In response to Macallan's illuminating post on the passing of Hugh Thompson (the whistleblower who helped expose Lt. James Calley and the My Lai massacre), I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese, citing as an example the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese at Hue during the Tet offensive. The American people have heard plenty of our war crimes but little of the war crimes committed against the Americans and the inhabitants of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese communists and their southern fellow travelers. A commenter disputed my claim on the number of civilian casualties so, using the free Internet sources I could muster, I investigated.
James Wilbanks has a thorough take on the battle for Hue, which began 30 January 1968 and lasted 26 days. The centuries-old, three-mile-square Citadel in the center of town proved formidable and, from this, Americans tasted their first real bit of urban guerilla warfare in Vietnam. According to Wilbanks, 116,000 were homeless (out of 140,000) and 40% of the buildings in town were destroyed in the process of retaking Hue. Jack Shulimson also wrote in detail of the struggle for Hue. Wikipedia has a pretty good and evenhanded piece on the massacre, putting the civilian death toll closer to 3,000. Because of the passage of time and the fog of war, we'll never know the actual number. Also interesting was the sometimes heated wikipedia discussions here and here. Accuracy in Media provides a timeline on how the Hue massacre was reported here.
After Hue was retaken, one of the first reporters on the scene was Stewart Harris, and his visit was summarized by Accuracy in Media thus:
Stewart Harris for The Times of London wrote the first story with any detail on the massacre. The New York Times printed it on page 4 on March 28, 1968. Harris had actually taken the trouble to look at some of the graves and see the mutilated bodies. He reported for the first time that some of the victims were said to have been buried alive. However, Harris used a very conservative figure for the number executed-only 200.
In his 1983 book Vietnam: A History, Stanley Karnow writes the following on pages 530-531:
The Communists executed hundreds of civilians during their Tet offensive, but the slaughter was particularly marked in and around Hue, where estimates of those put to death range from 200 to 400[.] British Journalist Stewart Harris, who opposes U.S. policy in Vietnam and declares that "my instinct is not to sustain it by writing propaganda," recently visited Hue and vicinity to investigate the executions. Last week he reported his findings in the Times of London:
The North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong executed many Vietnamese, some Americans and a few other foreigners during the fighting in and around Hue. I am sure of this after spending several days in Hue investigating allegations of killings and torture. I saw and photographed a lot for myself, but inevitably I relied on many civilians and soldiers, Vietnamese, Americans, Australians and others. All seemed honest witnesses, telling the truth as they believed it.
On a lovely sunny afternoon in the green valley of Nam Hoa, about ten miles southwest of Hue, I was with Warrant Officer Ostara, an Australian adviser with the South Vietnam army standing on the sloping sides of a recently dug hole. In the bottom were rush mats over sheets of plastics. Ostara drew them back and I saw two bodies, dead Vietnamese, with their arms tied behind their backs just above the elbows. They had been shot through the back of the head, the bullet coming out through the mouth. The faces would have been difficult to recognize, but the day before 27 women from the village walked out three miles carrying mattocks to dig for their missing husbands and sons, having heard about this patch of disturbed earth near the roadside. Ostara told me that the enemy had come through on their way to Hue. They had taken 27 men. Some were leaders and some were younger strong enough to be porters or even ancillary soldiers.
"Men were simply condemned by drumhead courts and executed as enemies of the people," said Bob Kelly, the senior province adviser in Thua Thien province. "These were the leaders, often quite small men. Others were executed when their usefulness ceased, or when they didn't Cooperate they were shot for their trouble. Some of my staff were badly mutilated, but I am inclined to believe this was done after they were killed. Their hands were tied and they were shot behind the head I helped to dig one body out, but I have been told by Vietnamese whom I respect that some people were buried alive."
Lieut. Gregory Sharp. an American adviser with the Vietnam 21st Ranger Battalion, told me that his men had come across about 25 new graves in a cemetery five miles east of Hue on March 14. From half a dozen of the graves the heads were sticking up out of the sandy soil and, according to Sharp, "there wasn't much left of them-buzzards and dogs, I suppose. Some had been shot in the head and some hadn't. They had been buried alive. I think. There were sort of scratches in the sand in one place, as if someone had clawed his way out." At Quan Ta Ngan three Australian warrant officers saw seven men in one of three graves they found. The seven. I was told, had been shot one after the other, through the back of the head, hands tied.
Soon after arriving in Hue' I went in a Jeep with three Viet Nam officers to inspect sites where the bodies of executed men were said to have been found. We went first to Gia Hoi high school in District Two, east of the citadel. Here 22 new graves had been found, each containing between three and seven bodies. It is still a horrifying place. The officers told me that the bodies had been tied and, again. Most had been shot through the head, but "some had been buried alive."
There are about 40,000 Roman Catholic Vietnamese in Hue'. What happened to them? About three-quarters of the Roman Catholics in Hue' live in Phu Cam, on the southern outskirts of the city. They resisted strongly when the enemy came in, and some were executed. Four Viet Nam priests were taken away and three foreign priests were killed. Two French priests were actually given permission by the Viet Cong to return to Phu Cam and help the sisters-and then they were shot on the way back. Another French priest was executed, perhaps because he was chaplain to the Americans.
Summing up all this evidence about the behavior of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese army in Hue one thing is abundantly clear and ought to surprise no one. They put into practice, with their usual efficiency the traditional Communist policy of punishing by execution selected leaders who support their enemies. In Hue, as elsewhere, they were unable on the whole to capture and execute the more important officials, because these men were careful to protect themselves in heavily fortified compounds, defended by soldiers and police. In Hue, as elsewhere, the more defenseless "little people' were the victims-the village and hamlet chiefs, the teachers and the policemen. Already most of these positions have been filled again, and I find it impossible to write adequately about the courage of men who succeed the executed.
Don Oberdorfer was a reporter for the Washington Post who visited Hue several times after Tet. At this site, Oberdorfer wrote the following:
Hue was occupied for twenty-five days before the North Vietnamese were ousted. During that time, the troops and the political officers who came with them ruled over large parts of the city. One of the central objectives of the occupation, according to a written plan prepared in advance, was to "destroy and disorganize" the administrative machinery that the South Vietnamese regime had established since Vietnam was divided by international agreement in 1954. The effort to root out "enemy" functionaries, according to the plan, was to extend "from the province and district levels to city wards, streets and wharves." The political officers arrived with a carefully prepared "target list" of 196 places, organized on a block-by-block basis, to be given priority attention, including U.S. and South Vietnamese offices and the homes of the officials who worked there, as well as the homes of those who were deemed to be leading or cooperating with their efforts, including foreigners. Once in charge, the occupation forces set about expanding its target lists with the assistance of local sympathizers.
So many were killed. Le Van Rot, the owner of the most popular Chinese soup restaurant in the city, was the government block chief of his area. Four armed men, two from Hue and two from North Vietnam, came to his shop and arrested him, accusing him of being a spy. They bound his arms behind his back with wire and began to tug him toward the door. When he resisted, one of them put a bullet through his head.
Then there was Pham Van Tuong. He worked part-time as a janitor at the government information office. Four men in black pajamas came to his house, calling on him by name to come out of the bunker where he and his family had taken refuge. But when he did come out, along with his five-year-old son, his three-year-old daughter, and two of his nephews, there was a burst of gunfire. All five were shot to death.
Dr. Horst Gunther Krainick was a German pediatrician and professor of internal medicine who had worked for seven years with teams of Germans and Vietnamese to establish a medical school at Hue University. Krainick stayed in his university apartment after the fall of the city, believing he and his wife would not be harmed. Unknown to them, they were on the original target list. On the fifth day of the occupation, an armed squad arrived and put the Krainicks and two other German doctors into a commandeered Volks-wagen bus. Their bodies were found later in a potato field, all victims of an executioner's bullets.
