Date: 2025-08-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021716
US WARS
VIETNAM WAR
We Lost Our Humanity in Vietnam
VIETNAM WAR
We Lost Our Humanity in Vietnam
Photo credit: Wiki Commons.
Original article: http://hnn.us/article/153571
Burgess COMMENTARY
I was born in 1940. We lived in Surbiton, in the ourskirts of London. I was too young to understand what was happening, but I developed a simple way of scoring what was happening. All the houses in the neighborhood had all their glass windows blown out ... so that was the norm. Some of the houses had holes in the roofs and the roofs covered with tarpaulins to keep the rain out. This was medium bad. Some of the houses had not only had the roof blown off, but some walls knocked down as well. These were the bad cases.
I knew where the damage came from. It was either bombs from aircraft or it was from the V1 pilotless vehicle and towards the end of the war, from V2 rockets.
I never knew ... I never figured out ... that all this damage to houses also killed and injured people. Something that my parents understood all too well.
My father had been too young to fight in WWI and was deemd too old to fight in WWII, and his work had something of a priority in these war years. He was a schoolmaster and besides his work in the classroom, he also coached cricket and rugby for the older boys. My father had a quite impressive rugby record himself including playing for the Barbarians rugby team. During the war, the school leavers went straight into the miliary services ... and my father got news of his former pupils deaths and injuries every week throughout the war.
By the time I was 6 years old I was pretty clear that Germany and the Germans were evil ... and I glad to say that I was taught at school to differentiate between the Nazi Germans and Germans generally.
Years later ... in the late 1970s, I was working on a project in Nigeria and became friendly with a family from Germany that was working in the same part of the country. The husband was about 15 years older than me, so was a teenager in the late 1930s. He had been a member of the Hitler Youth when he was growing up. Why not? As a teenager he was being given the opportunity to do all sorts of exciting things, like being trained to actually fly gliders. When the war broke out, he was immediately recruited into the Luftwaffe to fly fighter aircraft and bombers for his country.
In my view leaders have huge responsibilities and should be held accountable ... but followers should be given the opportunity to get onto a better path.
I think leaders like Mandella in South Africa understand this and did all he could to implement a productive change in South Africa from apartheit to a more equitable society. The use of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a great initiative to implement this idea. It was not 100% successful, but it was a lot more successful than a policy of total retribution would have been.
Similarly the post war reconstruction of Europe after WWII was vastly different from post WWI when the winners did everything they could to humiliate Germany and strip it of all wealth and dignity. Keynes resigned from the team negotiating the Treaty of Versailles after WWI because of his disagreement with this policy and its potential for something bad in the future. He was right. It enabled the rise of fascism, Hitler and the Nazi organization that led to WWII. The allies did not make the same mistake after WWII and helped with a constructive program of rebuilding, including the US funded Marshall Plan.
After WWII the US had a lot of money compared to the rest of the world including the UK. While the US produced a huge amount of war material for use by its alles the UK and The Societ Union, these were not free gifts. The UK got deliveries of all sorts of war materials for its use and paid for them through a Lend-Lease program that had to be paid off in dues course ... with interest of course! The repayment of this lend-lease program by the UK to the USA crippled the UK and made its recovery after WWII the weakest in Europe. Food and clothing were still rationed in the UK when I went away to boarding school at 13 in 1953, 8 years after the war. The UK was still paying off the lend-lease debt and would continue to do so for several more years. The final payments were completed in
Nasser declared on 26 July 1956 that Egypt was nationalizing the canal. with the moral support of the Soviet Union. In July 1956, President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. In response, Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt and destroyed large portions of Port Said.
Peter Burgess
by William J. Astore. William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), now teaches at the Pennsylvania College of Technology.
Cross-posted from Contrary Perspective.
