them were psychologically scarred, politically motivated or brainwashed by communist propaganda.

Based on a cachet of newly declassified army documents and interviews with Vietnamese and Americans, Deborah Nelson, a veteran newspaper investigative reporter, winner of the Pulitzer prize for Investigative Reporting in 1997 and currently Carnegie Visiting Professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism, reveals that war crimes were in fact systematically committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam owing to the political climate of the war, the racial characterization of the Vietnamese as “gooks” and the pressure faced by soldiers to obtain high body count totals to impress their superiors. “The War Behind Me” thus serves to vindicate once and for all the veterans who courageously spoke out against the injustice of the war and antiwar activists of the era who broadcast the wide scope of atrocities in an appeal to public conscious.

Evidence of massive U.S. war crimes is copiously documented in the memoirs and testimonials of American and Vietnamese participants, journalistic exposés, and war crimes tribunals conducted during the 1960s by peace activists like Bertrand Russell. Newsweek correspondent Kevin Buckley documented one of the worst cases of U.S. atrocities in Operation Speedy Express, a six month operation in 1968 to eradicate the National Liberation Front (NLF) from Kien Hoa province in the Mekong Delta in which over 10,000 enemy were reported killed while only 748 weapons were recovered. Nelson’s book adds a new level of detail and is unique in drawing on newly declassified army criminal investigations files that were kept buried in the national archives for decades. The files consist of the reports by lower-ranking soldiers of atrocities committed against civilians that were in turn investigated by the army. As Nelson notes, these cases likely represented the tip of the iceberg because killings of civilians were so routine that in most cases they were never reported or investigated.

In one of the prominent examples that she followed up, Jamie Henry, a battalion medic with the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry reported to his superiors that in February 1968, members of his unit massacred 19 unarmed civilians in a tiny hamlet on the coast of South Vietnam. They had been given orders while on a search and destroy mission to “kill anything that moves.” Henry’s allegations spawned a three year army investigation, which found that massacres of civilians and systematic killings had indeed taken place. Seeking to avoid bad publicity after the exposure of the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. GI’s killed an estimated 504 Vietnamese civilians, the army publicly covered up their findings and tried to slander Henry as a liar. Henry later spoke out in the Winter Soldiers hearings, which was organized by anti-war Vietnam veterans to raise public attention about the wide scope of atrocities in Vietnam. The hearings were predominantly ignored, however, by the mainstream press.

With the assistance of Nick Turse, who wrote his dissertation at Columbia University on U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, Nelson was able to track down and interview many of those cited in the criminal files, including Henry. He was astounded to learn that his complaints were investigated so thoroughly by the Army and that they knew he was telling the truth yet remained silent. Besides lower-ranking “grunts,” Nelson and Turse, interviewed many high-ranking Army personnel who either gave the direct orders for mass killings or were responsible for investigating and in turn covering up the atrocities. Most continue to try to minimize the scope or provide ipso facto rationalizations for U.S. conduct. A few, however, are highly critical of the lack of discipline among American troops which they blame in part on poor leadership as well as the insolubility of U.S. strategy in Vietnam. According to Nelson, John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who helped to develop the army’s first course on counter-insurgency strategy, told her that tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians died in incidents that weren’t investigated as war crimes, including prisoners being thrown out of helicopters and officially sanctioned attacks in free-fire zones and under the notorious Phoenix program. Johns was among those to sign a petition calling for withdrawal in 2006 from Iraq, which he considers to be one of the greatest blunders in history.

One of the most poignant sections of the book is when Nelson recounts the interviews that she and Turse conducted in southern Vietnam in the hamlets where many memorials have recently spring up honoring the victims of atrocities during the war. The memory of the witnesses and survivors remains crystal clear, forty years later. The people of the region also continue to be filled with sorrow at the loss of their loved ones and vividly recall the fear and terror that they felt when American troops invaded their villages. Ngo Ba Nanh, whose father was murdered by U.S. troops while tending to his flock of ducks, recalled that “the Rangers were the most frightening. Everyone would just panic to hear the painted-face Americans were coming to the neighborhood.” Ho Thi Van, who witnessed the death of her mother and younger sister, further recounted that afterwards “the liberation army gathered the surviving villagers and promised them revenge for those innocent villagers……Now we are at peace, but if the war returns and the Americans come back I will try to shoot one round before I die as revenge for my family.”

