Yes The World is saying Yes

Have you said Yes yet?

Michael Uhl, Vietnam

Michael Uhl, a graduate of Georgetown University, U.S.A., was commissioned in 1967 as a second lieutenant in Military Intelligence, U.S. Army, and in November 1968 was assigned to Vietnam. In March, 1970, he testified publicly before the Citizen's Commission of Enquiry into U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam. Since that time he has been working full time as a Veterans organiser.

My presentation is entitled, "Exposing U.S. War Crimes Through Veteran Organising". What that means simply, is that during the last year, a number of Americans, including myself, have been engaged in organising Vietnam war veterans to speak out against the war and to tell how they were forced to become executioners for a policy of genocide. They feel that individual and low ranking GI's are being scapegoated for a war crimes policy created and implemented at the highest levels of the American government. These veterans, who to the Nixon constituency—the middle Americans—represent the last credible segment among the youth; have one unique advantage over traditional peace and anti-war people. They speak about the war concretely—they tell of their own experiences and disillusionment with a society whose integrity they never before questioned, and whose motivations they can no longer trust. I am such a Vietnam veteran.

I was brought up in a suburban New York community and educated primarily in private Catholic institutions with the exception of my last one and a half years of secondary education when I attended and graduated from a local public school, in 1961.

After a year at a small New York University, I transferred to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., specifically to study Spanish and Linguistics. In February, 1964, I temporarily left Georgetown to attend a university in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in order to satisfy a desire to travel and also to learn Portuguese. My ambition at that time was to become a South American specialist and to one day, work in the Foreign Service. During the year, 1964-65, I travelled extensively throughout Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina, devoting almost no time to formal education. Through this experience, I began to gain my first real insights into my government's imperialistic and neo-colonialistic practices. I was shocked to find that many students and simple people harbored great resentment toward Americans and I found it increasingly difficult to defend America's position in light of the obvious evidence of its oppressive presence.

When I returned to the university, I was immediately faced with a dilemma: my draft deferrment had expired. I chose to join a compressed course in what we call ROTC, the Reserve Office Training Corps, rather than be drafted immediately and again interrupt my formal studies. (I was able to do this at that time, because the Army was desperate for junior officers, as they were just beginning to expand their aggression in South East Asia in a convential military way.) 1 was selected for military intelligence training, being assured by some Sergeant that I had little chance of ever going to Vietnam. I then spent two more years' at Georgetown, receiving my Bachelor of Science degree in June 1967. I taught high school for several months after I graduated, and was called to active duty on November 23, 1967.

All military intelligence officers are first trained as infantry officers so I spent my first thirteen weeks in the Army at Fort Benning, Georgia, training in the skills of conventional warfare and small unit tactics and leadership. Military training in the U.S. is geared to reinforce America's already institutionalised racism. We learned and were encouraged to refer to the enemy by derogatory labels, like gook or gink. It is a subtle process of self-dehumanizing and dehumanizing of the Asians, calculated to turn out the good soldier and to shield him against the traditional western humanistic instincts in which he is ideally steeped. Thus armed, he will obey the lawful orders of his superiors, because authority becomes synonymous with good, and he will carry out the mad policies employed by his unit against the non-humans.

Mike McCusker, a former Marine Sergeant and combat reporter with the First Marine Division in Vietnam explains in his testimony before the Citizens' Commission of Inquiry the attitude of his Division Commanding Officer, a Major General, concerning the Vietnamese people. The General said, in an off-the-cuff interview, that the Vietnamese society was ignorant and superstitious, the children were raised as thieves and liars; we could do nothing with the old; the children themselves should be taken from their families and indoctrinated all their lives in government camps. When a man like this, in a high position of responsibility applies these criteria, the results we have seen are not surprising.

