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August 6th, 2006 - Civilian
Killings Went Unpunished News
article by the Los Angeles Times |
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Civilian Killings Went
Unpunished - Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelso Los Angeles Times August 6, 2006 The men of B Company were in
a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day
before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their
sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's
central coast. They met no resistance as
they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry,
a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers
and lighted a cigarette. Just then, the voice of a
lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19
civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the
company commander's response: Kill anything that moves. Henry stepped outside the
hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began. Moments later, the 19
villagers lay dead or dying. Back home in California,
Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air
his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war
crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for
the massacre. Now, nearly 40 years later,
declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth - about the
Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company. The files are part of a
once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s,
that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more
extensive than was previously known. The documents detail 320
alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators - not
including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre. Though not a complete
accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection
to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn
statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass. The records describe
recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese - families in their homes, farmers
in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews
with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority
who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity. Abuses were not confined to
a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in
every Army division that operated in Vietnam. Retired Brig. Gen. John H.
Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported
keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in
light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq. "We can't change current
practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78. Among the substantiated
cases in the archive: - Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in
which at least 137 civilians died. - Seventy-eight other attacks on
noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually
assaulted. - One hundred forty-one instances in which
U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists,
sticks, bats, water or electric shock. Investigators determined
that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or
prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These
"founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for
action. Ultimately, 57 of them were
court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the records show. Fourteen received prison
sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant
reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence
interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts on a 13-year-old girl in
an interrogation hut in 1967. He served seven months of a
20-year term, the records show. Many substantiated cases
were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine or, in more than half the
cases, no action at all. There was little interest in
prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven Chucala, who in the early 1970s
was legal advisor to the commanding officer of the Army's Criminal
Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the attitude but understood
it. "Everyone wanted
Vietnam to go away," says Chucala, now a civilian attorney for the Army
at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia. In many cases, suspects had
left the service. The Army did not attempt to pursue them, despite a written
opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III, then the Army's general counsel,
that ex-soldiers could be prosecuted through courts-martial, military
commissions or tribunals. "I don't remember why
it didn't go anywhere," says Jordan, now a lawyer in Washington. Top Army brass should have
demanded a tougher response, says retired Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, who
oversaw the task force as a brigadier general at the Pentagon in the early
1970s. "We could have
court-martialed them but didn't," Gard says of soldiers accused of war
crimes. "The whole thing is terribly disturbing." Early-Warning System In March 1968, members of
the 23rd Infantry Division slaughtered about 500 Vietnamese civilians in the
hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre the following
year. By then, Gen. William C.
Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had
become Army chief of staff. A task force was assembled from members of his
staff to monitor war crimes allegations and serve as an early-warning system. Over the next few years,
members of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group reviewed Army investigations
and wrote reports and summaries for military brass and the White House. The records were
declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by law, and moved to the
National Archives in College Park, Md., where they went largely unnoticed. The Times examined most of
the files and obtained copies of about 3,000 pages - about a third of the
total - before government officials removed them from the public shelves,
saying they contained personal information that was exempt from the Freedom
of Information Act. In addition to the 320
substantiated incidents, the records contain material related to more than
500 alleged atrocities that Army investigators could not prove or that they
discounted. Johns says many war crimes
did not make it into the archive. Some were prosecuted without being
identified as war crimes, as required by military regulations. Others were
never reported. In a letter to Westmoreland
in 1970, an anonymous sergeant described widespread, unreported killings of
civilians by members of the 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta - and
blamed pressure from superiors to generate high body counts. "A batalion [sic] would
kill maybe 15 to 20 [civilians] a day. With 4 batalions in the brigade that
would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy," the
unnamed sergeant wrote. "If I am only 10% right, and believe me it's
lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay
[sic] each month for over a year." A high-level Army review of
the letter cited its "forcefulness," "sincerity" and
"inescapable logic," and urged then-Secretary of the Army Stanley
R. Resor to make sure the push for verifiable body counts did not "encourage
the human tendency to inflate the count by violating established rules of
engagement." Investigators tried to find
the letter writer and "prevent his complaints from reaching"
then-Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), according to an August 1971 memo to
Westmoreland. The records do not say
whether the writer was located, and there is no evidence in the files that
his complaint was investigated further. Pvt. Henry James D. "Jamie"
Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the Army shaved his hippie locks and packed
him off to boot camp. He had been living with his
mother in Sonoma County, working as a hospital aide and moonlighting as a
flower child in Haight-Ashbury, when he received a letter from his draft
board. As thousands of hippies poured into San Francisco for the upcoming
"Summer of Love," Henry headed for Ft. Polk, La. Soon he was on his way to
Vietnam, part of a 100,000-man influx that brought U.S. troop strength to
485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a conflict growing ever bloodier for
Americans - 9,378 U.S. troops would die in combat in 1967, 87% more than the
year before. Henry was a medic with B
Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. He
described his experiences in a sworn statement to Army investigators several
years later and in recent interviews with The Times. In the fall of 1967, he was
on his first patrol, marching along the edge of a rice paddy in Quang Nam
province, when the soldiers encountered a teenage girl. "The guy in the lead
immediately stops her and puts his hand down her pants," Henry said.