These testimonials provide a gripping reminder of the destructiveness of the American war in Vietnam and the sorrows that it brought for countless Vietnamese. Nelson deserves great credit for her legwork, not only in going through the army criminal files but also in interviewing participants and survivors of the atrocities. She provides definitive evidence to counteract the claim of mythologists that the Vietnam War was fought humanely or for a just cause. The one bright spot is that many soldiers like Henry were brave enough to report the abuses taking place with the hope of putting an end to the carnage. It is from their example that we can draw hope for the future.


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RJ Vecchio - 3/28/2009

After revisiting this site and reading the assorted rebuttals and comments, it seems one last try to bring facts to bear is in order.
Positing 'Working Class War' as the “most comprehensive” book on the war is about as unbiased a judgment as admiring the Nazi film Triumph of the Will as a factual documentary. Appy claims the war was fought 80% by draftees, when 70% of our KIAs were volunteers, and his book is based on interviews with a self-sorted group of about 100 veterans, most in “rap groups” specifically organized for the disturbed or disaffected, not exactly a valid cross-section of vets. He seems shocked that most enlisted men were of the working class, as if any nation ever fought a war with mostly college and postgrad men in the ranks. By that criterion there has never been a war that was not a working class war, and in fact working class draftees were the great majority of our men who served in WW2.
By Dr. Kuzmarov’s standards, clearly the Korean War was also nothing but an atrocity, another civil war in which we (& others) interfered foolishly and unjustly on behalf of a less-than-democratic leader of the South against a “peoples’ army” of the North. Perhaps the fact that today North Koreans brave death to flee and become refugees in China to escape repression and starvation, while the South is free and well fed, has some meaning as to the worth of helping half of a country resist violent takeover by the other half.
And the “entrenched nationalist movement” of the South comment might make one wonder why the National Liberation Front (NLF) was cast aside and disbanded by the communists shortly after Saigon fell, and its leaders, undeniably nationalist activists of many years, were swept aside; some to wind up in obscurity, some in re-education camps, and some who left as Boat People to find elsewhere the freedom they thought they had been fighting for in their homeland all their lives.
Then we have the almost funny comment that there are memorials in Viet Nam for US transgressions (real and alleged) but none for the communist forces. (Which were never under the command of the NLF, the tragic puppet of Hanoi.) The most famous and utterly undeniable atrocity of the communists was the massacre in Hue of thousands of Vietnamese civilians and also a few foreigners such as German doctors and French priests. There is no record, no whisper of acknowledgment of that planned and well organized slaughter in today’s Viet Nam. Why would anyone expect such?
And statistics that 1/3 of our men engaged in acts of resistance? That is so bizarre a claim that it’s hard to even begin to address, there are no such statistics, and if in fact it were true, it would have been utterly impossible to prosecute the war. Many supported the antiwar movement? The VVAW never had a membership much past 1000 (not all of whom were vets) out of over 3.5 million men who served in the war. That’s one out of every 3000 vets at most, a far cry from a significant fraction.
Then there’s the recurrent myth that the Geneva Accords guaranteed elections in all of Viet Nam. Inasmuch as the Accords were signed only by a French general and a representative of Ho Chi Minh, but not by anyone from the South or any other nation, there was no binding obligation on the South to participate in national elections with the North. Even had the South participated in the Accords, since the North began violating the Accords shortly after they were signed, any such obligation would have been negated anyhow.
The referral to elections in the North is another source of amusement, as others have already shown. Indeed, there are no real elections in Viet Nam to this day, it remains a totalitarian state, albeit one where the velvet glove is all that tourists and ideologues ever see.
It’s nice to note the self-immolation protests by Buddhists against the Diem regime, which did in fact tolerate some level of dissent. (None whatsoever was tolerated in the North, but why harp on details?) However, one might note that after Tet ’68, there were no more such events, since the Buddhists figured out that however much they weren’t happy with the Saigon government, Hanoi would be much worse. And it was, which is why more Buddhists immolated themselves after ’75 than before. (Not one of those facts that received any publicity once “liberation” was achieved.)
China was never a major player? Could anyone deny that the 35,000 or more Chinese who served in the North (along with some other foreign military like the Cuban interrogators in the Hanoi Hilton) and the American howitzers captured in Korea that China gave to the Viet Minh to bombard Dien Bien Phu, and lots of other forms of aid from China were important? “Some assistance” from the Soviet Union? Like perhaps thousands of SAM missiles, thousands of trucks, hundreds of tanks, hundreds of artillery pieces, many thousands of tons of ammunition, oceans of fuel, and all the other major supplies of war? (There were 400 Russian tanks alone in the ’72 invasion by the NVA, and far more in ’75.)
And it’s nice that somebody’s cousin is marrying a Vietnamese lady in a Western nation, but there is that interesting detail where Vietnamese women are for sale as “brides” in Taiwan, China, Korea, and elsewhere. Maybe that says something about conditions in “liberated” Viet Nam.
The US did not invade Viet Nam. If there were to be a military invasion, it would have been in the North, just as during the Korean War we invaded at Inchon, not at Seoul.
Lastly, the US did not lose the war in Viet Nam, it did not fight a real war, it fought a holding action to allow the South to acquire full capacity to defend itself. Which the South did, in repelling the ’72 invasion by a totally conventional multi-divisional force of the NVA (not Southerners in pajamas and tire-piece sandals carrying old weapons). But the cutback in US supplies to the South after ’72, while Russian aid to the North increased mightily, and the reneging on our promise to the South to come to their aid if any invasion were mounted again from the North, amounted to unavoidable doom for the South. And that is the only real shame that falls on this country.