After finishing the infantry course, I was sent to the counter-intelligence officers' course at Fort Holabird, Maryland. I stayed there for approximately three months, when upon completion of the training, I was assigned to a military intelligence unit at Fort Hood, Texas. Here I learned how the military intelligence and Criminal Investigation Division harassed and punished those soldiers whose views were even moderately progressive. For example, those who were caught reading or possessing any movement or anti-army literature were given extra duties and subjected to constant search of their personal property. Those who actively tried to discuss their views were either court-martialed on trumped up charges or given other than honorable discharge from service. According to the Army, a thinking soldier is a poor soldier. I silently supported those courageous men and women who were organising enlisted men at a local coffee house and even went as far as not reporting so called suspicious persons or activities or writing "half-truths" in my reports. But I was still not moved to the type of concrete action that affected my own life. The real issues had yet to affect me personally, physically, emotionally. I had the liberal intellectual's moral perspective on the war, racism, and American political repression in general.

From Fort Hood, I was assigned to the 11th Brigade military intelligence team, American Division, as the team chief. I arrived in Vietnam on November 20, 1968. At the time of my arrival, I was familiar with the many alleged reasons for American presence in Vietnam. Throughout High School and University, history professors had explained the complicated Domino theory, which I, to this day, have never understood. The necessity of containing communism and the Chinese was also emphasised. The Chinese and Vietnamese, we were told, valued life far less than western man and were therefore thought to be war prone and reckless. Later the argument was advanced that we were in Vietnam to prevent VC atrocities and terrorism and lastly, it was—we are here to achieve freedom and self-determination for the South Vietnamese people. It's difficult to assess to what degree I still believed any of these arguments, when I arrived in Vietnam. I suppose it would be safe to say that I still believed that my government, though by no means perfect, would try to do what, was best, and so I went, as I told my friends, to see what it was really like.

It was only there in Vietnam that I began to understand to what extent I had been fooled by the American myths of democracy and freedom for all. The contradictions of: free fire zones, search and destroy tactics, torture of prisoners, saturation bombing of civilians, etc., became impossible to harmonize away by clever rationalizations or euphemism. I began to understand that this was a peoples' war of liberation and that the so-called Vietcong were in fact the Vietnamese people. I didn't have a solid political analysis of the situation, but the one thing I understood instinctively, was that to the Vietnamese people, the American presence in Vietnam, was not part of the solution.

After five months in Vietnam, my health and morale deteriorated. I was evacuated with TB in April, 1969. After several months in the hospital, I went back to Graduate School in New York City, where I at once began to relate to student and campus politics. At one meeting I attended, A Vietnam veteran spoke of a group that was trying to collect testimony from war veterans to show that atrocities like My Lai were not isolated, but wide-spread, and the inevitable result of our war policies. This group was the Citizens' Commission of Inquiry into US war crimes in Vietnam. Since March, 1969, when I first testified before the Citizens' Commission in New York, I have been working steadily as a veteran organiser.

Following the public disclosure of the Song My massacre in November, 1969, it was suggested by Ralph Schoenman, former Secretary General of the Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, that it was time to present similar testimony in forums within the U.S. These forums would specifically demonstrate that the My Lai massacre was not an isolated aberration but rather the logical result of military strategies and objectives of the U.S. command in Vietnam.

Jeremy Rifkin and Rod Ensign, who had met while working with the National Committee to Combat Fascism, both began working on implementing local Commissions of Inquiry in early December, 1969. A draft working proposal was prepared by Ensign and Rifkin as a model for creating citizens' commissions in various communities. At the same time, a co-ordinating committee was formed to include such notable sponsors as Noam Chomsky, Dr. Benjamin Spock and David Dellinger.

The first commission was held in Anapolis, Maryland in early March, 1970, followed by commissions in Toronto, Canada (for deserters), Springfield, Mass, New York City, Los Angeles, California, Boston, Mass, Baltimore, Maryland, Buffalo, New York, Minneapolis, Minn, Portland, Oregon, Philadelphia, Pa., finally culminating in the National Veterans Inquiry, which was held in Washington, D.C., on December 1,2, 3, 1970 at which over fifty Vietnam vets testified on every aspect of the U.S. aggression in Indochina. These hearings have all been open to the press and public, including members of the Pentagon's Criminal Investigation Division and at each, the members of the working press and all others, have been able to fully cross-examine those testifying. All of the men testifying have provided detailed information concerning their backgrounds, current occupations, addresses, as well as copies of their discharge papers, unit served with in Vietnam, length and date of tour of duty, decorations, and all other basic material relating to their service in South-east Asia.

