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From: Christina Firpo <christina.firpo@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 6, 2006 7:29 AM
Subject: [Vsg] VN War Massacres from LA TImes
Dear List,
The LA Times published an article on the newly released files of investigations into war
crimes and massacres in Vietnam. It's very well written, thoughtful and extremely
disturbing.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vietnam6
aug06,0,6350517.story?track=tottext
Best,
Christina
From: Liam C Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Date: Aug 6, 2006 5:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] VN War Massacres from LA TImes
Dear Christina (and the List):
Thanks for forwarding this. I remember when the Toledo Blade story came out, in some
article that I read there was a quote from a Columbia University doctoral candiate who said
that he was researching this topic and that he had come across many documented instances of
war crimes and massacres. I had forgotten what his name was, but now I see that he is one of
the authors of this article.
I checked "digital dissertations and theses" to see if his dissertation was there. It is
listed, but there is not yet a pdf file for free download (some people chose to not make
them available, so maybe there won't be). It is probably available for order, however.
At 1025 pages (see description below), this guy apparently found plenty to write about!!
Liam Kelley
UH
"Kill anything that moves": United States war crimes and atrocities in Vietnam, 1965--1973
by Turse, Nicholas, Ph.D., Columbia University, 2005, 1025 pages; AAT 3174910
» More Like This - Find similar documents
Advisor: Fairchild, Amy
School: Columbia University
School Location: United States -- New York
Index terms(keywords): War crimes, Atrocities, Vietnam, Military history
Source: DAI-A 66/05, p. 1930, Nov 2005
Source type: DISSERTATION
Subjects: American history, History
Publication Number: AAT 3174910
ISBN: 0542132699
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?
did=921031021&sid=3&Fmt=2&clientId=23440&RQT=309&VName=PQD
ProQuest document ID: 921031021
Abstract (Document Summary)
This dissertation offers a history of U.S. war crimes and atrocities during the American War
in Vietnam from 1965-1973. During the conflict, U.S. military policy was, to use historian
Christian Appy's formulation, a "doctrine of atrocity" (DoA) in which the strategy of
attrition; the indiscriminant use of firepower; an over-riding command emphasis on killing
as the measure of success (the "body count"); the fact that the American military's stated
rules of engagement (ROE) were largely ignored, broken or circumvented; and standard
operating procedures that exhorted soldiers to "kill anything that moves"; dehumanized the
Vietnamese as "mere gooks"; and cast civilians as enemies; ensured that millions of
Vietnamese noncombatants were killed and wounded. Throughout the entirety of the conflict,
the U.S. military regularly flouted the laws of war. Yet, despite a contemporary literature
that shed light on American atrocities, most of the mainstream histories of the Vietnam War,
i
gnore, marginalize or deny the pervasiveness of U.S. atrocities and reduce discussions of
American war crimes to the U.S. massacre of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.
This dissertation uses formerly classified military criminal investigations documents, once
confidential Department of Defense analyses, veterans' testimonies, military court records
and secondary source materials from a now largely marginalized and out of print literature,
among other sources, to reveal the existence of the American doctrine of atrocity and the
pervasiveness of U.S. war crimes during the conflict. This dissertation also attempts to
properly contextualize the doctrine of atrocity by demonstrating that the DoA did not
originate during the Vietnam War, but instead was part of a long legacy of the U.S.
military's conduct during wars against racial Others over the prior 100 years. As such, this
dissertation is meant to contribute to a greater understanding of the American War in
Vietnam and ongoing discussions, across a variety of disciplines, of atrocities,
humanitarian law and American military policy, past, present and future.
From: Bruce Swander <bruceswander@hotmail.com>
Date: Aug 7, 2006 8:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] VN War Massacres from LA TImes
Liam ~ When I went to the link provided it asked for a P/W (which I don't
have)....nor could I locate the document at Proquest or UMI. If anyone
knows where and how to get a copy of it, it would be appreciated.
From: Tuan Hoang <thoang1@nd.edu>
Date: Aug 7, 2006 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Vsg] VN War Massacres from LA TImes
What a way to begin the week by reading about these atrocities!
Plenty could be said about this issue, obviously. But first, my thanks to Christina Firpo
and Liam Kelley for
passing on the links. It is clearly a hot topic for public consumption, as evidenced by the
fact that the LAT
article is the most emailed article at the moment.
Second, I hope that the article and dissertation will open the gate for deeper interests on
both popular and
academic levels. For instance, a related issue - equally disturbing, if not more - is the
policy of solacium
payments made by the US military to families of killed civilians as "accidents of war."
Virtually next to
nothing is known about this issue, including the fact that it was an new addition during
Vietnam to
previously existing policies. One of only two books that I've seen it mentioned - Philip
Beidler's Late
Thoughts on an Old War: The Legacy of Vietnam (2004) - Beidler recalled having witnessed
himself one such
payment, when the parents came to a military base to receive compensation for the death of
their child,
killed by falling concrete caused by American action, came to the base to receive
compensation. The amount,
Beidler believes, came to about US$35.
Another instance has to do with the infamous William Calley. According to James William
Gibson's The Perfect
War (1986, 2000), not long after My Lai, Calley applied to be a civic action officer, saying
to his
commander, "I'm tired of killing them, sir. I want that job." According to Gibson, Calley
"showed John
Wayne's film The Green Berets. He built wells. He vaccinated people. He introduced soap.
He started a
sewing class and got five prostitutes out of jail to work in the new company." Two
questions occurred to me
while reading that: How many people knew this about Calley? And how much of his desire to
work in civic
action was motivated by his guilty conscience? Surely, the latest information will prompt
more and larger
questions.
Lastly, there is the issue of total war. The political commentator George Will once
remarked that two
greatest features of the twentieth century are totalitarianism and total war. Moving into a
more academic
mode - Will himself used to teach political science before entering journalism, so are
predisposed to think
conceptually often - I think that the study of war crimes in Vietnam will be a significant
contribution to
our understanding of total war, of which the US, though relatively new among the modern
international
powerhouses, might have a deeper history than often assumed. One historian even goes as far
to argue that
the American Civil War contributed big-time to modern total war - see Charles Royster's The
Destructive War:
William Tecumseh, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (1993).
~Tuan
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