Lorraine Paul - 3/17/2009

There was no 'Communist coup' in 1965. There was a coup in Indonesia but it was a military coup led by Suharto. With the implicit and complicit assistance of the United States. It is estimated that over one million people were assassinated and murdered, identified from lists supplied to the murderers by the CIA.

So a legitimate government is one recognised by other governments. I thought it had to be one that is elected by the people of that particular government.

You are blowing in the wind, sir!


Lorraine Paul - 3/15/2009

What rubbish did I write? Please give me an example.

Next Sunday I will stand witness for my cousin when he marries his Vietnamese bride.

Tell me, what did the US invasion of Vietnam achieve? Apart from the death toll you have mentioned.

The subtitle of this book is 'Vietnam Veterans confront...War Crimes'. Australians and New Zealanders fought in Vietnam too although there is yet to be a book with a similar title written about their experience. Why is that?


R.R. Hamilton - 3/13/2009

Lorraine Paul and these U.S.-based "professors" are still giddy about their fellow Marxist Kim Jong Il's recent stunning re-election in North Korea. By their lights, his 100.00% of the vote makes him -- like Ho Chi Minh in the Marxist-enslaved regions of Indo-China -- a "legitimate" government.


Dale R Streeter - 3/12/2009

Let me ask you, are you a troll or do you really believe the rubbish you write? If you think the deaths of over 50,000 Americans and several times that many Vietnamese is amusing, enjoy your laugh. I think I'll return to Earth now.


Lorraine Paul - 3/12/2009

Are you referring to the fact that Budhist priests were 'allowed' to express their 'modicum of political dissent' by setting themselves on fire?

As for elections, one would think that as you live in a country where only 50% of the population vote, whose 2000 elections positivly reeked of corruption right through to the Supreme Court and whose young men and women were sent off to kill and be killed by lies promoted by the highest in the land, you would keep very quiet about other country's perceived misdeeds!

Anyway, keep on fighting your war, but remember, your side lost! <g>


Dale R Streeter - 3/12/2009

Ms. Paul,
Elections in North Vietnam!! Yes, just like the free elections in the Soviet Union and Cuba; now who's being naive?
North Vietnam was a totalitarian dictatorship; South Vietnam may have been (and probably was) an oppressive regime but it was at least open, diverse, had a free press, and allowed a modicum of political dissent.