In addition, the Commission has sponsored three hearings at which active-duty officers in the U.S. military announced their intention to bring charges under the military code for the war crimes policies implemented page break by their commanding officers. We have opened an office in the suite of Congressman Ron Dellums, Democrat of Berkeley, California. This office, with an extensive war crimes display, is quite unprecedented and has generated considerable interest and controversy on Capitol Hill. The political analysis on which our work has been based was developed as our experience with veterans deepened. There are almost three million U.S. soldiers who have served in the Indochina theatre since 1961. With the exception of career soldiers (a small percentage of this total) all survivors have returned to their homes and jobs. The disclosure of the My Lai massacre and the Administration's response to it, have served to create a real crisis of conscience for most of these men. While vietually alt officials are convinced that an atrocity was in fact perpetrated, the official line from Nixon and the Pentagon on down has been that the individual responsible soldiers will be tried and punished for their illegal acts and that this will dispose of the issue. It is our perception that all Vietnam veterans understand the realities of our military strategics in Indochina; i.e., that men in the field are operating under tactical field policies and procedures conceived and designed at the highest levels of political and military leadership. Certainly, lowly privates and lieutenants do not make policies or define military objectives. Despite this commonplace, the Administration and the Brass have chosen to isolate a few GIs and place them on trial for their lives for their role in My Lai. It has also been our experience that a version of this view is widely held by many liberals and other anti-war activists. That is, they feel that because, theoretically, the GI in Vietnam could refuse to participate in war or implement war crimes policies, it is reasonable to punish him if he does not refuse to submit to orders. Such a view of course, fails to take account of the age, social experience, military conditioning and indoctrination of the young combat soldier, to say nothing of the conditions of combat—where everything is subject to a discipline born from intense fear.

As we approached veterans, somewhat apprehensively at first, we discovered that there was deep resentment over the paradox implicit in the Army's My Lai prosecution—i.e., that a soldier is compelled to conduct and carry out military policies such as search and destroy, free fire zones, no prisoners, pacification and relocation and the like, but if the horrendous results of these policies arouse too much public clamour, that they will be held responsible and prosecuted. In a word, we have sought to shift the veterans' focus from concepts like personal guilt to institutional responsibility—so that the blame for the atrocious conduct of U.S. and puppet forces is fixed where it truly belongs—on the highest levels of civilian and military leadership.

We concluded that for combat veterans, many of whom are workers infected with virulent forms of patriotism and racism by virtue of their class position, to speak out publicly denoucing acts and policies they have been compelled to commit in Vietnam would represent a considerable escalation in their own power and ability to act collectively against an institution that had cruelly oppressed them and their brothers 3nd sisters. In fact, we have been able to organise or reactivate dormant veterans' groups in several cities initially around the issue of their speaking out on U.S. genocide.

Over the past year, we have amassed hundreds of testimonies covering virtually every aspect of the war of genocide being waged in Vietnam. We have provided vet speakers for many groups, schools, universities, etc. Our ability to generate substantial public attention (particularly in the press and on TV) has also increased substantially. Our approach to the media has been along the following lines: 1) the subject matter—war crimes policy—is so strong and so deeply implicates the Government—that it speaks for itself—political interpretation is not necessary; 2) political statements and opinions must be presented as news—not political rhetoric: 3) vets are extremely credible—even to hostile audiences—especially when they speak of their own experiences.

Because the issue of war crimes is such a sensitive issue, and because the Administration and the Pentagon would exploit any opportunity to cast doubt on the credibility of our work, we have necessarily developed an elaborate screening procedure to ensure as reliable testimony as possible. Aside from requiring copies of the veteran's discharge papers, our regional Veteran Coordinators spend many days of extensive interrogation with each witness to check on reliability. Our co-ordinators all served in Vietnam and are knowledgable in areas of unit deployment, major operations, standard operational procedures, and tactical field policies. Whenever possible we cross-check testimony by interviewing corroborating witnesses in the same units as the man testifying. We have on occasion received testimony that was not used, and several potential witnesses have been screened out over the past year whenever there was the least doubt in our minds as to their accuracy and sincerity.