The same day, North Vietnamese troops came in force to the Roman Catholic cathedral, where many people had taken refuge from the fighting. Four hundred men were ordered out, some by name and others apparently because they were of military age or prosperous appearance. When the group was assembled, the political officer on the scene told people not to fear; the men were merely being taken away temporarily for political indoctrination. Nineteen months later, three defectors led U.S. soldiers to a creekbed in a double canopy jungle ten miles from Hue where the skulls and bones of those who had been taken away had lain ever since. Those killed included South Vietnamese servicemen, civil servants, students, and ordinary citizens. The skulls revealed they had been shot or brained with blunt instruments.
Altogether, South Vietnamese authorities counted about twenty-eight hundred victims of deliberate slaughter during the Tet Offensive in Hue. The fate of some was known immediately. The bodies of others emerged later from mass graves in nearby jungles or the coastal salt flats. Like those taken from the cathedral, they had been shot to death, bludgeoned, or buried alive.
After Hue was retaken, the South Vietnamese authorities were reported to be guilty of some of the same practices. I learned from a U.S. team that "black teams" of South Vietnamese assassins were sent in to eliminate those who were believed to have aided the enemy during the occupation. On March 14, three weeks after South Vietnam regained control, more than twenty prisoners, including some women and schoolboys, were brought to provincial military headquarters with burlap bags covering their heads and hands tightly wired behind their backs. After being taken into a stone building that was reputed to be a place of execution, all the prisoners disappeared.
Friend or foe, Oberdorfer does not excuse those who violated the Geneva Conventions. Wikipedia also describes Oberdorfer's reportage:
Don Oberdorfer spent five days in late 1969 with Paul Vogle, an American English professor at the local Hue University, going through Hue interviewing witness of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong occupation. Oberdorfer classified all the killings into two categories: the planned execution of government officials and their families, political and civil servants, and collaborators with Americans; and those civilians not connected to the government who ran from questioning, spoke harshly about the occupation, or the occupiers believed "displayed a bad attitude" towards the occupiers. While unable to confirm this with first-hand accounts, Oberdorfer reported that in the Catholic area of Hue, Phucam, virtually every able bodied man over the age of 15 who took refuge in the cathedral was taken away and killed. In an interview with Ho Ty, a Viet Cong commander who took part in the advanced planning of a general uprising, Oberdorfer reported that Ty stated that the Communist party "was particularly anxious to get those people at Phucam... The Catholics were considered particular enemies of ours."
In 1968: The Definitive Year, Jack Shulimson wrote the following:
Once in Hue, the North Vietnamese were there to stay. The Communists established their own civil government and their cadres rounded up known government officials, sympathizers, and foreigners including American civilians and military personnel in the pans of the city they controlled. After the recapture of Hue, South Vietnamese authorities exhumed some 3,000 bodies thrown into hastily dug graves. In all probability, these were the victims of the Communist roundups. Although the North Vietnamese admitted the tracking down and punishing of 'hoodlum ringleaders,' they claimed most of the reported civilian deaths were the result of happenstance, exaggerations by the South Vietnamese, or caused by the allies. The true sufferers in the battle were the people of Hue.
[...]
Some estimates held that over 80 percent of the structures in the city sustained damage or were destroyed. Out of a population of about 140,000, more than 116,000 people were homeless and 5,800 were either dead or missing. According to most reports, Hue was a devastated city.34*
34. MACV ComdHist, 1967, pp. 75, 98; Telfer, Rogers, and Fleming, U.S. Marines in Vietnam, 1967, pp. 132-39; Palmer, Summons of the Trumpet, pp. 167-9; Oberdorfer, Tit! [sic], pp. 107-8; Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, pp. 236-9.
* Former Washington Post reporter Peter Braestrup, an eyewitness to the battle, cautioned in his book against overdramatic comparisons that appeared in the media of the Hue battle with World War II battles. According to Braestrup, "to the uninitiated or imaginative observer on the ground, it [Hue) suggested Seoul or Stalingrad. . . . Actually Hue got off fairly lightly by World War II or Korean War standards for three-week urban battles." Braestrup, Big Story, vol. l, p. 202. For contrasting views of the Hue "massacres," see Douglas Pike, "Viet Cong Strategy, New Face of Terror," and D. Gareth Porter, "The 1968 Hue Massacre" in Hue Tet Folder, A&S Files, Indochina Archives. William D. Ehrhart a former Marine who served with the 1st Battalion, 1st Marines in Hue and has written extensively on the Vietnam experience, commented that he personally saw a lor of dead civilians, killed not by intent, "but only because they were in the midst of some of the fiercest fighting of the war." While admitting he did not know "what actually happened," Ehrhart believes "there is more room for doubt than your account (and most others suggest)." William D. Ehrhart, Comments on draft, dtd 23Nov94 (Vietnam Comment File). The authors of this work feel no need to change the description in the text.
In October 1969, twenty months after the Battle for Hue--and after numerous hidden mass graves were found and unearthed--Time magazine came out with the following:
"At first the men did not dare step into the stream," one of the searchers recalled. "But the sun was going down and we finally entered the water, praying to the dead to pardon us." The men who were probing the shallow creek in a gorge south of Hue prayed for pardon because the dead had lain unburied for l9 months; according to Vietnamese belief, their souls are condemned to wander the earth as a result. In the creek, the search team found what it had been looking for--some 250 skulls and piles of bones. "The eyeholes were deep and black, and the water flowed over the ribs," said an American who was at the scene.
The gruesome discovery late last month brought to some 2,300 the number of bodies of South Vietnamese men, women and children unearthed around Hue. All were executed by the Communists at the time of the savage 25-day battle for the city during the Tet offensive of 1968. The dead in the creek in Nam Hoa district belonged to a group of 398 men from the Hue suburb of Phu Cam. On the fifth day of the battle, Communist soldiers appeared at Phu Cam cathedral, where the men had sought refuge with their families, and marched them off. The soldiers said that the men would be indoctrinated and then allowed to return, but their families never heard of them again. At the foot of the Nam Hoa mountains, ten miles from the cathedral, the captives were shot or bludgeoned to death.
Shallow Graves. When the battle for Hue ended Feb. 24, 1968, some 3,500 civilians were missing. A number had obviously died in the fighting and lay buried under the rubble. But as residents and government troops began to clean up, they came across a series of shallow mass graves just east of the Citadel, the walled city that shelters Hue's old imperial palace. About 150 corpses were exhumed from the first mass grave, many tied together with wire and bamboo strips. Some had been shot, others had apparently been buried alive. Most had been either government officials or employees of the Americans, picked up during a door-to-door hunt by Viet Cong cadres who carried detailed blacklists. Similar graves were found inside the city and to the southwest near the tombs where Viet Nam's emperors lie buried. Among those dug out were the bodies of three German doctors who had worked at the University of Hue.
Search Operation. Throughout that first post-Tet year, there were persistent rumors that something terrible had happened on the sand flats southeast of the city. Last March, a farmer stumbled on a piece of wire; when he tugged at it, a skeletal hand rose from the dirt. The government immediately launched a search operation. "There were certain stretches of land where the grass grew abnormally long and green," Time Correspondent Wllllam Mormon reported last week from Hue. "Beneath this ominously healthy flora were mass graves, 20 to 40 bodies to a grave. As the magnitude of the finds became apparent, business came to a halt and scores flocked out to Phu Thu to look for long-missing relatives, sifting through the remains of clothes, shoes and personal effects. "They seemed to be hoping they would find someone and at the same time hoping they wouldn't," said an American official. Eventually, about 24 sites were unearthed and the remains of 809 bodies were found.
The discovery at the creek in Nam Boa district did not come until last month--after a tip from three Communist soldiers who had defected to the government. The creek and its grisly secret were hidden under such heavy jungle canopy that landing zones had to be blasted out before helicopters could fly in with the search team. For three weeks, the remains were arranged on long shelves at a nearby school, and hundreds of Hue citizens came to identify their missing relatives. "They had no reason to kill these people," said Mrs. Le Thi Bich Phe, who lost her husband.
Negligible Propaganda. What triggered the Communist slaughter? Many Hue citizens believe that the execution orders came directly from Ho Chi Minh. More likely, however, the Communists simply lost their nerve. They had been led to expect that many South Vietnamese would rally to their cause during the Tet onslaught. That did not happen, and when the battle for Hue began turning in the allies' favor, the Communists apparently panicked and killed off their prisoners.
