The War Behind Me

The army launched a second important inquiry in the wake of Hersh’s exposé. But this one would receive no public notice. The chief of staff quietly assembled a team of officers to collect information on other war-crime allegations that had been reported internally or elsewhere. The men culled investigation files, surveillance reports, press accounts, court-martial records, and congressional correspondence. Each month they summarized what they’d found and sent a memo up the chain of command.

They operated in secret for five years. During that time, they amassed nine thousand pages of evidence implicating U.S. troops in a wide range of atrocities.³ In contrast to the My Lai investigation, their inquiry led to no major actions or public accounting. In fact, the Pentagon kept the entire collection under wraps, even after the war ended.

In 1990, Kali Tal, founder of Viet Nam Generation, a small journal of contemporary history and literature on the 1960s, was tipped to the papers’ existence. She requested a declassification and Freedom of Information Act review. After a year had passed, the National Archives and Records Administration notified her that the documents were available for inspection.⁴ She found the records deeply disturbing and posted a short notice in her journal to alert others. She did not pursue the matter further, and the boxes returned to the storeroom shelves.

A decade later, Cliff Snyder, a Vietnam specialist on the Archives staff, brought the cartons to the attention of Nicholas Turse, a visiting military historian.⁵ While researching them for his dissertation, he came across a 1968 massacre and other cases he believed to be newsworthy. In 2005, he contacted the Los Angeles Times about them. I was the newspaper’s Washington investigative editor at the time, so his e-mail was relayed to me. We joined forces soon afterward to investigate the long-buried reports.⁶

When I proposed the project to John Carroll, then the Los Angeles Times’ top editor, his first question was whether a few rogue units committed most of the crimes. That had been his impression as a young Vietnam War correspondent, and a commonly held view. The most notorious was the Americal Division, responsible for My Lai and a lengthy list of less-known atrocities. The Tiger Force, an elite army platoon, became a late addition to the club with the Toledo Blade’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series in 2003 that documented a seven-month killing spree in which scores perished .⁷

The archive collection contained hundreds of sworn statements from soldiers and veterans who committed or witnessed rapes, torture, murders, massacres, and other illegal acts. There were letters from soldiers, statistical reports, and case summaries. ⁸ When we hand-entered the data into a spreadsheet, it became clear the problem was much bigger than a few bad men: Every major division that served in Vietnam was represented. We counted more than 300 allegations in cases that were substantiated by the army’s own investigations. Some had never been revealed; others had been publicly disputed while the army remained silent about its findings. Five hundred allegations couldn’t be proven or weren’t fully investigated.⁹ According to officers who helped compile the records, those numbers represented only a small fraction of the war crimes committed in Vietnam.

Many veterans tried to alert the Pentagon and the public to the problem in the early 1970s at forums sponsored by such groups as Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Most famously, John Kerry, then a leader in the organization, testified on Capitol Hill on April 22, 1971, that U.S. forces had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war. . . .” ¹⁰

Within days, the declassified records show, the White House quietly requested a list of war-crime investigations from the army.¹¹ The staff at the Pentagon was ready with a lengthy response that reported 213 suspects and included confirmed cases of acts from the litany cited in Kerry’s testimony. ¹² Yet the Nixon administration went ahead with an aggressive backroom campaign to discredit as fabricators and traitors Kerry and other veterans who spoke out about war crimes. The president and White House aides worked closely with a rival organization, Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, to publicly condemn the allegations. ¹³ “The big lie” became the group’s familiar drumbeat. Years later, the founder of the group would boast, “Americans got the message that a motley crew of exaggerators and frauds didn’t speak for Vietnam veterans.”¹⁴ The impression stuck. By the mid-1980s, the whistle-blowers largely had been silenced, and conventional wisdom held that atrocities in Vietnam were overblown. ¹⁵ The controversy resurfaced in 2004, when Kerry ran for president. His old detractors ran ads demanding that he disavow his 1971 testimony, confident they would play to a receptive audience; their efforts contributed to his defeat.¹⁶ All the while, the army had evidence in its files that he had spoken the truth.

But this book isn’t about Kerry. It’s about setting the record straight for the many ordinary men who were ignored, threatened, or disbelieved. It’s a place for them to tell their stories again, now with the full force of the army’s own investigation findings behind them. Years ago, many of them hoped their accounts would pressure the Pentagon to stop “all the wrong killing,” as a soldier wrote in a private letter to then army chief of staff Gen. William C. Westmoreland in 1970.¹⁷ The war ended without an accounting or acknowledgment of the war crimes they witnessed. Their retelling comes at an equally important time when, having failed to address the past, we’re destined to repeat it.