"I just thought, 'My God, what's going on?' " A day or two later, he saw
soldiers senselessly stabbing a pig. "I talked to them about
it, and they told me if I wanted to live very long, I should shut my
mouth," he told Army investigators. Henry may have kept his
mouth shut, but he kept his eyes and ears open. On Oct. 8, 1967, after a
firefight near Chu Lai, members of his company spotted a 12-year-old boy out
in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only in shorts. "Somebody caught him up
on a hill, and they brought him down and the lieutenant asked who wanted to
kill him," Henry told investigators. Two volunteers stepped
forward. One kicked the boy in the stomach. The other took him behind a rock
and shot him, according to Henry's statement. They tossed his body in a river
and reported him as an enemy combatant killed in action. Three days later, B Company
detained and beat an elderly man suspected of supporting the enemy. He had
trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched him up a steep hill. "When I turned around,
two men had him, one guy had his arms, one guy had his legs and they threw
him off the hill onto a bunch of rocks," Henry's statement said. On Oct. 15, some of the men
took a break during a large-scale "search-and-destroy" operation.
Henry said he overheard a lieutenant on the radio requesting permission to
test-fire his weapon, and went to see what was happening. He found two soldiers using
a Vietnamese man for target practice, Henry said. They had discovered the
victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill him for sport. "Everybody was taking
pot shots at him, seeing how accurate they were," Henry said in his
statement. Back at base camp on Oct.
23, he said, members of the 1st Platoon told him they had ambushed five
unarmed women and reported them as enemies killed in action. Later, members
of another platoon told him they had seen the bodies. Tet Offensive Capt. Donald C. Reh, a 1964
graduate of West Point, took command of B Company in November 1967. Two
months later, enemy forces launched a major offensive during Tet, the
Vietnamese lunar New Year. In the midst of the
fighting, on Feb. 7, the commander of the 1st Battalion, Lt. Col. William W.