Lorraine Paul - 3/12/2009

Mr Streeter whether you want to acknowledge it or not, elections were held in North Vietnam. So, therefore, it puts the government of North Vietnam in the position of being the legitimate government.


Dale R Streeter - 3/12/2009

Robert,
Thanks for the clarification. I agree with you about the premiss of the book; it takes a overeager and unscrupulous army general and makes him a metaphor for the entire American effort.


Dale R Streeter - 3/11/2009

A legitimate government is one recognized by other governments. If you want to argue that South Vietnam was undemocratic and therefore not legitimate, where does that put North Vietnam? Don't be such a simpleton; politics are complicated and whether you approve of them or not, governments have the right of self-defense, as do other governments, like the U,S., have the right to promote their interests abroad by defending their allies. That the Kennedy administration, or more specifically Henry Cabot Lodge, abandoned the support of a moderate leader, Diem, and supported a military cabal is more a reflection of the confusion and lack of purpose of the American government than of anything to do with Vietnam.
I don't claim to have any knowledge of Australian politics, but perhaps the government's paranoia, as you call it, was fueled more by an abortive Communist coup in Indonesia in 1965 than the racism you suggest. Just a thought.


Robert Lee Gaston - 3/11/2009

Dale,

I think you have missed my point. That is probably my fault.

First, let’s talk about Project Phoenix. Phoenix was a counter insurgency program aimed at killing the political infrastructure of the South Vietnamese communist insurgents.

It worked. How do we know that it worked? We know this because the official North Vietnamese Army history of the war tells us that it worked. They report that when they finally took the south there was little left of the political organization that had been so effective in the South during the early to mid 1960s. What you have to understand is that the targets of Project Phoenix were legitimate under any definition. The American and French left, along with the Soviets, hated the Phoenix program simply because it worked. Phoenix answered the question of how do eliminate the VC tax collector without bombing the village.

My main thought however, was the book tells us that the U.S. military officially sanctioned war crimes through policy and doctrine. Such, I assure you, is not the case. I was there. I saw soldiers who committed crimes against Vietnamese civilians being prosecuted and sent to prison. The book is propaganda passed off as scholarship, and does not merit review.


Lorraine Paul - 3/11/2009

Mr Streeter,

Your knowledge of the genesis of the Vietnam War is sadly lacking. I suggest you hit the textbooks, or your memory, once again! There was not 'legitimate government' in South Vietnam, due to the fact the elections were part of the peace deal after the battle of Dien Bien Phu<sp>. They were never held in South Vietnam.

The US was not defending anything or anything in South Vietnam other than an illegitimate conglomeration of left-overs from French Colonialism.

China was never a major player in the Vietnam war. There was, however, some assistance given by the Soviet Union.

You might even look up Australia's part in promoting the United States into waging the Vietnam War, mainly due to our paranoia, mixed in with a little xenophobia, towards Communist China. At that time the White Australia Policy was in full force here.

I will not debate whether torture was used during this time but I cannot stand by and see you, either through lack of knowledge or, deliberately misrepresent the US reasons for entering Vietnam. There was not a noble purpose of 'defending democracy' anywhere within the calculations of the administration at that time.

We had to wait until recent times for that particular obfuscation of motives! LOL


