A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present -Howard Zinn

 Extract from the book

....Vietnam war to declare the war unconstitutional. Again and again, it refused even to consider the issue. 

Immediately after the Tonkin affair, American warplanes began bom­barding North Vietnam. During 1965, over 200,000 American soldiers were sent to South Vietnam, and in 1966, 200,000 more. Ву early 1968, there were more than 500,000 American troops there, and the U.S. Air Force was dropping bombs at а rate unequaled in history. Tiny glimmerings of the massive human suffering under this bombardment came to the outside world. On June 5, 1965, the New York Тimes carried а dis­patch from Saigon: 

А$ the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, United States jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese-one estimate is as high as 500-were killed Ьу the strikes. The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in а Vietnamese hospital afterward for bums from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women. 

On September 6, another press dispatch from Saigon: 

ln Bien Ноа province south of Saigon on August 15 United States aircraft accidentally bombed а Buddhist pagoda and а Catholic church ... It was the third time their pagoda had been bombed in 1965. А temple of the Сао Dai religious sect in the same area had been bombed twice this year. 

ln another delta province there is а woman who has both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them. When it is time for her to sleep her family puts а blanket over her head. The woman had two of her children killed in the air strike that maimed her. 

Few Americans appreciate what their nation is doing to South Vietnam with airpower ... innocent civilians are dying every day in South Vietnam. 

Large areas of South Vietnam were declared "free fire zones," which meant that all persons remaining within them-civilians, old people, children-were considered an enemy, and bombs were dropped at will. Villages suspected of harboring Viet Cong were subject to "search and destroy" missions-men of military age in the villages were killed, the homes were burned, the women, children, and old people were sent off to refugee camps. Jonathan Schell, in his book The Village of Ben Sue, describes such an operation: a village surrounded, attacked, a man riding on a bicycle shot down, three people picnicking by the river shot to death, the houses destroyed, the women, children, old people herded together, taken away from their ancestral homes. 

The CIA in Vietnam, in a program called "Operation Phoenix," secretly, without trial, executed at least twenty thousand civilians in South Vietnam who were suspected of being members of the Communist underground. A pro-administration analyst wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in January 1975: "Although the Phoenix program did undoubtedly kill or incarcerate many innocent civilians, it did also eliminate many members of the Communist infrastructure." 

After the war, the release of records of the International Red Cross showed that in South Vietnamese prison camps, where at the height of the war 65,000 to 70,000 people were held and often beaten and tor­tured, American advisers observed and sometimes participated. The Red Cross observers found continuing, systematic brutality at the two princi­pal Vietnamese POW camps-at Phu Quoc and Qui Nhon, where American advisers were stationed. 

By the end of the Vietnam war, 7 million tons of bombs had been dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the total bombs dropped on Europe and Asia in World War II-almost one 500-pound bomb for every human being in Vietnam. It was estimated that there were twenty mil­lion bomb craters in the country. In addition, poisonous sprays were dropped by planes to destroy trees and any kind of growth-an area the size of the state of Massachusetts was covered with such poison. Vietnamese mothers reported birth defects in their children. Yale biolo­gists, using the same poison (2,4,5,T) on mice, reported defective mice born and said they had no reason to believe the effect on humans was different. 

On March 16, 1968, a company of American soldiers went into the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. They rounded up the inhabitants, including old people and women with infants in their arms. These people were ordered into a ditch, where they were methodically shot to death by American soldiers. The testimony of James Dursi, a rifleman, at the later trial of Lieutenant William Calley, was reported in the New York Times: 

"Lieutenant Calley and a weeping rifleman named Paul D.  Meadlo-the same soldier who had fed candy to the children before shooting them­ pushed the prisoners into the ditch....
"There was an order to shoot by Lieutenant Calley, I can't remember the exact words-it was something like 'Start firing.'

"Meadlo turned to me and said: 'Shoot, why don't you shoot?' 

It was a small rural network of villages, and the people were incredibly poor. My unit burned and plundered their meager possessions. Let me try to explain the situation to you. 

The huts here are thatched palm leaves. Each one has a dried mud bunker inside. These bunkers are to protect the families. Kind of like air raid shelters. 

My unit commanders, however, chose to think that these bunkers are offensive. So, every hut we find that has a bunker we are ordered to burn to the ground. 

When the ten helicopters landed this morning, in the midst of these huts, and six men jumped out of each "chopper", we were firing the moment we hit the ground. We fired into all the huts we could ....

It is then that we burned these huts .... Everyone is crying, begging, and praying that we don't separate them and take their husbands and fathers, sons, and grandfathers. The women wail and moan. 

Then they watch in terror as we burn their homes, personal possessions, and food. Yes, we burn all rice and shoot all livestock."

The more unpopular became the Saigon government, the more des­perate the military effort became to make up for this. A secret congres­sional report of late 196 7 said the Viet Cong were distributing about five times more land to the peasants than the South Vietnamese gov­ernment, whose land distribution program had come "to a virtual standstill." The report said: "The Viet Cong have eliminated landlord domination and reallocated lands owned by absentee landlords and the G.V.N. [Government of Viet Nam] to the landless and others who cooperate with Viet Cong authorities."

The unpopularity of the Saigon government explains the success of the National Liberation Front in infiltrating Saigon and other govern­ment-held towns in early 1968, without the people there warning the government. The NLF thus launched a surprise offensive (it was the time of "Tet," their New Year holiday) that carried them into the heart of Saigon, immobilized Tan San Nhut airfield, even occupied the American Embassy briefly. The offensive was beaten back, but it demonstrated that all the enormous firepower delivered on Vietnam by the United States had not destroyed the NLF, its morale, its popular support, its' will to fight. It caused a reassessment in the American gov­ernment, more doubts among the American people. 

The massacre at My Lai by a company of ordinary soldiers was a small event compared with the plans of high-level military and civilian leaders to visit massive destruction on the civilian population of Vietnam. Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton in early 1966, seeing that large-scale bombing of North Vietnam villages was not producing the desired result, suggested a different strategy. The air strikes on villages, he said, would "create a counterproductive wave of revulsion abroad and at home." He suggested instead: 

Destruction of locks and dams, however-if handled right-might ... offer promise. It should be studied. Such destruction doesn't kill or drown people. By shallow-flooding the rice, it leads after a time to widespread starvation (more than a million?) unless food is provided-which we could offer to do "at the conference table." ... 

The heavy bombings were intended to destroy the will of ordinary Vietnamese to resist, as in the bombings of German and Japanese popu­lation centers in World War II-despite President Johnson's public insistence that only "military targets" were being bombed. The govern­ment was using language like "one more tum of the screw" to describe bombing. The CIA at one point in 1966 recommended a "bombing pro­gram of greater intensity," according to the Pentagon Papers, directed against, in the CINs words, "the will of the regime as a target system." 

Meanwhile, just across the border of Vietnam, in a neighboring country, Laos, where a right-wing government installed by the CIA faced a rebellion, one of the most beautiful areas in the world, the Plain of Jars, was being destroyed by bombing. This was not reported by the government or the press, but an American who lived in' Laos, Fred Branfman, told the story in his book "Voices from the Plain of Jars: 

Over 25,000 attack sorties were flown against the Plain of Jars from May 1964, through September 1969; over 75,000 tons of bombs were dropped on it; on the ground, thousands were killed and wounded, tens of thousands driven underground, and the entire aboveground society leveled. 

From A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present -Howard Zinn