Taylor Jr., ordered an assault on snipers hidden in a line of trees in a
rural area of Quang Nam province. Five U.S. soldiers were killed. The troops
complained bitterly about the order and the deaths, Henry said. The next morning, the men
packed up their gear and continued their sweep of the countryside. Soldiers
discovered an unarmed man hiding in a hole and suspected that he had
supported the enemy the previous day. A soldier pushed the man in front of an
armored personnel carrier, Henry said in his statement. "They drove over him
forward which didn't kill him because he was squirming around, so the APC
backed over him again," Henry's statement said. Then B Company entered a
hamlet to question residents and search for weapons. That's where Henry set
down his weapon and lighted a cigarette in the shelter of a hut. A radio operator sat down
next to him, and Henry was listening to the chatter. He heard the leader of
the 3rd Platoon ask Reh for instructions on what to do with 19 civilians. "The lieutenant asked
the captain what should be done with them. The captain asked the lieutenant
if he remembered the op order (operation order) that came down that morning
and he repeated the order which was 'kill anything that moves,' " Henry
said in his statement. "I was a little shook … because I thought the
lieutenant might do it." Henry said he left the hut
and walked toward Reh. He saw the captain pick up the phone again, and
thought he might rescind the order. Then soldiers pulled a naked
woman of about 19 from a dwelling and brought her to where the other
civilians were huddled, Henry said. "She was thrown to the
ground," he said in his statement. "The men around the civilians
opened fire and all on automatic or at least it seemed all on automatic. It
was over in a few seconds. There was a lot of blood and flesh and stuff
flying around…. "I looked around at
some of my friends and they all just had blank looks on their faces…. The
captain made an announcement to all the company, I forget exactly what it
was, but it didn't concern the people who had just been killed. We picked up
our stuff and moved on." Henry didn't forget,
however. "Thirty seconds after the shooting stopped," he said,
"I knew that I was going to do something about it." Homecoming For his combat service,
Henry earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor, and a Combat Medical Badge,
among other awards. A fellow member of his unit said in a sworn statement
that Henry regularly disregarded his own safety to save soldiers' lives, and
showed "compassion and decency" toward enemy prisoners. When Henry finished his tour
and arrived at Ft. Hood, Texas, in September 1968, he went to see an Army
legal officer to report the atrocities he'd witnessed. The officer advised him to
keep quiet until he got out of the Army, "because of the million and one
charges you can be brought up on for blinking your eye," Henry says.
Still, the legal officer sent him to see a Criminal Investigation Division
agent. The agent was not receptive,
Henry recalls. "He wanted to know what
I was trying to pull, what I was trying to put over on people, and so I was
just quiet. I told him I wouldn't tell him anything and I wouldn't say
anything until I got out of the Army, and I left," Henry says. Honorably discharged in March
1969, Henry moved to Canoga Park, enrolled in community college and helped
organize a campus chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Then he ended his silence:
He published his account of the massacre in the debut issue of Scanlan's
Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine, which hit the newsstands on Feb.
27, 1970. Henry held a news conference the same day at the Los Angeles Press
Club. Records show that an Army
operative attended incognito, took notes and reported back to the Pentagon. A faded copy of Henry's
brief statement, retrieved from the Army's files, begins: "On February 8, 1968,
nineteen (19) women and children were murdered in Viet-Nam by members of 3rd
Platoon, 'B' Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry…. "Incidents similar to
those I have described occur on a daily basis and differ one from the other
only in terms of numbers killed," he told reporters. A brief article
about his remarks appeared inside the Los Angeles Times the next day. Army investigators
interviewed Henry the day after the news conference. His sworn statement
filled 10 single-spaced typed pages. Henry did not expect anything to come of
it: "I never got the impression they were ever doing anything." In 1971, Henry joined more
than 100 other veterans at the Winter Soldier Investigation, a forum on war
crimes sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The FBI put the three-day
gathering at a Detroit hotel under surveillance, records show, and Nixon
administration officials worked behind the scenes to discredit the speakers
as impostors and fabricators. Although the administration
never publicly identified any fakers, one of the organization's leaders
admitted exaggerating his rank and role during the war, and a cloud descended
on the entire gathering. "We tried to get as
much publicity as we could, and it just never went anywhere," Henry
says. "Nothing ever happened." After years of dwelling on
the war, he says, he "finally put it in a closet and shut the
door." The Investigation Unknown to Henry, Army
investigators pursued his allegations, tracking down members of his old unit
over the next 3 1/2 years. Witnesses described the
killing of the young boy, the old man tossed over the cliff, the man used for
target practice, the five unarmed women, the man thrown beneath the armored
personnel carrier and other atrocities. Their statements also
provided vivid corroboration of the Feb. 8, 1968, massacre from men who had
observed the day's events from various vantage points. Staff Sgt. Wilson Bullock
told an investigator at Ft. Carson, Colo., that his platoon had captured 19
"women, children, babies and two or three very old men" during the
Tet offensive. "All of these people
were lined up and killed," he said in a sworn statement. "When it,
the shooting, stopped, I began to return to the site when I observed a naked
Vietnamese female run from the house to the huddle of people, saw that her
baby had been shot. She picked the baby up and was then shot and the baby
shot again." Gregory Newman, another
veteran of B Company, told an investigator at Ft. Myer, Va., that Capt. Reh
had issued an order "to search and destroy and kill anything in the
village that moved." Newman said he was carrying
out orders to kill the villagers' livestock when he saw a naked girl head
toward a group of civilians. "I saw them begging
before they were shot," he recalled in a sworn statement. Donald R. Richardson said he
was at a command post outside the hamlet when he heard a platoon leader on
the radio ask what to do with 19 civilians. "The cpt said something
about kill anything that moves and the lt on the other end said 'Their [sic]
moving,' " according to Richardson's sworn account. "Just then the
gunfire was heard." William J. Nieset, a rifle
squad leader, told investigators that he was standing next to a radio
operator and heard Reh say: "My instructions from higher are to kill
everything that moves." Robert D. Miller said he was
the radio operator for Lt. Johnny Mack Carter, commander of the 3rd Platoon.