Written October 14th, 2013 (Accessed February 2022)
Nick Turse has a fine op-ed in the New York Times, “For America, Life Was Cheap in Vietnam.” In it he argues that for Americans involved in the Vietnam War, life was very cheap indeed -- Vietnamese lives, that is. Turse has written a powerful book, “Kill Anything that Moves,” that documents the total war the United States waged on the Vietnamese people and countryside. As Turse notes in his op-ed, American leaders like General William Westmoreland demonstrated “a profligate disregard for human life,” mainly because their strategy “was to kill as many ‘enemies’ as possible, with success measured by body count. Often, those bodies were not enemy soldiers,” Turse concludes.
As the U.S. embraced a bloody war of attrition, Turse observes that “the United States declared wide swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside to be free-fire zones where even innocent civilians could be treated as enemy forces. Artillery shelling, intended to keep the enemy in a state of constant unease, and near unrestrained bombing slaughtered noncombatants and drove hundreds of thousands of civilians into slums and refugee camps.”
I recently came across two accounts that lend further support to Turse’s conclusion. The first is an article written by Bernard Fall, “This Isn’t Munich, It’s Spain,” published in Ramparts in December 1965. (My thanks to Dan White for bringing this article to my attention.) Bernard Fall was an expert on Vietnam; among other classic books, he wrote “Hell In A Very Small Place” (about the siege of Dien Bien Phu) and “Street Without Joy.” He was killed by a mine in Vietnam in 1967.
Writing in 1965, in the early stages of large-scale American deployment of troops, Fall noted that the war had already become “depersonalized and, to a large extent, dehumanized.” “It is a brutal war,” Fall continued, “and already, in what may loosely be termed the ‘American period’ [of Indochinese conflict], the dead are near a quarter million, with perhaps another half million people seriously maimed.”
“A truly staggering amount of civilians are getting killed or maimed in this war,” Fall concluded, illustrating his point by recounting an air raid he had accompanied that destroyed a Vietnamese fishing village.
By later standards (massive bombing by B-52s in Arc Light attacks), the air raid Fall witnessed, consisting of A-1 Skyraiders carrying napalm and fragmentation bombs, was small. But don’t tell that to the Vietnamese fishing village that was utterly destroyed in this “small” raid. As Fall recounts, the village may or may not have been harboring a Viet Cong unit. If it had been harboring a VC unit, it may have done so unwillingly, and that VC unit may have already moved along by the time the Skyraiders appeared overhead. No matter. The village and villagers were burnt, blown apart, and strafed. A U.S. official report recorded that a VC rest center “had been successfully destroyed.”
Such indiscriminate attacks convinced Fall that the U.S. was not “able to see the Vietnamese as people against whom crimes can be committed. This is the ultimate impersonalization of war.”
But even more worryingly for Fall was that “The incredible thing about Vietnam is that the worst is yet to come,” a tragically prescient statement.
And the worst might be represented by U.S. Army Lieutenant General Julian Ewell. As the commanding general of the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam, Ewell became known as the “Butcher of the Delta.” Douglas Kinnard, an American general serving in Vietnam under Ewell, recounted his impressions of him (in “Adventures in Two Worlds: Vietnam General and Vermont Professor”):
Ewell, recalled Kinnard, “constantly pressed his units to increase their ‘body count’ of enemy soldiers. This had become a way of measuring the success of a unit since Vietnam was a war of attrition, not a linear war with an advancing front line. In the 9th [infantry division] he had required all his commanders to carry 3” x 5” cards with body count tallies for their units by date, by week, and by month. Woe unto any commander who did not have a consistently high count.”
In a war in which commanding generals rewarded American troops for generating high enemy body count and punished those “slackers” who didn’t kill enough of the enemy, small wonder that Vietnam became an American killing field and a breeding ground for atrocity.
Bernard Fall ended his powerful article on an ambiguous note. After having talked to a lot of Americans in Vietnam, he noted he hadn’t “found anyone who seems to have a clear idea of the end -- of the ‘war aims’ -- and if the end is not clearly defined, are we justified to use any means to attain it?”
In Vietnam, the U.S. used immoderate means, often with wanton disregard for the lives or livelihood of the Vietnamese people, in pursuit of ill-defined ends. Echoing Fall’s words, we pursued open-ended devastation for no clear purpose with little regard to moral responsibility.
We lost more than a war in Vietnam. We lost our humanity.