“had been cut to pieces by booby traps all around [their] hamlet.”68 David Donovan was revolted by My Lai, but asserts that the atrocity issue was overblown because civilian deaths are an unavoidable consequence of war.69 Caputo admits that two of his men executed a captured Vietcong on his implicit orders. He argues, though, that neither he nor his men were to blame for the prisoner’s death because the madness of war drove them to commit the act.70
Even though a few memoirists minimized or made excuses for American atrocities, these sentiments are overshadowed by the huge number and wide variety of war crimes that are documented in veterans’ narratives. Perhaps the most commonly related atrocities are those committed against enemy soldiers. Numerous authors say prisoners were beaten, tortured, or executed by GIs and their Vietnamese allies. Such acts were sometimes retribution for enemy atrocities. Mason saw an American sergeant shoot a group of bound NVA prisoners because his comrades had recently been tortured and mutilated after being captured.71 In other cases, US soldiers committed atrocities against their enemies out of frustration. Two of Frederick Downs’s platoon mates slashed a corpse with knives because of the rage they felt at all their efforts resulting in only the death of “one lousy dink.”72 In still other cases, there is no obvious reason for such behavior. Anderson’s unit, for instance, executed a group of wounded NVA soldiers simply because there were “no witnesses in the bush.”73
The most disturbing, and probably most frequent, atrocity against enemy combatants that appears in veteran narratives is the taking of body parts as souvenirs. Memoirists write about GIs who wore necklaces strung with human ears,74 drank whiskey out of skulls, joked about tossing severed ears into mess hall soup,75 and rigged a skull to open and close its jaw so that it appeared to sing along to music.76 Several veterans even claim that they knew of soldiers who brought their macabre trophies back to the United States, or at least hoped to.77 Others say that GIs did not just hack up enemy bodies for souvenirs; they also set them in lifelike poses to get a laugh out of their comrades. Bodies were propped up, cigarettes put between their fingers,78 beer cans in their hands,79 and Playboy magazines placed on their laps.80 Johnnie M. Clark’s platoon mate retrieved a “spare leg” from a pile of NVA corpses, “shoved it into the crotch” of an enemy body to create the illusion that the dead man had three legs, and then laughed at his gruesome handiwork “until tears filled his eyes.”81
Twentieth-century GIs, Peter S. Kindsvatter explains, learned during training “that killing America’s enemies was not only legally sanctioned but also [their] duty.”82 But “this license to kill did not automatically instill willingness; soldiers also wanted to believe that the enemy deserved to die.”83 Soldiers were thus told that their foes were “godless, evil, barbaric, greedy for conquest, even bestial.”84 This propagandizing caused enemies to be dehumanized. Adversaries of various races and ethnicities received this treatment, but Asian enemies, who were “not ethnically and culturally akin to white America,” were especially dehumanized.85 This happened when US forces fought Japanese, Korean, and Chinese troops, and it happened again when they squared off against Vietnamese fighters. Vietnam-era GIs were taught from basic training onward that the VC were inhuman “gooks” and “dinks” that had to be exterminated.86 In light of this indoctrination, it is not surprising that US soldiers sometimes treated Vietnamese corpses more like playthings or slain animals than dead human beings.
Americans were not the only perpetrators of war crimes in Vietnam. Many veterans say that the Vietcong tortured captured GIs to death and mutilated their bodies. Mason, for example, writes about the horrific fate of two fellow helicopter pilots who were shot down during his tour. The pilots’ corpses were found skinned and dismembered, proof that they had been “caught on the ground” by the Vietcong after they crashed.87 Veteran memoirs, however, contain few references to enemy atrocities committed against civilians. This is appropriate because although “the Vietcong and North Vietnamese killed thousands of civilians . . . most of their atrocities were calculated assassinations of specific individuals.”88 In 1958, two years before the NLF was even officially established, “an estimated 700 government officials” were victims of such murders.89 In October 1966, Neil Sheehan of the New York Times reported that “over the past decade, about 20,000 persons have been assassinated by Communist terrorists.”90 Sheehan added, though, that “the gun and the knife of the Vietcong assassin are . . . far more selective” than US bombing raids that indiscriminately killed dozens of people at a time.91
The Vietcong had to be selective in their killing because they could not afford to alienate “the people.” The guerrillas relied on South Vietnamese villagers for food and shelter and needed civilian complicity to evade their adversaries, mount ambushes, and plant booby traps.92 The Vietcong infamously strayed from this pattern of behavior after taking control of the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. During their brief rule the Communists attempted to “not only destroy the government administration of the city, but to establish, in its place, a ‘revolutionary administration.’”93 Hundreds of Hue residents connected to the South Vietnamese government or the US “imperialists” were executed during this attempted political transformation.94 The victims were thrown into mass graves;95 some were buried alive.96 But the “Hue Massacre,” as despicable as it was, did not represent typical Vietcong or NVA conduct.
American troops, on the other hand, were not desperate to cultivate the goodwill of villagers. On top of this, civilians looked like the enemy, often aided the enemy, and were generally of a different race than GIs. Veterans document a wide range of war crimes involving civilians in their narratives, including beatings, rape, and murder. Caputo says that on two occasions his platoon went “nuts,” turning into “unrestrained savages” who burned down villages in fits of rage.97 Lee Childress, a veteran who contributed to Everything We Had, an oral history, says a fellow GI shot an old Vietnamese woman because she stole his pack of chewing gum.98 One of the first veteran narratives published was the ghostwritten memoir of Lieutenant William Calley, the only American soldier convicted for the My Lai murders. Calley is shockingly frank about his participation in the massacre, but he asserts that killing unarmed women and children was justified because they aided the Vietcong.99
Few narratives can be categorized as definitively antiwar. But many facets of these works put the American venture in Vietnam in a poor light, from the seemingly senseless and ineffective tactics employed by the US military, to the horrendous atrocities attributed to American troops. It seems odd, then, that another reoccurring theme in these accounts is the idea that American soldiers were victimized by Vietnamese civilians, the people who suffered the most in the war. Some reasons for this hatred of civilians are obvious. GIs became enraged when peasants did not warn them about booby traps planted in and around their villages. Many noncombatants actively aided the Vietcong and NVA, and many more were unwilling for various reasons to help American troops find their elusive enemies.
The idea of civilians as victimizers, however, goes beyond the role they played in hindering American combat operations. This concept also involves the feeling that while US soldiers were dying for South Vietnam’s freedom, the majority of its citizens were ungrateful and scornful of these sacrifices. One common manifestation of this attitude in memoirs is the portrayal of Vietnamese civilians as motivated by a single-minded desire for American dollars. The great majority of Vietnamese who appear in veterans’ accounts are people who tried to part GIs from their money: beggars, prostitutes and their pimps, sellers of shoddy souvenirs, thieves, and hustlers. The people portrayed as the greediest members of South Vietnamese society are the children who constantly swarmed US soldiers wherever they went, pleading for handouts of money, candy, and cigarettes.100 During James R. McDonough’s first day in Vietnam he was initially delighted to see groups of “smiling children . . . with grinning teeth and sparkling eyes” waving at him as he passed by in a jeep.101 But his delight turned to shock when he leaned out of the jeep to wave back at a group of boys and they instantly grabbed onto his arm and stole his watch.102
ARVN soldiers, according to memoirists, also ruthlessly took advantage of American