The Saigon government, which claims that the Communists have killed 25,000 civilians since 1967 and abducted another 46,000, has made negligible propaganda use of the massacre. In Hue it has not had to. Says Colonel Le Van Than, the local province chief: "After Tet, the people realized that the Viet Cong would kill them, regardless of political belief." That fearful thought haunts many South Vietnamese, particularly those who work for their government or for the Americans. With the U.S. withdrawal under way, the massacre of Hue might prove a chilling example of what could lie ahead.
There was no byline in the Time article, but it looks like the report was by Wllllam [?] Mormon. A month after the above report, news of the My Lai massacre hit the front pages.
In 1998, Kim Nguyen wrote a remembrance of Hue, excerpting from Stanley Karnow:
The world renown historian, Stanley Karnow, and an authority in the Vietnam War History has revealed many details of the Tet offensive and the Hue massacre.
Five months before, as they began to prepare for the assault planners and their intelligence agents inside the city compiled two lists. One detailed nearly two hundred targets ranging from such installations as government bureaus and posts to the home of the district chief's concubine. The other contained the names of "cruel tyrants and reactionary elements," a rubric covering civilian functionaries, army officers, and nearly anybody else linked to the South Vietnamese regime as well as uncooperative merchants, intellectuals and clergymen. Instructions were also issued to arrest Americans other foreigners except for the French-presumably because President de Gaulle had publicly criticized U.S. policy in Vietnam.
Vietcong teams, armed with these directives, conducted house to house searches immediately after seizing control of Hue, and they were merciless. During the months and years that followed, the remains of approximately three thousand people were exhumed in beds, coastal salt flats, and jungle clearings. The victims had been shot or clubbed to death, or buried alive. Paradoxically, the American public barely noticed these atrocities, preoccupied as it was by the incident at Mylai-in which American soldiers had massacred a hundred Vietnamese peasants, women and children among them. Revisiting Vietnam in 1981, I was able to elicit little credible evidence from the Communists clarify the episode.
Captured in the home of Vietnamese friends, Stephen Miller of the U.S. Information Service was shot in a field behind a Catholic seminary Dr. Horst Gunther Krainick, a German physician teaching at the local medical school, was seized with his wife and two other German doctors and their bodies were found in a shallow pit. Despite their instruction to spare the French, the Communists arrested two Benedictine missionary, shot one of them, and buried the other alive. They also killed Father Buu Dong, a popular Vietnamese Catholic priest who had entertained Vietcong agents in his rectory, where he kept a portrait of Ho Chi Minh -telling parishioners that he prayed for Ho because "he is our friend too." Many Vietnamese with only the flimsiest ties to Saigon regime suffered as well Pham Van Tuong, a part-time janitor at a government office, was gunned down in his front yard along with his two small children. Mrs. Nguyen Thi Lao, a cigarette vendor, was presumably executed because her sister worked in a government bureau. Anyone resisting arrest was promptly killed, but those who surrendered to the Communists often fared no better. Five South Vietnamese officers, who emerged from their hiding place without a fight, were taken to a high school playground and each shot in the head. Many people disappeared after submitting to Vietcong promises of a quick release, as one woman later recalled: "The Communists came to our house and questioned my father who was an elderly official about to retire. Then they went away returning afterward to say that he had to attend a study a study session that would last only ten days. My mother and I were worried because the Communists had arrested his father in just that way in 1946. Like his father my father never came back."
Nguyen also pulls some words from Battle for Hue, written by Keith William Nolan, who fought in battle for Hue:
Soon after the battle, the South Vietnamese government initiated Operation Recovery, a 90-day relief and reconstruction effort aimed at the entire I Corps, but focused primarily on Hue. It brought food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention to that city's estimated 116,000 refugees (out of a population of 140,000). By the end of the year, life in Hue was relatively back to normal. As Major Swenson noted, "My final duties as liaison officer entailed taking visitors to Task Force X-RAY through the city on a guided tour. The city was not destroyed in the Tet Offensive. It was damaged, but still beautiful."
The war had finally come to the people of Hue - and they paid the price. As Hue pulled itself out of the mess, one bloody sidelight of the battle was uncovered, something worse than refugees and cross-fire deaths: the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese had massacred many of the people of Hue during their occupation. Over the years, the evidence was collected in bits and pieces; the discovery of mass graves, captured communist documents, statements by prisoners of war. It was learned that with the typical cold-blooded efficiency of the Communists, the VC had gone into Hue with lists of so-called Enemies of the People. Those marked included government officials, city administrators, intellectuals, teachers, college students, soldiers, foreigners - and their families - all those suspected of being potential enemies of the communist cause. There was one other category: all those who could identify the VC infrastructure now that it had surfaced for the Tet Offensive. That could include any innocent bystander. The people were rounded up and some were executed in the city. When the fight was obviously being lost by the VC, they marched their political prisoners outside the city to different sites and killed them. Some were buried alive. Great pains were taken by the Communists to conceal their work, and it took a year for the allies to put the pieces together. The South Vietnamese government finally recovered three thousand bodies in mass graves around Hue. Another two thousand people were still unaccounted for.
Also from Nolan's book, but taken from this source:
Sargent Dye was standing in front of a pit in an area recaptured by the 2/5. Other grunts stood by muttering “Jesus Christ”. An incredible stench rose from it, a stomach turning putrid smell, that seemed to press down on them all the more with all the clouds and drizzle. There below their boots were hundreds of bodies. They were South Vietnamese civilians, all tangled and twisted, as if they clung to each other when the machine guns were turned on them. Dye had heard the rumors of Communists massacring civilians in Hue- but he had never expected to see anything like this.
It was a scene Dye never forgot, and he though about it one year later when the My Lai killings hit the paper. It was incredible he thought that the press made such a fuss about My Lai, but never said much about the NVA massacre in Hue.
Nguyen also talks about Le Minh, who was a colonel and one of the top four officers in charge of the Hue operation:
Information sources concerning the Tet Mau Than are ample to find from the American and South Vietnam side. However, most of materials coming from Hanoi are carefully prepared propaganda that does not reflect the truth. In fact, Vietcong intentionally present the Mau Than event as a civilian "uprising" to oppose the government of South Vietnam. More over, they bluntly deny the massacres and skilfully conceal the names of the perpetrators.
From the memoirs "Victory at Mau Than" (Chien Thang Mau than) by Le Minh printed in Vietnam 10 years ago [1988], it clearly illustrates the chronically deceitful image of Vietcong. Le Minh who ranked Colonel was one of the four top officers in charge of the attack of Hue. The commander in chief was General Tran Van Quang, Le Chuong was Political Commissar and Generals Nam Long and Le Minh were field commanders.
An excerpt from "Victory at Mau Than" shows that the circle of power in Hanoi had carefully plotted out their offensive plan in Mau Than; to attack Hue immediately after the truce agreement that they had signed.
"The preparation tasks for the battle fields are going well until February 67, Headquarters called upon one of us three (Mr. Tran Van Quang, Mr. Le Chuong or myself) to go North to receive the order. Mr Chuong went. I thought the order would include the instruction to overtake Hue in 5 days (as planned by the "Zone Party Committee"), I therefore carry on with what had been planned. A month later Mr. Chuong returns and informs that the new order is to attack Hue simultaneously with the general uprising in whole South Vietnam. The timing was "around Tet". This infers that the attack will be for many days, everything has changed completely, things will have to be planned carefully and differently."
Considering later official documents, it was July 1967 that the Communist Politburo in Hanoi started to plan for the Mau Than offensive.
Another passage of Le Minh's memoirs shows their plan to set-up a puppet government in Hue that consists of their cadres. "To set up government in the whole province of Thua Thien and Hue city; from there we form the People's Democratic and Peace Alliance in Hue. At the moment, there is plan to invite Professor Le Van Hao, Venerable Thich Don Hau and Mrs. Nguyen Dinh Chi and a few other well-known people in Hue."