Dale R Streeter - 3/11/2009

I would like to make two observations about how our perceptions of the Vietnam war were shaped. First, the war was a civil war in which we aided one side (the Republic of Viet Nam) and China and North Viet Nam aided the Communist insurgents, the Viet Cong. Civil wars are always nasty, any review of history will show that each side is prone to excesses (witness the Vendee, Quantrell's Raiders, the Reds and Whites in Russia, and so on). South Vietnam, however one views their political regime, was a legitimate government trying to survive, its army (ARVN) fought desperately to defeat the Viet Cong and later regular units of the North Vietnam Army (PAVN). One can abhor the atrocities inflicted by both sides (for every act of Operation Phoenix there was an equivalent act by the VC), but the war was primarily fought below the DMZ (the bombing of North Vietnam was designed to warn off NVM, to no avail).
My second observation is that virtually all reportage from VN was negative and defeatist. This clear to anyone who served in VN, as I did. In addition, I can only think of one or two films that showed the sacrifice and professionalism of the American military in Viet Nam (Here Come the Spartans, Green Berets, We Were Soldiers, all of which are derided in PC circles). Almost every other film, from the late 60s until today is negative, no worse than negative, scurrilous, in its treatment of American soldiers and Marines. Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Coming Home (a particularly vile film), Full Metal Jacket, and many others overlooked the fact that most (not all, admittedly) soldiers, sailors, and Marines felt the war was just and necessary. That the intelligensia in this country decided that the war in VN was corrupt and illegal led them to use any means to discredit it at home. Certainly the many families who lost sons and daughters were angry and bitter, the same reaction undoubtedly can be found during WWI, WWII, and Korea. This is the nature of war.
I'm not arguing the merits of the book's argument, although others have found its methodology suspect; the documents speak for themselves. But I am suggesting the war was much too complex to characterize American involvement solely on the basis of a handful of orders issued by a careerist general.


Robert Lee Gaston - 3/11/2009

I served in Vietnam for 30 months between 1965 and 1969. During different tours of duty I was assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the 5th Special Forces Group. During these assignments I spent in excess of 300 days of direct combat operations.

The geographical area of these assignments included the Central Highlands in the vicinity Pleiku (Play Cu), the IDrang Valley and Kontum, the DMZ area from HUE to Laos, and an area Northwest of Saigon, commonly known as the Iron Triangle, including the Michelin Plantation.

I saw some hard places during that time. I saw a lot of soldiers, U.S, North and South Vietnamese, and South Vietnamese civilians killed and injured. I also took part in some of the killing and wounding. I suppose I could qualify as one of the “experts”.

What I did not see were U.S. Soldiers deliberately harming unarmed civilians. There were a lot of urban legends, but they were generally passed on by people who hung around enlisted and NCO clubs and had no direct knowledge of anything. The military, especially bored and half drunk GIs can embellish a rumor in ways that would make the New York Times envious.

As to Rangers: There were no organized U.S. Ranger units in Vietnam above platoon level. These were individuals belonging to units designated as part of the 75th Infantry who were trained in conducting long range reconnaissance patrols. A major part of their mission was not to contact the enemy or Vietnamese civilians while on operations, but to observe North Vietnamese military activity and report that activity as intelligence. I doubt that a three or four man unit would risk coming into contact with a village.

There were however, South Vietnamese Ranger units. These were elite airborne infantry formations. They sometime had U.S. advisors. I doubt if there was any unreported violence against unarmed civilians while these advisors were present.

Larger Ranger units capable of direct action missions were organized in the late 1970s.

I think what we have here is a mixture of 1960s propaganda (U.S. and Vietnamese) and latrine rumors presented as legitimate history. This kind of thing being passed off as serious scholarship does not serve your profession well.


Michael D. Pearlman - 3/9/2009

Prof. Young and Mr. Vecchio have a hard row to hoe: pitting fact vs. hyperbolae. Prof. Kuzmarov seems to confuse the political decision to go to war ("the whole war was an atrocity?) with the conduct of the typical soldier and marine in the field.


Lewis Bernstein - 3/9/2009

You both miss the point--all these incidents or crimes or whatever you wish to call them were documented not by the Vietnamese but by the US Government.


Jeremy A. Kuzmarov - 3/8/2009

Dr. turner - who are the experts you are referring? There is already an abundance of scholarship on this topic, of which Nelson is only the latest. Chris Appy's book, Working Class War is perhaps most comprehensive. It is his conclusion that US military doctrine in Vietnam was a "doctrine of atrocity."