Miller said that when Carter asked Reh what to do with the 19 civilians, the
captain instructed him to follow the "operation order." Carter immediately sought
two volunteers to shoot the civilians, Miller said under oath. "I believe everyone
knew what was going to happen," he said, "so no one volunteered
except one guy known only to me as 'Crazy.' " "A few minutes later,
while the Vietnamese were huddled around in a circle Lt Carter and 'Crazy'
started shooting them with their M-16's on automatic," Miller's
statement says. Carter had just left active
duty when an investigator questioned him under oath in Palmetto, Fla., in
March 1970. "I do not recall any
civilians being picked up and categorically stated that I did not order the
killing of any civilians, nor do I know of any being killed," his
statement said. An Army investigator called
Reh at Ft. Myer. Reh's attorney called back. The investigator made notes of
their conversation: "If the interview of Reh concerns atrocities in
Vietnam … then he had already advised Reh not to make any statement." As for Lt. Col. Taylor, two
soldiers described his actions that day. Myran Ambeau, a rifleman,
said he was standing five feet from the captain and heard him contact the
battalion commander, who was in a helicopter overhead. (Ambeau did not
identify Reh or Taylor by name.) "The battalion
commander told the captain, 'If they move, shoot them,'" according to a
sworn statement that Ambeau gave an investigator in Little Rock, Ark.
"The captain verified that he had heard the command, he then transmitted
the instruction to Lt Carter. "Approximately three
minutes later, there was automatic weapons fire from the direction where the
prisoners were being held." Gary A. Bennett, one of
Reh's radio operators, offered a somewhat different account. He said the
captain asked what he should do with the detainees, and the battalion
commander replied that it was a "search and destroy mission,"
according to an investigator's summary of an interview with Bennett. Bennett said he did not
believe the order authorized killing civilians and that, although he heard
shooting, he knew nothing about a massacre, the summary says. Bennett refused
to provide a sworn statement. An Army investigator sat
down with Taylor at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. Taylor said he had
never issued an order to kill civilians and had heard nothing about a
massacre on the date in question. But the investigator had asked Taylor about
events occurring on Feb. 9, 1968 - a day after the incident. Three and a half years
later, an agent tracked Taylor down at Ft. Myer and asked him about Feb. 8.
Taylor said he had no memory of the day and did not have time to provide a
sworn statement. He said he had a "pressing engagement" with
"an unidentified general officer," the agent wrote. Investigators wrote they
could not find Pvt. Frank Bonilla, the man known as "Crazy." The
Times reached him at his home on Oahu in March. Bonilla, now 58 and a hotel
worker, says he recalls an order to kill the civilians, but says he does not
remember who issued it. "Somebody had a radio, handed it to someone,
maybe a lieutenant, said the man don't want to see nobody standing," he
said. Bonilla says he answered a
call for volunteers but never pulled the trigger. "I couldn't do it.