In addition, Vietcong's top secret documents, were later seized, contradict with Hanoi's alibis. The findings include layout plans for the Tet offensive such as a document prepared by the "Province Party Committee" Binh Tri Thien dated October 1, 1967 (photograph of document included). Apart from plans to attack the document order to assassinate, and by all means kill all "reactionaries groups". These facts reject the cover up themes and reasoning by Vietcong that the victims massacred at Hue were only to settle personal vendettas.
From this source, here's an excerpt from Troung Nhu Tang, a onetime Vietcong Minister of Justice, wrote a A Vietcong Memoir:
The accounts I read of Hue’s experience with revolutionary rule, were unsettling to say the least.
Large numbers of people had been executed, most of them associated with the government or opposed to the revolution. But others had been killed as well, including some captured American soldiers, and other foreigners who were non combatants. I had questioned Huynh Tan Phat in private about these atrocities. He had expressed his sorrow and disappointment at what happened, and explained that discipline in Hue had been seriously inadequate. Fanatic young soldiers had shot people and angry local citizens sympathetic to the cause had taken justice into their own hands.
Another eyewitness account of Hue comes from none other than Ken White, a Vietnam vet, bourbon connosieur and frequent Tacitus commenter:
I was there when some of the graves were opened. That was in mid March 1968 and the three graves I witnessed were in the middle of almost a months worth of discoveries of similar graves.
That linked article [written by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, which I'll get to further down] is as propagandistic as anything it accuses the US and South Viet Namese of. About 2,500-3,000 bodies were discovered by units from both nations in fourteen (IIRC) large mass graves. Many were obviously victims of the combat to clear Hue. Many had also been shot at close range with wounds not consistent with the vagaries of war but from being deliberatelty executed. One estimate at the time was about 15% for such killings from the three graves I saw. I know the Canadians and the Poles were invited to come look, no idea what their reports said. But I do know Chomsky et.al are wrong.
The Bulldozer tracks were US SeaBee bulldozers used to scrape the top cover of about three feet away from the hand cleared graves.
Another source who writes about the Hue massacre is Douglas Pike, who was with the U.S. Information Office at the time of his writings in late 1969. In Viet Cong Strategy of Terror, Pike wrote of the finds:
In the chaos that existed following the battle, the first order of civilian business was emergency relief, in the form of food shipments, prevention of epidemics, emergency medical care, etc. Then came the home rebuilding effort. Only later did Hue begin to tabulate its casualties. No true post-attack census has yet been taken. In March local officials reported that 1,900 civilians were hospitalized with war wounds and they estimated that some 5,800 persons were unaccounted for.
The first discovery of Communist victims came in the Gia Hoi High School yard, on February 26 ; eventually 170 bodies were recovered.
In the next few months 18 additional grave sites were found, the largest of which were Tang Quang Tu Pagoda (67 victims), Bai Dau (77), Cho Thong area (an estimated 100), the imperial tombs area (201), Thien Ham (approximately 200), and Dong Gi (approximately 100). In all, almost 1,200 bodies were found in hastily dug, poorly concealed graves.
At least half of these showed clear evidence of atrocity killings: hands wired behind backs, rags stuffed in mouths, bodies contorted but without wounds (indicating burial alive). The other nearly 600 bore wound marks but there was no way of determining whether they died by firing squad or incidental to the battle.
The second major group of finds was discovered in the first seven months of 1969 in Phu Thu district-the Sand Dune Finds and Le Xa Tay-and Huong Thuy district-Xuan Hoa-Van Duong-in late March and April. Additional grave sites were found in Vinh Loc district in May and in Nam Hoa district in July. The largest of this group were the Sand Dune Finds in the three sites of Vinh Luu, Le Xa Dong and Xuan 0 located in rolling, grasstufted sand dune country near the South China Sea. Separated by salt-marsh valleys, these dunes were ideal for graves. Over 800 bodies were uncovered in the dunes.
In the Sand Dune Find, the pattern had been to tie victims together in groups of 10 or 20, line them up in front of a trench dug by local corvee labour and cut them down with submachine gun (a favourite local souvenir is a spent Russian machine gun shell taken from a grave). Frequently the dead were buried in layers of three and four, which makes identification particularly difficult.
In Nam Hoa district came the third, or Da Mai Creek Find, which also has been called the Phu Cam death march, made on September 19, 1969. Three Communist defectors told intelligence officers of the 101st Airborne Brigade that they had witnessed the killing of several hundred people at Da Mai Creek, about 10 miles south of Hue, in February of 1968. The area is wild, unpopulated, virtually inaccessible. The Brigade sent in a search party, which reported that the stream contained a large number of human bones.
By piecing together bits of information, it was determined that this is what happened at Da Mai Creek: On the fifth day of Tet in the Phu Cam section of Hue, where some three-quarters of the City's 40,000 Roman Catholics lived, a large number of people had taken sanctuary from the battle in a local church, a common method in Vietnam of escaping war. Many in the building were not in fact Catholic.
A Communist political commissar arrived at the church and ordered out about 400 people, some by name and some apparently because of their appearance (prosperous looking and middle-aged businessmen, for example). He said they were going to the "liberated area" for three days of indoctrination, after which each could return home.
They were marched nine kilometres south to a pagoda where the Communists had established a headquarters. There 20 were called out from the group, assembled before a drumhead court, tried, found guilty, executed and buried in the pagoda yard. The remainder were taken across the river and turned over to a local Communist unit in an exchange that even involved banding the political commissar a receipt. It is probable that the commissar intended that their prisoners should be re-educated and returned, but with the turnover, matters passed from his control.
During the next several days, exactly how many is not known, both captive and captor wandered the countryside. At some point the local Communists decided to eliminate witnesses: Their captives were led through six kilometres of some of the most rugged terrain in Central Vietnam, to Da Mai Creek. There they were shot or brained and their bodies left to wash in the running stream. The 101st Airborne Brigade burial detail found it impossible to reach the creek overland, roads being non-existent or impassable. The creek's foliage is what in Vietnam is called double-canopy, that is, two layers, one consisting of brush and trees close to the ground, and the second of tall trees whose branches spread out high above. Beneath is permanent twilight. Brigade engineers spent two days blasting a hole through the double-canopy by exploding dynamite dangled on long wires beneath their hovering helicopters. This cleared a landing pad for helicopter hearses. Quite clearly this was a spot where death could be easily hidden even without burial.
The Da Mai Creek bed, for nearly a hundred yards up the ravine, yielded skulls, skeletons and pieces of human bones. The dead had been left above ground (for the animists among them, this meant their souls would wander the lonely earth forever, since such is the fate of the unburied dead), and 20 months in the running stream had left bones clean and white.
Local authorities later released a list of 428 names of personswhom they said had been positively identified from the creek bed remains. The Communists' rationale for their excesses was elimination of "traitors to the revolution." The list of 428 victims breaks down as follows: 25 per cent military: two officers, the rest NCO's and enlisted men; 25 per cent students; 50 per cent civil servants, village and hamlet officials, service personnel of various categories, and ordinary workers.
The fourth or Phu Thu Salt Flat Finds came in November, 1969, near the fishing village of Luong Vien some ten miles east of Hue, another desolate region. Government troops early in the month began an intensive effort to clear the area of remnants of the local Communist organization. People of Luong Vien, population 700, who had remained silent in the presence of troops for 20 months apparently felt secure enough from Communist revenge to break silence and lead officials to the find. Based on descriptions from villagers whose memories are not always clear, local officials estimate the number of bodies at Phu Thu to be at least 300 and possibly 1,000.
The story remains uncompleted. If the estimates by Hue officials are even approximately correct, nearly 2,000 people are still missing. Re-capitulation of the dead and missing.
| Wounded (hospitalized or outpatients) with injures attributable to warfare | 1,900 |
| Estimated civilian deaths due to accident of battle | 844 |
| First finds-bodies discovered immediately post battle, 1968 | 1,173 |
| Second finds, including Sand Dune finds, March-July, 1969 (est.) | 809 |
| Third find, Da Mai Creek find (Nam Hoa district) September, 1969 | 428 |
| Fourth Finds-Phu Thu Salt Flat find, November, 1969 (est.) | 300 |
| Miscellaneous finds during 1969 (approximate) | 200 |
| Total yet unaccounted for | 1,946 |
| Total casualty and wounded in Hue | ~7,600 |
Some or most of the estimates could very well have been inflated, which is why Wikipedia reported on 3,000 civilians found in mass graves. The actual number missing may be lower than 1,946, but it also remains likely mass graves remain undiscovered. The dead bodies at Da Mai Creek may never have been found without the aid of Communist defectors, for example.