What both of you seem not to understand is that the whole war was an atrocity - fought against a well entrenched nationalist movement that had wide popular support. This made the commission of atrocities not the product of "bad apples" (although Calley did go to extremes, we can agree on that point) but inevitable.
the memorials in the countryside are for US crimes not those of the NLF which were far less, as any serious scholar of the conflict would know.
you also ignore in your statistics that 1/3 of US soldiers engaged in acts of resistance against the military including fragging, drug use, etc. they were conscious of the reality on the ground and many supported the antiwar movement when they came back from the war - an aspect of the history that has been suppressed by conservative spin-masters and those bent on denigrating the antiwar movement.


RJ Vecchio - 2/27/2009

As a Marine Combat Photographer I traveled the length and breadth of I Corps for all of 1968, and worked in the jungles and paddies with many of the 1st MarDiv grunt units. While I saw some instances of people with bad attitudes towards all Vietnamese, I never found the slightest instance of official or semiofficial or tacit acceptance of deliberately bad treatment of either civilians or captured enemy. In fact, what I saw and photographed were our Corpsmen routinely giving medical care to villagers, and Marines giving some of their own food and water to prisoners.
There is no doubt that atrocities were committed at times, but there is also no doubt that such events were exceptions, not policy, not routine behavior by US troops.
Nelson has chosen to give blanket credence to every report of any sort of bad behavior by our soldiers, assume every investigation was nothing but a cover-up, and thereby "confirm" the hypothesis that our military was filled with war criminals. This is not objective reporting, this is biased use of a body of information to support a preconceived conclusion.
Examination of the investigations by military lawyers of the claimants at the Winter Soldier Investigation (WSI)would have been part of real journalism, but that would never occur to Nelson; nor would she notice that after almost two years of a suit filed by one of those claimants against someone who even inferred that the claimant might not have committed the war crimes to which he confessed, the suit was dropped the day before actual testimony was to begin. Which was due to the fact that the pretrial depositions of the various testifiers at WSI all produced recantations or denials of their old statements, so that the outcome of an actual trial was guaranteed to be an affirmation of the presentation to which the self-proclaimed war criminal objected.
The reviewer has jumped with enthusiasm on the bandwagon that only "mythologists" claim the war was fought humanely (by our forces, that is, the atrocities of the communist forces are manifest, massive, and undeniable) or in a good cause. He betrays his own bias thereby. Those of us who were there, have studied the detailed history since then, and have returned to see for ourselves what "liberation" brought to South Viet Nam are perhaps a bit better qualified to opine on these matters.


Robert F. TURNER - 2/26/2009

I seriously began studying the Vietnam War in 1965 and wrote my 450-page undergrad honors thesis on the conflict over the next two years. Between 1968 and the final evacuation in April 1975 I served twice in Vietnam as an Army lieutenant and captain and visited the country regularly as a Senate staff member. In 1975 I published the first major English-language history of Vietnamese Communism while a fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. During the past two decades I've taught undergrad and graduate seminars on the war at the University of Virginia. I've also edited two major books on the war and written numerous monographs and articles. So these are not new issues to me.

Were there war crimes committed in Vietnam? Of course there were, just as there were in World War II, Korea, and the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. And in all of those cases, some of the war crimes (a minority) were committed by American forces.

My LaI not only happened -- it was WORSE than reported in the American press at the time. Had I been entrusted with deciding the fate of Lt. William Calley, he would have faced a firing squad. There were also lesser but still horrible war crimes at Son Thang and elsewhere.

But the idea that a significant percentage of America soldiers who fought in Vietnam knowingly or willingly committed war crimes is both false and unfair to the fine young men who served honorably and were treated shamefully because of lies being told in this country.

Senator John Kerry deserves a fair share of the blame. Kerry went to Vietnam to credential himself to run for president, stayed only a very short time, and upon returning with some very dubious hero medals he was dismayed to learn the voters of Massachusetts were not interested in electing a "war hero" from that unpopular war to Congress. So he joined up with an impostor named Al Hubbard (a former Air Force staff sergeant who had never set foot in Vietnam while in the military [or he would have been awarded the Vietnam Service Ribbon], but passed himself off as a combat wounded Air Force captain and pilot in Vietnam), and quickly became the spokesman for a relatively small group of disenchanted Vietnam vets.