There were women and kids," he says. "A lot of guys thought that I
had something to do with it because they saw me going up there…. Nope … I
just turned the other way. It was like, 'This ain't happening.' " Afterward, he says, "I
remember sitting down with my head between my knees. Is that for real?
Someone said, 'Keep your mouth shut or you're not going home.' " He says he does not know who
did the shooting. The Outcome The Criminal Investigation
Division assigned Warrant Officer Jonathan P. Coulson in Los Angeles to
complete the investigation and write a final report on the "Henry
Allegation." He sent his findings to headquarters in Washington in
January 1974. Evidence showed that the
massacre did occur, the report said. The investigation also confirmed all but
one of the other killings that Henry had described. The one exception was the
elderly man thrown off a cliff. Coulson said it could not be determined
whether the victim was alive when soldiers tossed him. The evidence supported
murder charges in five incidents against nine "subjects," including
Carter and Bonilla, Coulson wrote. Those two carried out the Feb. 8 massacre,
along with "other unidentified members of their element," the
report said. Investigators determined
that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of
conflicting accounts "as to the actual language" he used. But Reh could be charged
with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report
said. Coulson conferred with an
Army legal advisor, Capt. Robert S. Briney, about whether the evidence
supported charges against Taylor. They decided it did not.
Even if Taylor gave an order to kill the Vietnamese if they moved, the two
concluded, "it does not constitute an order to kill the prisoners in the
manner in which they were executed." The War Crimes Working Group
records give no indication that action was taken against any of the men named
in the report. Briney, now an attorney in
Phoenix, says he has forgotten details of the case but recalls a reluctance
within the Army to pursue such charges. "They thought the war,
if not over, was pretty much over. Why bring this stuff up again?" he
says. Years Later Taylor retired in 1977 with
the rank of colonel. In a recent interview outside his home in northern
Virginia, he said, "I would not have given an order to kill civilians.
It's not in my makeup. I've been in enough wars to know that it's not the
right thing to do." Reh, who left active duty in
1978 and now lives in Northern California, declined to be interviewed by The
Times. Carter, a retired postal
worker living in Florida, says he has no memory of his combat experiences.
"I guess I've wiped Vietnam and all that out of my mind. I don't
remember shooting anyone or ordering anyone to shoot," he says. He says he does not dispute
that a massacre took place. "I don't doubt it, but I don't remember….
Sometimes people just snap." Henry was re-interviewed by
an Army investigator in 1972, and was never contacted again. He drifted away
from the antiwar movement, moved north and became a logger in California's
Sierra Nevada foothills. He says he had no idea he had been vindicated -
until The Times contacted him in 2005. Last fall, he read the case
file over a pot of coffee at his dining room table in a comfortably worn
house, where he lives with his wife, Patty. "I was a wreck for a
couple days," Henry, now 59, wrote later in an e-mail. "It was like
a time warp that put me right back in the middle of that mess. Some things
long forgotten came back to life. Some of them were good and some were not. "Now that whole
stinking war is back. After you left, I just sat in my chair and shook for a
couple hours. A slight emotional stress fracture?? Don't know, but it soon
passed and I decided to just keep going with this business. If it was right
then, then it still is." Times researcher Janet
Lundblad contributed to this report. About this report Nick Turse is a freelance
journalist living in New Jersey. Deborah Nelson is a staff writer in The
Times' Washington bureau. This report is based in part
on records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group filed at the National
Archives in College Park, Md. The collection includes 241 case summaries that
chronicle more than 300 substantiated atrocities by U.S. forces and 500 unconfirmed
allegations. The archive includes reports
of war crimes by the 101st Airborne Division's Tiger Force that the Army
listed as unconfirmed. The Toledo Blade documented the atrocities in a 2003
newspaper series. Turse came across the
collection in 2002 while researching his doctoral dissertation for the Center
for the History and Ethics of Public Health at Columbia University. Turse and Nelson also
reviewed Army inspector general records in the National Archives; FBI and
Army Criminal Investigation Division records; documents shared by military
veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive
at the University of Michigan. External link:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vietnam6aug06,0,6350517.story |