The Dissenters
The primary source from which all dissents flow is a Marxist named D. Gareth Porter, who began his career promoting massacre-denial in Hue and then graduated to genocide-denial in Cambodia. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman used Porter-Hildebrandt as a cornerstone for their defense of the Khmer Rouge. In detailed takedowns, Bruce Sharp and Sophal Ear shred all credibility from Chomsky-Herman and, by extension, Porter-Hildebrandt. If states required licensing for practicing history, Porter would have had his certificate yanked. In a 2005 book review of Porter's Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, Stephen L. Morris of Johns Hopkins University in typical academic understatement writes:
One consistent underlying defect in Mr. Porter’s scholarship is his reliance upon published Vietnamese Communist Party histories as credible evidence of Vietnamese leaders’ actual intentions, motives or actions. He does not seem to grasp that such sources are meant as retroactive justifications for past actions, not honest analysis. This element of his writing goes back more than three decades, and is connected to his political sympathies.
Morris' conclusion:
Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance is so deeply flawed that no scholarly reader should take him seriously, let alone gush over his amazing misconceptions. All the more so since Mr. Porter’s extensive resume of being wrong about great historical events in Southeast Asia is a matter of public record. Too bad some of America’s more prominent academics and publishers didn’t check that record before buying such damaged goods.
Ouch. Not to get too ad hominem here, but if so many of his other works are incurably flawed, then common sense dictates the same for Porter piece on Hue. Porter's conclusion on Hue:
The available evidence -- not from NLF sources but from official U.S. and Saigon documents and from independent observers -- indicates that the official story of an indiscriminate slaughter of those who were considered to be unsympathetic to the NLF is a complete fabrication.
I don't want to waste too much time on a person with a long track record of Spock-with-a-beard alternative universe historical writings, but I wanted to touch on a couple of areas in his piece. First, his use of South Vietnam's "Tenth Political Warfare Battalion". A Google search of "political warfare battalion" shows that the term originates from Porter himself. What is the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion and what happened to the first nine? Porter applies the Chomskyesque tactic of denigrating the sources he doesn't like--applying stern tests of rigor and skepticism--and uncritically accepting at face value the claims made by his communist allies.
Another interesting section is his analysis of the tally of dead people buried near Gia Hoi High School. Stewart Harris reported a higher number and Dr. Alje Vennema reported a much lower figure. This does indicate that Douglas Pike's numbers, taken straight from U.S. and South Vietnamese authorities, were likely overstated, but does not disprove a massacre. Also, if Dr. Vennema's word is golden, then Porter must also agree with the contents of Dr. Vennema's book, titled The Viet Cong Massacre at Hue.
Like what he did in his infamous Distortions at Fourth Hand, Chomsky-Herman march in lock-step with Porter on Hue, adding their own section to their Counter-Revolutionary Violence treatise.
More recently, hardline left-winger Scott Laderman is along the Chomsky-Porter axis with his take on the Hue "massacre", relying heavily on Porter. Not long after 9/11, Laderman wrote several blame-America-first pieces in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and we got into several testy e-mail exchanges. As far as I'm concerned, he's about as extreme as Porter and Chomsky.
I'd be disappointed if Dr. Ngo fails to show up.
Posted by: Charles Bird | January 20, 2006 at 04:38 PM
From Pike:
At least half (600) of these showed clear evidence of atrocity killings: hands wired behind backs, rags stuffed in mouths, bodies contorted but without wounds (indicating burial alive). The other nearly 600 bore wound marks but there was no way of determining whether they died by firing squad or incidental to the battle.
Okay...so 600 definitely executed. Laderman citing Porter et al puts the number of executed at 400.
Er...is this something worthy of getting outraged over?
Posted by: spartikus | January 20, 2006 at 05:01 PM
Thanks for the detailed post, Charles. A couple of points spring to mind:
(1) Hue was different from My Lai because at least some of the Hue atrocities were carefully planned ahead of time in order to eliminate political opposition. I don't doubt that some of the killings were unplanned, but it's clear that some of them were targeted.
(2) No amount of atrocities by the other side can justify atrocities by our own side. I realize that's not your point here, but the regularity with which atrocities by US personnel lead to comparisons with enemy behavior makes it worth repeating.
Posted by: togolosh | January 20, 2006 at 05:09 PM
Looks as if 600 is half of something, no?
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 20, 2006 at 05:10 PM
Looks as if 600 is half of something, no?
Ah, pointless. useless "make me want to stop commenting here" snark.
Neither Laderman/Porter Pike seem to dispute the number that can be definitively be attributed to NLF execution.
Thanks for stopping by.
Posted by: spartikus | January 20, 2006 at 05:23 PM
Morality is not a football game with penalties and points, and a trophy at the end for being better than the other guy. I seriously wonder about people and groups that need to look around at others to know whether they are acting well enough or not.
The behavior of others is always, in all cases, absolutely irrelevant.
Posted by: bob mcmanus | January 20, 2006 at 05:36 PM
To get to 600, spart, you have to ignore the Sand Dune fields and Da Mai Creek at the very minimum. They don't hide mass graves for no reason.
Posted by: Charles Bird | January 20, 2006 at 05:38 PM
...I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese, citing as an example the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese at Hue during the Tet offensive.
These wera atrocious crimes, but they pale before what the Romans committed at Carthage.
Posted by: double-plus-ungood | January 20, 2006 at 05:43 PM
Somehow, I always took it for granted that the NV were ruthless and wicked.
I hope CB won't follow up with evidence that the Babi Yar massacre really, really, really did happen.
But it's rather tasteless to mention Hue as if it posed some kind of counter-example to the murders at My Lai.
Posted by: Anderson | January 20, 2006 at 05:52 PM
Bodies were found at Sand Dune fields and Da Mai Creek by, and correct me if I'm wrong, the S. Vietnamese government whose report Pike is basing his scholarship on.
The cause of death of these particular poor souls is not given. Perhaps they were executed. Perhaps their deaths were "incidental".
Tragic, regardless.
Posted by: spartikus | January 20, 2006 at 05:54 PM
What bob mcmanus said.
Posted by: Ugh | January 20, 2006 at 06:26 PM
I'd be disappointed if Dr. Ngo fails to show up.
I'll get on the Batphone later this evening...
Posted by: Anarch | January 20, 2006 at 06:56 PM
Sigh. Chomsky doesn't deny massacres were committed at Hue by the communists. In PEHR (Political Economy of Human Rights) he seems to favor Len Ackland's figure of 700 or so. The Ken White post you cite doesn't contradict Chomsky's apparent preference for a lower estimate. 2500 to 3000 people found in mass graves dead from various causes. In the three graves he's familiar with he says the estimates were that 15 percent were victims of execution-style killings.
There's no doubt (and neither Chomsky nor anyone else I have read denies this) that the VC committed mass murder in Hue. There's some question about the numbers--hundreds or thousands?. It's worth arguing about, if you are a genuinely objective historian or journalist who just wants to know exactly what happened. Those of us who aren't already know that the VC massacred large numbers of people and the US partially demolished Hue in "saving" it, according to its usual practice.
But since you brought up Vietnam, try getting exact figures for the number of civilian dead in either Vietnam or Korea. My Lai and Hue are both drops in a bucket. For Vietnam, a couple hundred thousand, say official American statistics. 400,000 or 600,000-- says American apologist Guenter Lewey. (It's a little hard to tell what figure he means to give in the appendix to "America in Vietnam".) 2 million, says the Vietnamese government these days, along with 1 million military deaths. And try to find out how many civilians died in individual operations. Apparently none at all in Operation Speedy Express, in which the Americans reportedly counted 11,000 bodies and captured 700 weapons. Interesting ratio, that.