Polls have consistently shown that more than 90% of Vietnam veterans were "glad they served" and 2/3ds said they would "go back again even if they knew how the war would end." (Harris Poll reported in Wash. Post, Apr. 11, 1985.) Fifteen years after the war ended a Time magazine poll reported that two-thirds of Vietnam veterans who expressed an opinion said they were "proud of the role the U.S. played in Vietnam." (Time, Apr. 30, 1990.)

Some of the "Vietnam veterans" who testified at the Winter Soldiers Investigation and traveled around college campuses testifying to committing and observing war crimes have been exposed as total impostors who, if they wore a uniform at all, served as clerks in south Carolina or mechanics in Germany rather than in Vietnam. One of the speakers at Kerry's "Winter Soldiers Investigation" in Detroit in 2001 was Steven Pitkin, who has since explained that he rode from Baltimore to Detroit with Kerry for the program because he had been told there would be lots of girls there, and when he told Kerry he had observed no U.S. war crimes in Vietnam was told if he wanted a ride back to Baltimore he had better make some up and testify.

Even John Kerry has admitted his 1971 claims American soldiers in Vietnam were behaving like "Genghis Khan" was false. Appearing on Meet the Press on May 6, 2001, Kerry acknowledged that our soldiers in Vietnam "served as nobly, on the whole, as in any war."

The reality is that the United States in Vietnam exceeded the requirements of international law to avoid war crimes. Indeed, the Saigon representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1966 praised the United States for having gone “far beyond the requirements of the Geneva Convention” by voluntarily extending the Geneva Convention to cover Viet Cong detainees (other than those apprehended in connection with acts of “terrorism”). The ICRC called the American regulation one of the important documents “in the history of the humanitarian law.”

But there were, indeed, war crimes. Hanoi went out of its way to provoke American forces to fire on innocent civilians -- sometimes entering villages and firing at American helicopters in the hope of provoking return fire that would kill innocents and alienate friends and relatives of the victims.

By refusing to comply with the obligations of Article 4 of the 1949 Geneva POW convention to carry arms openly and wear a uniform or identifiable insignia -- but instead dressing in the "black pajamas" of civilians -- the Viet Cong intentionally blurred the distinction between combatant and innocent civilian and made it far more likely that honest mistakes would be made by American forces.

I have little doubt that Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell's desire to make the 9th Division the most decorated unit in the war and to achieve the highest "body count" promoted war crimes. But he was the exception. It was a difficult war in which our forces often had no way of distinguishing enemy combatants from innocent civilians. Anyone who has viewed the scene in Saving Private Ryan where American soldiers fight among themselves over whether to shoot a captured German POW who may have killed one of their comrades moments earlier will understand that the horror of combat can provoke good people to do bad things. That's one of the many horrible things about war.

About 2.7 million Americans served in Vietnam during the war. If you randomly take a million American males -- mostly between the ages of 18 and 35 years old -- off the streets of our cities and towns, you are going to snag a few thieves, robbers, and rapists. Send them half-way around the world, tell them to ignore that commandment about "Thou Shall Not Kill," remove the social pressures of friends and relatives who might dissuade them from wrongdoing, and let them watch few friends be blown apart in front of them, and it is not surprising that some American troops in Vietnam did commit rape, murder, and other criminal acts during the war. Hundreds of them were prosecuted for such misconduct. But the average American soldier, airman, sailor, or marine in Vietnam served honorably and ably in a difficult conflict. And from my personal observations, Vietnam veterans were more outraged by the misconduct of William Calley than any other group of Americans.

There are some very serious scholars who have documented genuine war crimes at places like My Lai and Son Thang. Over the years I have included several of them in my Vietnam seminars, because we need to understand our mistakes and work hard to reduce the risk they will be repeated in the future. I have yet to find a real expert on this issue who takes Deborah Nelson's "scholarship" on this issue seriously. And it is important that American historians not be misled by this volume.

Prof. Robert F. Turner
University of Virginia