Our record of accuracy is best attested to by the Pentagon itself. Members of the Criminal Investigation have been present at almost every regional inquiry and the National Inquiry in Washington. Over the past year, they have interviewed and in some cases, taken statements from CCI witnesses. Yet they have never once denied or repudiated the credentials of any of the witnesses testifying. At the Washington hearings, they issued the following statement after checking the testimony through their computer banks: the statement appeared in an Associated Press release:

(AP) The Pentagon, while saying it does not dispute the credentials of Osborn or of the 50 other Vietnam veterans testifying during the three-day inquiry, has declined comment.

There will always be, of course, some information concerning the events being disclosed that is virtually impossible to verify. We believe that if a Vietnam veteran is willing to provide us with military papers, occupation, address, family background material and is willing to subject himself to extensive interrogation by our co-ordinators and is willing to stale his accusation, in the full scrutiny of the national press and the Pentagon agents, knowing the grave legal and non-legal risks involved, then, we have a similar obligation to let him present his case to the American people.

So far, I have made continuous reference to what I have designated as U.S. war crimes policies. In order to explain what I mean by this, let us examine that type of behaviour that might be considered a war crime under the current interpretation of international law. For example, under sub-section b of the sixth principle of Nuremberg, formulated in 1950 by the United Nation's International Control Commission, war crimes are: 1) violations of the Laws of War, including murder, ill treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian populations of or in occupied territories; 2) killing of hostages; 3) plunder of public or private property; 4) wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages or devastation not justified by military necessity. The list that I have just read could also be the answer to the question: What have been the results of U.S. policies in Indochina? Professor Edward Herman, in his book "Atrocities in Vietnam, myths and realities," points out that the wording of the principle makes no distinction between 'face to face and impersonal killings of civilians. Certainly, saturation bombing with B-52's in civilian populated areas is no less a war crime than ground operation massacres, just because it is impersonal in nature.

The questions that come up most often when a Vietnam veteran testifies about his experiences are: Aren't you really just saying that war is hell, or, don't war crimes occur in all wars? There is, of course, aberrant behaviour in all wars, but it is important to emphasize the difference between individual acts of terrorism and a conscious policy of genocide. I'd like to point out that during the entire time I was in Vietnam as a counterintelligence officer, I never saw nor even heard of a DRV or NLF atrocity—and I was certainly in a position, to hear if such incidents had occurred in my area. The American government and press would like nothing more than an opportunity to slander the NLF or DRV by widely publicizing any hint of Viet Cong terrorism. Instead they have had to resort to fabrication. The classic example is Hue during Tet, 1968.

What follows is a description of what happened in Hue according to two Americans, one a former high level Defense Department official, and the accounts of two Saigon government officials. These references appear in Herman's recent book. According to Townsend Hoopes, former undersecretary of the Air Force, 80% of the buildings had been reduced to rubble and in the smashed ruins, lay two thousand dead civilians. Three quarters of the city's people were rendered homeless and looting was widespread, members of the ARVN being the worst offenders. Famous combat photographer Davis Douglas Duncan tells how "the Americans pounded the Citadel and surrounding city almost to dust with air strikes, napalm runs, artillery and naval gunfire," and the direct cannon fire from tanks and recoilless rifles—a total effort to root out and kill every enemy soldier. The mind reels at the carnage, cost and ruthlessness of it all."

Concerning the alleged VietCong atrocities, Ranger Captain Phan Phouc, a Saigon government precinct chief in Hue, estimated that the NLF killed 350 people, sixty percent of whom were soldiers, the rest being civil functionaries of the Saigon regime. As reported in the London Times, Hue police chief, Doan Cong Lap said there were two hundred killings attributed to the NLF. Lap also stated that civilian casualties that resulted in retaking the city were 3776. American sources, however, quoted figures on the VietCong victims in the thousands, and these were based on a secret document that had been misplaced until nineteen months after the incident and just happened to be relocated at the same time as the My Lai massacre was announced.

