“Our mission was to make friends with the people living in the small towns. … but I would rather shoot them, because then we don’t have to worry about them later, and besides, I learned it takes a long time to make a friend, and I don’t want to spend much time out there in the field.” 

-Letter from Private Jimmy Glitch to his family

win hearts & minds Get a high body count

A South Vietnamese soldier uses the end of a dagger to beat a farmer for allegedly supplying government troops with inaccurate information about the movement of Viet Cong guerrillas. photo by Horst Faas, AP
Wounded and shocked civilian survivors of Dong Xoai crawl out of a fort bunker on June 6, 1965, where they survived murderous ground fighting and air bombardments of the previous two days. photo by Horst Faas, AP

“Tough shit, they grow up to be VC.”

– Officer’s response when a Marine reported that there were children in the shelters that were being blown up. 

“In 1965, I was a small child. The Americans were bombing, and many children were wounded and killed. When I was injured by a fragmentation bomb, an American helicopter took me to the hospital in Da Nang where they operated on my eye. The Americans shot the children. The children would be playing here on this side of the river, and American soldiers from over on the other side would shoot them. The Americans would cut off the hair of the older people. They shot people and then threw them in the river. This lady here, they pushed her to the ground and cut off her hair. Sometimes they shot people in the eyes. And they would laugh.” 

– Mr. Vo Van Vuong

The South Koreans were especially brutal. They raped the women and girls in our village. In 1965, my aunt was raped. They cut off her hands and legs, and threw her in the river. We were rounded up into areas controlled by American and South Vietnamese soldiers. The old ones didn’t want to go, and so the soldiers would tie ropes around their necks and drag them. My uncle was killed like that, being dragged by the neck. They burned all the houses. We were given very little food. There was no school. We were kept in the camps for ten years, until 1975.

– Mrs. Nguyen Thi Duc. Largely financed by the US, South Korea provided troops to support the US military presence in Vietnam. During the course of the war, 300,000 military personnel fought on the American side. Many of these troops were virulently anti-communist and were largely involved in efforts to “pacify” villages. The villagers claimed that the South Korean troops were especially brutal.

A woman mourns over the body of her husband after identifying him by his teeth and covering his head with her conical hat. photo by Horst Faas, AP

Killing with impunity

The troops on the ground were stuck between a policy that asked them to “win the hearts and minds” of a people who were already overwhelming hostile and a conflicting policy that ordered the troops to get a high body count, destroy villages and move people off their land. The commanders gave their troops vague orders, that left the frustrated soldiers with plenty of room for spontaneous, rage-driven improvisation, and that resulted in the futile, abhorrent assault on the people of Vietnam. 

Sources:
– Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late, TomDispatch.com
– Jonathan Schell, The Real War: Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War
– Martha Hess, And Then the Americans Came: Voices from Vietnam
– Michael Adas and Joseph Glitch, Everyman in Vietnam: A Soldier’s Journey into the Quagmire

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