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For villagers in a war zone,
Difficult choices
“If a gunner [in a helicopter] saw anyone, even a woman or a small child or a water buffalo, he blew them apart. Once there was a woman in a Cai Lay district. They shot her arm off so it dangled. Her husband had to cut off the rest. She had children. They might as well have killed her.”
– Mr. Huynh Phuc Tinh
American pilots explain how they distinguish enemy from civilian
“If we ran across unarmed people who appeared to be civilians, I was to fire as near to them as possible. If they ran, I had permission to kill them.”
– Door gunner on a helicopter gunship operating outside of Saigon.
“Well he walked real proud, with a kind of bounce in his gait, like a soldier, instead of just shuffling along, like the farmers do.”
– a fighter-bomber pilot explaining why he called in an airstrike on a patch of woods that a Vietnamese had just entered.
Sources:
– Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam
– Nick Turse, Ken Burns Documentary Glosses Over Devastating Civilian Toll, theintercept.com
– Jonathan Schell, The Real War: Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War
“Just imagine that you’re actually crouched in your basement, that your home above is ablaze, that lethal helicopters are hovering overhead, and that heavily-armed teenagers — foreigners who don’t speak your language — are out there in your yard, screaming commands you don’t understand, rolling grenades into your neighbor’s cellar, and if you run out through the flames, into the chaos, one of them might just shoot you.”
Living under constant threat
“I spoke with hundreds of Vietnamese from these [war torn] rural areas. In hamlet after hamlet, they told me about being rousted from their homes and then being forced to drift back to the ruins, for deeply-held cultural and religious reasons, and often simply to survive. They explained what it was like to live, for years on end, under the threat of bombs and artillery shells and helicopter gunships.”
Forced to live in bunkers
“They talked about homes burned again and again and again, before they gave up rebuilding and began living a semi-subterranean existence in rough-hewn bomb shelters gouged into the earth. They told me about scrambling inside these bunkers when artillery fire began. And then they told me about the waiting game.”
“I guess you can call it a kind of intuition. I think I can just smell a VC from 5,000 feet. Like everything else, some people have the knack and some people don’t.”
– a FAC pilot on his ability to identify the enemy
“In a zone designated as a ‘free-fire zone’—everyone, men, women, children could be considered [a fair target]; you could not be held responsible for firing on innocent civilians since by definition there were none there.”
-U.S. infantryman
WHEN TO STAY, WHEN TO LEAVE THE BUNKER?
“Just how long did you stay in your bunker? Long enough to avoid the shelling, of course, but not so long that you were still inside it when the Americans and their grenades arrived. If you left the shelter’s confines too soon, machine-gun fire from a helicopter might cut you in half. Or you might get caught in crossfire between withdrawing guerrillas and onrushing U.S. troops. But if you waited too long, the Americans might begin rolling grenades into your bomb shelter because, to them, it was a possible enemy fighting position.”
Every second mattered
“They told me about waiting, crouched in the dark, trying to guess the possible reactions of the heavily-armed, often angry and scared, young Americans who had arrived on their doorsteps. Every second mattered immensely. It wasn’t just your life on the line; your whole family might be wiped out. And these calculations went on for years, shaping every decision to leave the confines of that shelter, day or night, to relieve oneself or fetch water or try to gather vegetables for a hungry family. Everyday existence became an endless series of life-or-death risk assessments.”
– from Nick Turse interviews of survivors