It's also fascinating to read about what much of North Vietnam looked like outside Hanoi--a moonscape, says Canadian journalist Michael Maclear in "The Ten Thousand Day War." People lived in caves, as they also did on the Plain of Jars in Laos.
South Vietnam received more bombs, however. What was General Westmoreland's response to Neil Sheehan's question about civilian casualties from air strikes and shelling? "Yes, Neil, it is a problem, but it does deprive the enemy of the population, doesn't it?"
US bombing in Cambodia doesn't really stand out--the Khmer Rouge became genocidal because of the ideology of their leaders, not because of the massive civilian casualties caused by American bombing. But the bombing did recruit for them, as reported by the CIA.
Korea is also kinda interesting--there some of the biggest estimated civilian death tolls at the hands of our massive bombing campaign come from Curtis LeMay--over a million. Professional pride, no doubt.
And speaking of atrocities, there were hundreds of thousands of people murdered in Indonesia at the time, with the approval and probable help from the Americans.
This is all standard cant from lefties like me, but it's all verifiable you know, at least on the planet that we lefties live on. You just have to stop imagining you live in a world where the only high-ranking mass murderers are anti-American.
As for what most Americans know, I doubt many Americans know much about Vietnam outside what they see in movies, and for once the movies probably give the right general sense--both sides were bad. As for the bombing campaign in Korea and the massive death toll claimed for it by the American general, I suspect that's escaped most people's notice.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | January 20, 2006 at 07:14 PM
Can someone competent compare/contrast the 30k/100k body count/sampled estimate conversation about Iraq? Or maybe that's a distraction.
Posted by: rilkefan | January 20, 2006 at 07:27 PM
"You just have to stop imagining you live in a world where the only high-ranking mass murderers are anti-American."
Rather doubt there's reason to believe CB imagines he lives in such a world.
Posted by: rilkefan | January 20, 2006 at 07:29 PM
I'm not sure what CB thinks. I'm old enough to remember the TIME magazine article on My Lai (I saved it as a kid) and there was this same contrast between Hue and My Lai, where My Lai was an aberration that shocked us and Therefore Proved How Good We Really Were, while Hue was standard operating procedure for the other side. I think the latter point was correct, but the first point could only be maintained by people who use the kind of language Orwell described in "Politics and the English language". CB's post sounded to me very much like that TIME magazine article 30 something years ago.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | January 20, 2006 at 07:41 PM
Hugh Thompson a whistleblower? That's an interesting way to minimize the actions of the man who landed his chopper between Calley's troops and the remaining residents of My Lai and prevented them from continuing the massacre.
Posted by: Nell | January 20, 2006 at 07:50 PM
First, to call Hugh Thompson a whistleblower is a gross understatement: he didn't drop a dime on someone or send a note to someone. He put himself and his crew between armed American soldiers and the civilians they were attacking and ordered his crew to shoot their countrymen.
Second and more important, what's the point of this rant? Are we seeking the high ground here, that some regimes or field commanders have been more bloodyminded than William Calley or his heirs in atrocity?
Posted by: Paul | January 20, 2006 at 07:54 PM
This post reminds me of a conversation I had with an American friend three years ago, in which she cited the US's response to My Lai as evidence of how seriously Americans take atrocities committed by American soldiers.
At the time, I actually had no idea what had happened, beyond what I'd picked up in popculture references; I knew that it had been a massacre, committed by US soldiers, and that the senior officer present had been prosecuted. So I let the point drop and the conversation continued.
Later, I looked up My Lai, and discovered that about 500 unarmed civilians had been slaughtered by 150 US soldiers; that, thanks to delays in investigating the crime, most of the soldiers implicated in this atrocity had left the army and were immune from prosecution; that charges were brought against only 25 people, and that of those 25, only half a dozen were court-martialled, and of those, only one, Lieutenant Calley, was convicted. Calley spent less than 4 years in jail for this crime, and was then paroled, with general public approval. No one thinks My Lai was a unique event, but it was unique for Vietnam in that one US soldier was actually convicted of murdering foreign unarmed civilians.
And since then, I've seen that indeed the US's response to My Lai is indeed typical of how seriously Americans take atrocities committed by American soldiers: this post proves that point all over again, if it needed proving.
Jeanne at Body and Soul and Fred at Slacktivist both posted recently pointing out the irony of pro-war conservatives who pay lip service to the memory of Martin Luther King. Fred said it best:
Posted by: Jesurgislac | January 20, 2006 at 08:23 PM
My memory of the news coverage of the VietNam years is pretty hazy (for many reasons) but it seems to me that Americans had a higher standard for ourselves then than we do now. Yes I remember that there were people who blamed the news for exposing My Lai or blamed Thompson etc, but still I also remember that people were really shocked that our side would behave that way. Is the shock the same over Abu Graib? There seems to be an absence of shock over getting into a war over WMD that turn out to not be there. The news media seems to cover these things only when forced to, when the story is impossible to ignore.
Von made a crack about liberals needing to acknowledge that there are truly evil people in the world: I have no problem acknowlwdging that. I just feel more responisble when the evil people are American.
BTW when I teach American history I usually do a reading on Thompson. He is a hero.
Posted by: lily | January 20, 2006 at 08:34 PM
I'll add my "What bob mcmanus said."
Posted by: Louise | January 20, 2006 at 08:47 PM
Jackmormon has a post on this at HoCB and I, having been beaten to the punch, follow it up with a frivolous post on funny place names, so I'm going to button up in my foxhole and wait for Dr. Ngo to chopper in.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | January 20, 2006 at 08:50 PM
As usual, Democracy Now! provides interesting additional light, an interview with former Army Specialist Lawrence Colburn who helped Thompson end the massacre.
Posted by: ral | January 20, 2006 at 09:20 PM
not much to add except (a) bob m's comment speaks for me and (b) the title of the post is a way nice play on words.
Posted by: Francis | January 20, 2006 at 09:21 PM
BTW, Charles, elsewhere in that thread you link to I find you writing this--
"Chomsky has been more recently found talking down the massacre in Srbrenica. After all, it wasn't alleged to have been done by Americans."
You then link to some website by Oliver Kamm which provides precisely zero evidence for what you say. And one might think it would give you pause that the Guardian apologized to Chomsky for making the accusation you make--it occurs to me that if a newspaper can't find any evidence for Chomsky denying the massacre at Srebrenica, then maybe he didn't deny it. It's a funny little quirk I have, but I think the best evidence for what a person has said are the person's own words. So here are a couple of Chomsky quotes about Srebrenica, both from "The New Military Humanism". In this book in typical Chomsky style he launches a slashing attack on US foreign policy and the lies that accompany it. If there was a time when he'd deny Srebrenica this seems like the place we'd find him doing it. So on page 32 he says--
"Judah suggests that the US gave the green light to the Serb attack on Srebrenica, which led to the slaughter of 7000 people, a part of a broader pattern of population exchange. The US did 'nothing to prevent' the attack though it was aware of Serb preparations for it and then used the Srebrenica massacre 'to distract attention from the exodus of Krajina's entire population which was then taking place' " .
I have no idea if Chomsky or Tim Judah are correct. I note that Chomsky both accepts the Srebrenica massacre and does think the US might share some of the guilt, though I think he blames the US more directly for the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Krajina. So, Charles, you have a glimmer of some understanding of how Chomsky thinks--he doesn't write very much about atrocities which he doesn't think can be tied to American action. But you seem a little sloppy when it comes to details.
Here's another passage on page 74--
"We may also bear in mind another truism: the right of humanitarian interventionism, if it exists, is premised on the good faith of those intervening, and that assumption is based not on their rhetoric but on their record. Consider, for example, Iranian offers to intervene in Bosnia to prevent massacres at a time when the West would not do so. These were dismissed with ridicule (in fact, generally ignored), even though they might well have protected Muslims from slaughter at Srebrenica and elsewhere. If there was a reason beyond subordination to power it was because Iranian good faith could not be assumed--reasonably enough, as Iran is one of the two countries to have rejected a World Court judgment, along with other criminal acts."
Yeah, there goes Noam, denying the Srebrenica massacre again.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | January 21, 2006 at 12:27 AM
Matthew White has a pretty comprehensive comparison of various estimates of civilian and military N an S Vietnam casualties.