Without condoning the NLF assassinations aimed at eliminating key political figures, it is difficult to reconcile the self-righteous American position in light of the fact that in order to liberate the city, it was necessary to destroy it and to indiscriminately kill thousands of innocent civilians. So America has capitilised on an isolated atrocity, which clearly does not reflect the policy of the NLF, to cloud over the real issue, its own barbaric behaviour in that city. Obviously, a conscious policy of terror on the part of the NLF would be in total opposition to its interests. On the other hand, American atrocities occur on a daily basis and are derived from those policies employed in an attempt to gain a military victory for the so-called Allies.

Let me now discuss concretely what happens when unlimited and massive conventional firepower is page break applied. The results on the Vietnamese people have been devastating. Keep in mind also this question, which I won't cover: What does the acceptance of these war crimes policies, cloaked by euphemism, say about the state of American society and its institutions?

In his book, Herman conservatively estimates the number of South Vietnamese civilian casualties between 1965 and 1960 to be 1,116,000 killed and 2,232,000 wounded. By now it would not be unreasonable to assume that one fourth of the South Vietnamese population has been killed or wounded as a direct result of the American military operations and policies.

What exactly are these policies, strategic and tactical, that account for these casualties and the total non-attempt to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants? There are certain principles that provide the framework for American aggression and demonstrate an almost total lack of constraint on how American and non-American troops, purchased or non-purchased, conduct their military activities.

In his enlightening essay, "After Pinkville", Noam Chomsky describes the development, also known as urbanization, as follows: It is important to understand that the massacre of the rural population of Vietnam and their forced evacuation is not an accidental by-product of the war. Rather, it is of the very essence of American strategy. The story behind it has been explained with great clarity and explicitness by Professor Samuel Huntington, chairman of the Government Department at Harvard and, at the time, 1968, Chairman of the Council on Vietnamese Studies of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group. Writing in "Foreign Affairs" magazine, he explains that the Vietcong is a powerful force which cannot be dislodged from its constituency so long as the constituency continues to exist. Huntington feels that the only way to destroy this constituency is by the direct application of mechanical and conventional power—on such a massive scale as to produce a massive migration from countryside to city where, now totally demoralized, the peasants are placed in concentration camps and slums and are more easily controlled by the Saigon regime. Whereas before 1965, it was estimated that eighty-five percent of the South Vietnamese population resided in rural areas, it is now estimated that fifty percent of the people have been forcibly relocated and bombed into the disease infested camps in urban areas. Thirty percent of this same population are considered refugees according to Senator Ted Kennedy's report on the refugee problem in Vietnam.

Samuel Huntington realised that any social structure existing in the countryside of South Vietnam provides the liberation fighters with a base. He realised that the liberation fighters were of the peasants and that their loyalties were freely given.

Charles Locke, who testified at the Citizens Commission's National hearings in Washington, served with C Company, 1/20 Battalion, 11th Brigade, American Division. Locke was only nineteen and what we call a grunt, an infantry rifleman, when he served with this, the same unit that Lt. Calley was in but this was two years after the My Lai massacre. The men in Locke's unit wore helmet bands with the motto "Remember My Lai." When asked by an American journalist what this saying meant, Locke responded that, "My Lai was an example of what should be done over there, what the higher echelon wants done over there," Locke never had any formal education on guerrilla warfare, yet he knew instinctively what the Brass was up to with principles like pacification. He stated it simply. "It's a sea of people over there, and they've got to dry up the sea in order to get the so-called bad guys." Pacification is genocide, America's Final Solution.

Another one of Nixon's Southeast Asia advisors, Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute, perceived that the United States was faced with a dilemma - how to silence the irksome anti-war movement and at the same time, permit the war to continue until the United States achieves total control of Viet Nam. His ingenious solution was to withdraw United States troops, and to replace them with ARVN's and machines - and to, in his words, "instrumentalize the battlefield." This would allow the United States government to announce the eventual withdrawal of all combat troops; the catch is that all combat troops seems like all troops, but in fact, it's not more than 300,000 men. This leaves 200,000 so called support troops (artillery units, bombers, etc.), and advisors and technicians. These troops would be removed from the field and relocated in fortified strongholds, which would secure the bases around the cities, the cities themselves, and the East Coast, thus implementing the enclave theory.