Posted by: godoggo | January 21, 2006 at 12:40 AM
OK, I'm here and I've read quickly through the main thread and a handful of the more salient links. CB has done a good job of assembling the relevant sources, as far as I can see, so the interested reader could do worse than read through all of them, critically. (I'm sure I could dig out more sources from my files; I'm not sure anyone cares that much.)
I've got no strong views on the central issue. There were killings of civilians by the Communists during the 3 weeks they controlled Hue - no one disputes that. The only question is over the number, and how significant that number is in the grand scheme of things. (More than the couple of hundred the US killed at My Lai, far less than the 1-2 million killed during the war; choose your own lens to create your own perspective.)
I'm a little surprised that CB leads with "the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese," since the most detailed figures he has don't add up that high in terms of the "massacre" itself, unless one attributes all the bodies in mass graves to executions (one of his sources, if I read it aright, says only about 15% of those in the graves were executed) and if one assumes that the nearly 2000 missing were all executed as well, rather than simply "missing," as tends to happen in times of war.
But this is a minor quibble, since the larger political/moral issue would not (IMHO) be greatly affected whether the number was 5000 or several thousand less. I mention it only to show CB's use of sources and preference (surprise, surprise) for those most favorable to his political view. (But which of us is not at times susceptible to that?)
There's a fair amount of ad hominem argument in the thread and links, particularly directed toward Gareth Porter. If one were inclined to believe such argumentation to be valid, one might raise question-marks over some of the sources cited on the other side as well, such as Douglas Pike (always closely tied in with the US military), Steven Morris, and Accuracy [sic] In Media. But that way madness lies.
One fact about Porter which many people nowadays do not recollect. He "made his bones" as a scholar while still a graduate student, with a remarkable debunking of "The Myth of the Bloodbath," an article in the late 1960s (IIRC) that revealed the cynical US-RVN propaganda exaggerating the number of North Vietnamese killed during the land reform of the late 1950s. In this he was a pioneer, and generally proven to be right. (The standard US estimate was 50,000 deaths, but some political rhetoric [e.g., by Nixon, IIRC] swelled this total to "half a million." Porter showed where these fictive figures arose, and revised this total to 5,000 or less. Later [postwar] revisionism by Ed Moise, whose work I trust, upped this estimate to 10,000 or so.)
It is in this context that: (1) Porter challenged the quick, high, estimates of the "Hue massacre," based at first on US-RVN claims; and (2) many people believed him, since he was right before.
The only question that remains, which is one that others have raised above, is the particular point of revisiting the "Hue Massacre" now. If it's to make Americans feel better about My Lai, it doesn't work, at least for me. But perhaps there are those who sleep better at night knowing their country isn't as violently destructive as it might be. Schlaf woll, mein kind.
Posted by: dr ngo | January 21, 2006 at 01:44 AM
So, we weren't as bad as the NVA. When has the measure of our humanity been measured against the inhumanity of our adversaries?
Can you say rationalization?
Posted by: bobski | January 21, 2006 at 09:32 AM
You're mistaking brevity for snark, Spart. Even the passage you quoted upthread point out that 600 were clearly executed; the other half died of indeterminate cause. What started out as a light-hearted math flame turned into something else, evidently.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 21, 2006 at 09:44 AM
And if "the other guys massacred more" doesn't make me feel less ashamed for My Lai, do I have to turn in my VRWC ass-kicking boots?
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 21, 2006 at 09:59 AM
And if "the other guys massacred more" doesn't make me feel less ashamed for My Lai, do I have to turn in my VRWC ass-kicking boots?
I believe that does qualify your for the Blame America First teddy bear and gift coupons, yes.
Posted by: Anarch | January 21, 2006 at 10:23 AM
This is just the snarky liberal talking, but I did think from time to time of the phrase 'the Constitution is not a suicide pact' and wonder if they were justified in taking the steps they did to preserve their nation.
Posted by: liberal japonicus | January 21, 2006 at 10:36 AM
A bunch of people have speculated as to Charles' motives in writing this. Not being Charles, I obviously have no special insight into them, but I wanted to raise the possibility that it's just the fact that, having been challenged, he investigated, and having done all that research, he wrote a post.
Speaking as someone who has been there and done that, I can attest to the fact that when one has, in fact, done a bunch of research on a topic that's not particularly germane to any pressing political question, but that people might find interesting or informative nonetheless, one often does write posts about it, just because one has done the research and other people might be interested. There doesn't have to be a particular political motive behind it.
Posted by: hilzoy | January 21, 2006 at 10:46 AM
"When has the measure of our humanity been measured against the inhumanity of our adversaries?
Dunno exactly, Bob: but a good guess would be "right after the Abu Ghraib abuses were uncovered"?
Posted by: Jay C | January 21, 2006 at 11:09 AM
Speaking of interesting topics that might merit research: no way am I doing this one:
Although I'd be really interested in seeing Livermore Labs' approach to defending against this sort of thing.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 21, 2006 at 11:22 AM
Why are conservatives obsessed with Vietnam?
Posted by: Russell | January 21, 2006 at 12:01 PM
...I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese, citing as an example the slaughter of 5,500 civilians by the North Vietnamese at Hue during the Tet offensive.
Piece of advice -- when admitting that an atrocity committed by the US was an atrocity, avoid using a "yes, but..." comment. What is the point in making the comparison, other to diminish the My Lai atrocity?
Posted by: dmbeaster | January 21, 2006 at 12:09 PM
Not being Charles, I obviously have no special insight into them, but I wanted to raise the possibility that it's just the fact that, having been challenged, he investigated, and having done all that research, he wrote a post.
Thank you, Hil, for that. My purpose was clearly stated in the first paragraph.
Posted by: Charles Bird | January 21, 2006 at 12:15 PM
Not being obsessed at all with Vietnam, I have no idea what you're talking about. Maybe you should ask a more specific question; one that doesn't make provably false assumptions.
Posted by: Slartibartfast | January 21, 2006 at 12:18 PM
I felt disillusioned by Vietnam because of the continuing reports of brutality by our allies. I did not expect us to accept this and it appeared in nation after nation.
Our leaders did not defend the support of these many regimes as the "lesser evil," but seemed to proclaim them the friends of freedom.
The massive bombing and use of artillery in SE Asia did bother me. And like many I feared the actions of Calley were more typical than they were.
I am still saddened that 70% of the American people were "not disturbed" by his actions, that many on the right declared him a hero and the administration coddled him.
It is true that many on the left did not see the N. Vietnamese and other "liberation movements" as the murderers and torturers that they were. Personally I think this is one of the reasons the "new left" dissolved and seems to be incapable of new ideas or visions. Those who cared and studied left in disgust.
Posted by: anna | January 21, 2006 at 03:44 PM
What is the point in making the comparison, other to diminish the My Lai atrocity?
What diminishing, dm? My Lai stands on its own. Bringing up one does not detract from the other.
Posted by: Charles Bird | January 21, 2006 at 03:55 PM
What diminishing, dm?
Call me crazy, but...
I wrote in comments that the war crimes we committed at My Lai were atrocious, but they paled before the atrocities of the North Vietnamese
...a reasonable reading of this sentence could be construed as an attempt to diminish one event.
It's the "but", coupled with the "paled" in a sentence that is comparing the two events.
Posted by: spartikus | January 21, 2006 at 04:19 PM
slartibarfast -
Good point. My comment was cryptic.
Two things.
1. It wasn't clear to me who, exactly, Charles was arguing with. Are there folks out there claiming that the north vietnamese were wonderful people? I followed the links back to the original thread on Tacitus, and I sort of see the context for this post now.
2. My comment about conservatives obsessing about Vietnam is based on the large number of articles, blog posts, and comments to both that I come across, written by conservatives, in which the issues surrounding Vietnam -- now 30 to 40 years old, or more -- are once again rehashed for our consideration. Hence, my question.
Posted by: Russell | January 21, 2006 at 09:52 PM
I suspect there are two reasons for the conservatives "obsessing about Vietnam." First, it was until recent the big shaping event of the post-war generation. There is after all, a larger set of communities that focus on varieties of military conflict -- anyone who has stumbled into the Civil War section of the bookstore can attest to that. For those who like guns and bombs and history, Vietnam is a fairly fun topic to explore.