To reduce the weekly body count of dead GI's that was making such upsetting copy in the U.S. newspapers, Kahn suggested using sensors. Sensors are light, heat, noise and smell detectors for enemy movements. The sensors are attached to a computer at Tanshonnut, a major military airbase near Saigon. This computer automatically sets off a F-105 aircraft, over which the pilot has no control, which flies to the sensed area and bombs everything there to bits. The logic behind this is that everybody out there is enemy, which turns out to be most of the Vietnamese population. To date, 1.78 billion dollars have been spent on sensors. The military has asked Congress for a total of 20 billion dillars in order for sensors to be operational around every enclave. They call this the "Project to Save Lives" or Vietnamization, clearly even more cynical than its precursor, Pacification.

Most American ground operations in Indochina utilize the search and destroy tactic. The following is an analysis of search and destroy by George Pipkin of the Institute of Policy Studies. Search and destroy operations directed against enemy forces are usually referred to as "spoiling operations". They usually develop from the low levels of combat and command to upper ones, and merge after the enemy force has been detected from a sanctuary in a neutral country such as Cambodia or Laos. The operations are thrown together as rapidly as possible, usually as precise intelligence of the growing military threat is in the process of being developed. Indications of an enemy force may come into a divisional command post which do not warrant the commitment of a large force. A batallion or company size unit is dispatched, and if it runs into a superior opposing force, it is protected by massive air and artillery firepower while reinforcements arc sent out. Gradually the level of committed forces grows until the enemy is overwhelmed. This technique is referred to as the "pile on", and is one of the main tactics of spoiling operations. From the standpoint of technology, it begins by employment of mobility and brings in the employment of overwhelming firepower as the action develops. Platoons which are inserted into the jungle by helicopter only survive contact with the enemy if overwhelming firepower is employed in order to form protective "firescreens" around the threatened men until rapid air mobility can bring reinforcements. The air mobility which made it possible to put the men out on a limb in the first place, necessitates the overwhelming firepower which gets them off. It also necessitates its own further use if contact is made, and fast reaction forces arc flown to the scene of the firefight. In spoiling operations, the level of command at the start is usually low-batallion or brigade. As the level of combat accelerates, higher and higher ranking commanders arrive overhead in their helicopters to take over, and the level of operational command gradually rises. Targets are developed where they are found, making it increasingly more difficult to have any semblence of fire regulation. When an American unit is in danger of being wiped out, the artillery will be called in whether or not it is in a free fire zone and more than 1000 meters from a populated village, because the stage has already been set for the situation which justifies practically anything for the protection of American men under fire. In this way, rules of fire which may be set up on paper to minimize civilian casualties are short-circuited by the nature of the tactics which are employed within them.

All of these allegations arc supported by the testimony of the hundreds of Vietnam veterans who have testified publically about their experiences, during this last year in hearings around the United States.

What follows are excerpts from some of those testimonies; detailed descriptions in the veterans' own words of the application and results of these policies.

Don Engol was a Marine Corps captain and helicopter pilot who flew over five hundred combat missions in Vietnam. He relates the following story: "This one day in April of 1967, I had finished flying early, about five o'clock. I was sitting up on the bunker eating my C-rations when I spotted two F-4 Phantom jets coming out of the west. These planes, it's pretty easy for a pilot to pick out planes, I mean it's your job you know, you're afraid of everything that moves when you're in the air so there was no doubt about recognition. We were in Khe San and right south of us was a village called Long Ve. It was an armed, government village with a helicopter pad clearly marked which was quite distinguishable from the air. These two F-4's, and this was not a free fire zone, just pickled their bombs on this village, they really lowered the boom. We flew till one AM in the morning trying to pull out survivors - we pulled out approximately 150 casualtiees. Most of the people we just left because they were dead. It was just women, children and old men. They used cluster bomb units on them, napalm, anything you could think of." Don also told of how he had flown many missions into Laos as early as February 1969.

Major Gordon Livingston, a Doctor and a West Point Graduate, served with then Colonel George S. Patton in the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment.

Livingston tells how physicians, whose roles as non-combatants is clearly outlined in the Geneva Convention, used such drugs as sodium penothol or sucsoneal coline, a drug which induces paralysis, in attempts to illicit information from prisoners. These, war crimes policies wery so well integrated into Patton's unit that even the chaplain prayed for a big body count. Livingston relates the following story: "It occured about February, 1969, and the specific words of the prayer went as follows: "The standing order of the regiment was 'to find the bastards and pile on.' This was printed on signs in every bivuac area. And that in fact, is what the chaplain prayed for when asked to pray for a large body count. He said, "Help us, Oh Lord, to fulfill the standing order of this regiment. Give us the wisdom to find the bastards and the strength to pile on"."

First Lt. Larry Rottman served as the Information Officer for the 25th Division. Rottman, in his testimony, describes in vivid detail the results of Operation Junction City, which began on February 22, 1967, and ended on May 16 of the same year. These are his words:

"By June of 1967 the entire nine-hundred square-mile Elephant Ear area had been declared a free fire zone, meaning that anything that moved in it would be shot, burned, or killed. Flying over that area in helicopters I could sec how the defoliation had reduced the jungle to just barren soil and dead trees. You probably all know how a typical operation of this kind occurs, with air strikes and so on and so forth. I'll just give you a few figures. The Operation Junction City for the 25th Infrantry Division began with B-52 bomb raids which dropped a total of 16,000 two hundred, five hundred pound bombs. There were also 1,757 air support sorties by Phantom and Sky Hawk attack bombers. The jets expended 1,648 tons of napalm, 1,104 tons of other kinds of bombs, and countless hundreds of thousands of 2.75 rockets and machine-gun fire. After the prepping, the objects to be searched for by the ground crews: They looked for weapons, foodstuffs, medical supplies, bunkers, tunnels, or anything that could be of use to the enemy. Villages, hamlets, or any other signs of life were to be completely destoryed. Houses were burned, food confiscated, poisoned or urinated on: household items smashed, livestock killed or mutilated, banana trees and gardens destroyed, burned, uprooted. Twenty-one villages in Tay Ninh Province were destroyed during this operation. Af Trai Vai, Zamet - and I won't go through all of them. I have a list of twenty-one if you're interested. You can see them. I brought the map with me, the Joint Operations Ground Map, which you can obtain from the government map bureau, number 1501GNC487 which is standard issue to all ground combat units. I have the map here, I'll be glad to show it to anybody, as well as the villages, later on."

On one occasion, Rottman serving in his capacity as information officer, was present during a briefing between General Westmoreland and the Commanding General of the 25 Division concerning body count. Rottman stated that official MACV policy was to obtain a body count of two thousand enemy per week. He says that to meet this figure, each division was given an unofficial but very real quota of VietCong to report killed. During a visit by General Westmoreland in 1968, just the week following the beginning of Tes, "I heard him tell the commanding general that the 25th Division needed to put more emphasis on body count, 'I want more bodies', that's a direct quote. The commanding general of the division passed on the pressure to brigade commanders who passed it on to batallion commanders to company commanders to platoon leaders, squad leaders and on down until every man was affected by this body count obsession."

Ken Campbell was a lance corporal with the First Murine Division in Vietnam and a forward artillery observer. This is the story that he tells of how artillery was meted out to the enemy. "I was taught in forward observe school that artillery was the greatest killer on the battlefield, and I was to use it whenever possible and use it as much as possible. In mid-August of 1968 my company was at a place called Con Thien, which I believe is familiar to quite a few people. In Con Thien there is an observation post called O.P.I. From this observation post I observed two villages north of the demilitarized zone. These were not in the DMZ: they were north of it actually in the southern part of North Vietnam. I observed these villages through a pair of ship's binoculars, which are quite a hit more powerful than regular binoculars; they are 20 by 120 power. And these villages were approximately ten miles away, but through these binoculars I could see them clearly.