Of course, there is a political dimension, the what-if political narrative, the still not digested remnant of the 60s culture war. The period of Vietnam is also a period of great transition on a number of cultural and economic vectors. Who can blame a conservative for scratching his (or her) head and asking why? The "obsession" is a tool for coming to grips with our past.
There perhaps is a second reason for this obsession, one far more contemporary: the narrative of lost opportunity and domestic failure hovers around the present narrative in Iraq. I think less by way of direct analogy (Iraq as a latter day Vietnam), than by the sense of foreboding that the impact of this war, with its own narrative of failed opportunity, will dog the next generation.
It has taken --what?-- thirty years to come to grips with the domestic impact of Vietnam, as well as to peak behind our own preconceptions of that conflict. The conservative "obsession" reminds us that these tensions do not die easily: there are days of bitter indigestion ahead for which, sadly, there are no political or social antacids.
Posted by: Harris | January 21, 2006 at 10:29 PM
Re Vietnam:
What Harris said.
And, added to that, the inescapable fact that the conflict in Vietnam was that exceptional (virtually unique) occurrence in American history: a near-complete military/political defeat. Not in the WWI/WWII sense, of course; but a defeat nonetheless in that "our" fundamental military/political goal, (the survival of the Republic of [South] Vietnam as an independent entity) was an utter failure.
Americans generally don't take defeats well, and they sit even less well with adherents of most conservative ideologies (which are usually defined as "ultranationalism" when referring to other countries). The need to find "reasons" (i.e. excuses and blame) for what are seen as national disgraces underly a great number of right-wing "obsessions" in a lot of places. Vietnam just happens to be ours.
Posted by: Jay C | January 21, 2006 at 11:17 PM
Why are conservatives obsessed with Vietnam?
To be fair, most Americans are obsessed, if that's the right word, with Vietnam -- whether or not they realize it.
Posted by: Anarch | January 22, 2006 at 04:18 AM
Can I just ask what the point of this post was? To whom was it aimed, and what light does it shed on a previously darkened corner of the world?
Posted by: McDuff | January 22, 2006 at 04:13 PM
Mcduff, I guess that certain people feel that Iraq isn't going well [and some feel the need to get on to chapter 2 - Iran]. So it's time to rile up the faithful, and distract people from the policies of the current administration.
Posted by: Barry | January 22, 2006 at 06:50 PM
The genesis of this post was the one over at Tacitus--the helicopter gunner who saved some Vietnamese from being slaughtered at My Lai had died. Then CB said over there that the massacre at Hue was much worse. Then he posted over here, trying to argue that our communist enemies were much worse than we were. You can object to this sort of post on two grounds
Bob McManus says morality is not a football game. Their worse crimes don't excuse ours. But Charles didn't say that it does and criticizing his post on that ground lets him off the hook.
The real problem (IMO) is that Charles is trivializing the sheer scale of the crimes we committed in Vietnam, by picking out two atrocities and letting them stand for the morality of the two sides. Hue by anyone's estimate was a bigger slaughter by the communists than My Lai was by the Americans, therefore the commies were worse. But it's very likely that the vast majority of the civilian casualties in Vietnam were inflicted by American firepower and as my Westmoreland quote demonstrates, the destruction inflicted on the peasantry was a matter of policy. I'm not going to say this makes the US "worse" because we probably killed far more people--both sides were in the moral sewer and it's not a question of evil policy on the their side vs. the actions of a few bad apples on ours. I suspect Charles has in mind this alleged contrast between the deliberate atrocities of the communists and the occasional atrocities of a few American bad apples, but the contrast is a false one.
Posted by: Donald Johnson | January 22, 2006 at 10:50 PM
Anarch is right about the impact of the Viet Nam war on a whole generation, not just one political pole of it.
From the other end of the spectrum, it was the experience that did the most to shred youthful idealism about this country's behavior in the world.
Posted by: Nell | January 23, 2006 at 12:03 AM
If anyone would like to hate on Charles, we have set up a site especially for that. Here is the relevant thread, where, I think, you'll find all of your argumentative needs met. If you have something to say that does not meet the (admittedly restrictive and high-class) parameters of hating on Charles, carry on.
Posted by: Jackmormon | January 23, 2006 at 12:23 AM
Maybe it's just me, but I would have personally thought that we would get more as a culture out of being reminded of past atrocities committed by our own by reflecting on, well, those atrocities, and on the distance travelled since then.
The idea that one would take the opportunity to once again reflect on the bright and shinging new fact that Our Enemies Are Bad People indicates a certain lack of willingness to reflect, I think. I'm not saying that one cannot look at the historical facts of Our Enemies Being All Bad People And Sh*t, but it does strike me as inappropriate.
Although remaining imperfect, I think America has come a long way since My Lai and Vietnam. I don't think it hurts to examine the growth, its benefits and disadvantages, even for conservatives. But, apparently, as we have seen with Abu Ghraib, there is a somewhat jerkish motion of the knees which responds to any bad act by American forces with "Our Enemies Are Bad/Worse People." I find this particularly troubling specifically because one can never hope to get better if one ignores or explains away every problem.
The military did get broken in Vietnam, damaging the soldiers involved and their reputation abroad. It should be a non-partisan position to expect it to be fixed now. Is it? This is, I think, a question to be asked by both sides. Why does one side not want to ask it?
Posted by: McDuff | January 23, 2006 at 02:17 AM
Somewhere between 300 and 500 people were massacred at My Lai. The effort to minimize the incident is not only a moral evasion, but requires overlooking that it was far from the only event of its kind. After the massacre became public, and especially at the time of Lt. Calley's trial, many Viet Nam veterans said that they'd witnessed or taken part in similar atrocities.
It was hard to face the idea that abuses by U.S. forces were widespread, but testimony at the Winter Soldier hearing provided further support.
Just a few years ago, the Toledo Blade reported that the Tiger Force unit of the 101st Airborne committed a series of war crimes, including killing and torturing civilians, throughout its six-month tour in 1967. The Army substantiated many of the allegations against the unit, and sat on the evidence for thirty years.
All this is over and above the nature of the war itself, which we waged in a way that devastated the country and killed at least a million of its people.
Atrocities by one side don't make the other side the "good guys" in such a war. Or in any war, for that matter.
Posted by: Nell | January 23, 2006 at 11:22 AM
Why are conservatives obsessed with Vietnam?
What a uselessly generalized statement, Russell. Vietnam has been invoked by the Left practically every time the U.S. makes a military incursion. "Iraq is George Bush's Vietnam" wasn't spoken by a conservative. I would say that the obsession with Vietnam is quite bi-partisan.
Posted by: Charles Bird | January 23, 2006 at 12:19 PM
What a uselessly generalized statement, Russell.
Speaking of useless generalizations, how do you feel about this one:
Around the same time as My Lai, the NV slaughtered 5,500 civilians in Hue, but we hear little about that. Doesn't mesh with the liberal narrative.
I agree that Vietnam touched the American psyche as a whole, btw. In many different ways, of course.
Posted by: spartikus | January 23, 2006 at 12:35 PM
Hey Charles -
"What a uselessly generalized statement, Russell".
If you look upthread you'll see I've expanded my somewhat cryptic post in response to slarti's comments, which yours more or less echo.
Could be that "the left" cites Vietnam whenever the US makes a military incursion. At least when a Republican is President. The right made similiar noises around Somalia and Yugoslavia.
FWIW, my more recent sense is that commentators on the right have taken the current GWOT and, especially and specifically, our involvement in Iraq, as an occasion to revisit and, perhaps somehow, redeem the negative legacy of Vietnam. It's like some weird kind of exorcism.
Ever read, for example, Trevino on the topic?
No doubt we heard "Iraq is Bush's Vietnam" often enough back in the early days of our involvement there (Iraq). I haven't heard that too much lately. I think our involvement in Iraq is turning out to have a character, and will generate a legacy, all its own.
Posted by: Russell | January 23, 2006 at 08:51 PM