Upon observing these villages. I went back to the FSCC bunker, which is the Fire Support Co-ordinating Centre. I went to a lieutenant there, who was at the time the officer in charge of the bunker. He was a personal friend of mine because he served as the FO team's lieutenant when I first arrived in Vietnam, and then he was switched to the FSCC post after I was there for about three or four months. I mentioned the fact that I saw these villages and asked to fire on them. He gave me permission to fire on them, and I told him what they were that there didn't seem to be any kind of activity there. But being as they were in a free lire zone I thought maybe I could fire on them. And he said yes, I could fire on them, and a good reason for firing on them is because they supply the NVA wild food and support and that they were indeed the enemy also. So I went back to the observation post and I called in directed heavy artillery on these two villages. I directed 8-inch high explosive rounds, 175 millimeter high-explosive rounds and with mixed fuse. That is a variable time and quick fuse. The variable lime fuse would set the round off approximately twenty meters above the ground and would send shrapnel down and out, and the quite fuse would go off on the ground on impact. I fired both these missions, and observed the firing and I would make the approximation of about twenty-five, maybe even more, hootches destroyed and I could actually see farmers, women and children, running from the exploding rounds, and some of them not making it, I believe that approximately twenty people didn't make it to safely."

Bart Osborne worked closely with the CIA in the Planning assassination programme. He relates certain interrogation techniques that were successfully used to gain information. "I went along twice," Osborn tells, "with the Third Marine Division when they would go up in helicopter and take two detainees along. They used one as a scare mechanism for the other. If they wanted to interrogate detainee A, they would take someone along who was either, in bad health or whom they had already written off as a loss—take both these Vietnamese along in the helicopter and they would say, they would start investigating Detainee B, the one they had no interest in and they wouldn't get any information out of him and so they would threaten to throw him out of the helicopter. All the time, of course, the detainee they wanted information from was watching. And they would threaten and threaten and, finally, they would throw him out of the helicopter. I was there when this happened twice and it was very effective, because, of course, at the time the step one was to throw the person out of the helicopter and step two was to say, 'You're next. And that quite often broke them down demoralized them, and at that point they would give whatever information. Sometimes the information was accurate: sometimes this was considered an ineffective method of investigation. Sometimes the Vietnamese, when threatened with things like the towel treatment or the telephone treatment or in one case, the helicopter incident, would start babbling anything at all would say whatever you he fell, wanted to hear, and this, again, was ineffective. But that was the modus operandi used, and those were the incidents that I actually was involved in."

Osborne also relates the story of how a Vietnamese agent, considered dangerous by the American command, was terminated with extreme prejudice. "I had at one point in my employ a woman who was Chinese and who lived in Vietnam. She was a Chinese Vietnamese citizen. She was educated to the point where she spoke several languages, who spoke fluent English, And I used her as an interpreter and also as a guide to the culture that I was working in because as a Westerner, there were a lot of things there that I wouldn't have been sensitive to. She was my guide in that respect. She also was my direct contact with people I didn't want to meet because I didn't want them to know me because in case they got compromised, they couldn't compromise me. So she was my go-between. She acted as an interpreter, guide and support agent, dial is a courier. And at one point she had been because we were short of people who were dial well trained in Vietnamese - she was cross-exposed to operations. She was into a lot of my operations. She worked with and incidentally, I ran only unilateral operations. American operations only, not in co-operation with the Vietnamese, which is against the Geneva Convention.

And so this was a sensitive area. When it was determined by a military intelligence captain that she was loo cross-exposed, he reported that to Saigon and he got the reading back that she ought to be terminated from the scene. She ought to be let go. It was not determined it wasn't said whether she ought to be terminated with prejudice or not. He took it upon himself to terminate her by murdering her. He murdered her with a .45 in a street in Danang, shot her in the neck and let her lay in the street there. It was said dial there were VietCong agents, or terrorists, or sappers, or something in the area who shot her, and it was plausible because we knew that she was heavily involved in intelligence and would have been targeted by the unfriendlies—that's the VietCong."