The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 11 | Article ID 2956 | Nov 01, 2008

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A My Lai a Month: How the US Fought the Vietnam War

Nick Turse

A My Lai a Month: How the US Fought theVietnam War

Nick Turse

A helicopter gunship pulls out of an attack in theMekong Delta during Speedy Express, January 1969.

AP/MCINERNEY

By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with itsverdant paddies and canal-side hamlets, wasthe rice bowl of South Vietnam and home tonearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one ofthe most important revolutionary strongholdsduring the Vietnam War. Despite its militarysignificance, State Department officials were"deeply concerned" about introducing a largenumber of US troops into the denselypopulated area, fearing that it would beimpossible to limit civilian carnage.

Vietnam Regions

Yet in late 1968, as peace talks in Paris gotunder way in earnest, US officials launched a"land rush" to pacify huge swaths of the Deltaand bring the population under the control ofthe South Vietnamese government in Saigon.To this end, from December 1968 through May1969, a large-scale operation was carried outby the Ninth Infantry Division, with supportfrom nondivision assets ranging fromhelicopter gunships to B-52 bombers. The

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offensive, known as Operation Speedy Express,claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at acost of only 267 American lives. Althoughguerrillas were known to be well armed, thedivision captured only 748 weapons.

In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story ofthe 1968 My Lai massacre, during which UStroops slaughtered more than 500 civilians inQuang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta.Some months later, in May 1970, a self-described "grunt" who participated in SpeedyExpress wrote a confidential letter to WilliamWestmoreland, then Army chief of staff, sayingthat the Ninth Division's atrocities amounted to"a My Lay each month for over a year." In his1976 memoir A Soldier Reports, Westmorelandinsisted, "The Army investigated every case [ofpossible war crimes], no matter who made theallegation," and claimed that "none of thecrimes even remotely approached themagnitude and horror of My Lai." Yet hepersonally took action to quash an investigationinto the large-scale atrocities described in thesoldier's letter.

Mylai victims

I uncovered that letter and two others, eachunsigned or signed only "Concerned Sergeant,"in the National Archives in 2002, in a collectionof files about the sergeant's case that had been

declassified but forgotten, launching whatbecame a years-long investigation. Recordsshow that his allegations--of helicoptergunships mowing down noncombatants, ofairstrikes on villages, of farmers gunned downin their fields while commanders pressedrelentlessly for high body counts--were asource of high-level concern.

A review of the letter by a Pentagon expertfound his claims to be extremely plausible, andmilitary officials tentatively identified the letterwriter as George Lewis, a Purple Heartrecipient who served with the Ninth Division inthe Delta from June 1968 through May 1969.Yet there is no record that investigators evercontacted him. Now, through my owninvestigation--using material from four majorcollections of archival and personal papers,including confidential letters, accounts ofsecret Pentagon briefings, unpublishedinterviews with Vietnamese survivors andmilitary officials conducted in the 1970s byNewsweek reporters, as well as freshinterviews with Ninth Division officers andenlisted personnel--I have been able tocorroborate the sergeant's horrific claims. Theinvestigation paints a disturbing picture ofcivilian slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfsMy Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army's highestlevels. The killings were no accident oraberration. They were instead the result ofcommand policies that turned wide swaths ofthe Mekong Delta into "free-fire zones" in arelentless effort to achieve a high body count.While the carnage in the Delta did not begin orend with Speedy Express, the operationprovides a harsh new snapshot of the abjectslaughter that typified US actions during theVietnam War.

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The Mekong Delta, the rice basket of South Vietnam

The Concerned Sergeant

An inkling that something terrible had takenplace in the Mekong Delta appeared in a mostunlikely source--a formerly confidentialSeptember 1969 Senior Officer DebriefingReport by none other than the commander ofthe Ninth Division, then Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell,who came to be known inside the military as"the Butcher of the Delta" because of his single-minded fixation on body count. In the report,copies of which were sent to Westmoreland'soffice and to other high-ranking officials, Ewellcandidly noted that while the Ninth Divisionstressed the "discriminate and selective use offirepower," in some areas of the Delta "wherethis emphasis wasn't applied or wasn't feasible,the countryside looked like the Verdunbattlefields," the site of a notoriously bloodyWorld War I battle.

Col. David Hackworth briefs Gen. Julian Ewell (right)

That December, a document produced by theNational Liberation Front sharpened thepicture. It reported that between December 1,1968, and April 1, 1969, primarily in the Deltaprovinces of Kien Hoa and Dinh Tuong, the "9thDivision launched an 'express raid'" and"mopped up many areas, slaughtering 3,000people, mostly old folks, women and children,and destroying thousands of houses, hundredsof hectares of fields and orchards." But likemost NLF reports of civilian atrocities, this onewas almost certainly dismissed as propagandaby US officials. A United Press Internationalreport that same month, in which US adviserscharged the division with having driven up thebody count by killing civilians with helicoptergunships and artillery, was also largelyignored.

Then, in May 1970, the Concerned Sergeant'sten-page letter arrived in Westmoreland'soffice, charging that he had "information aboutthings as bad as My Lay" and laying out, indetail, the human cost of Operation SpeedyExpress.

In that first letter, the sergeant wrote not of ahandful of massacres but of official commandpolicies that had led to the killings of thousandsof innocents:

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Sir, the 9th Division did nothing toprevent the killing, and by pushingthe body the count so hard, wewere "told" to kill many times moreVietnamese than at My Lay, andvery few per cents of them did weknow were enemy....

In case you don't think I mean lots ofVietnamese got killed this way, I can give yousome idea how many. A batalion would killmaybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in theBrigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalionclaimed almost 1000 body counts one month!)If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lotsmore, then I am trying to tell you about120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month forover a year....

The snipers would get 5 or 10 a day, and I thinkall 4 batalions had sniper teams. Thats 20 a dayor at least 600 each month. Again, if I am 10%right then the snipers [alone] were a My Layevery other month.

In this letter, and two more sent the followingyear to other high-ranking generals, thesergeant reported that artillery, airstrikes andhelicopter gunships had wreaked havoc onpopulated areas. All it would take, he said,were a few shots from a village or a nearby treeline and troops would "always call for artilleryor gunships or airstrikes." "Lots of times," hewrote, "it would get called for even if we didn'tget shot at. And then when [we would] get inthe village there would be women and kidscrying and sometimes hurt or dead." Theattacks were excused, he said, because theareas were deemed free-fire zones.

Burning a “Viet Cong base camp” in the Mekongdelta, June 3, 1968 at Cai Lay

The sergeant wrote that the unit's policy was toshoot not only guerrilla fighters (whom UStroops called Vietcong or VC) but anyone whoran. This was the "Number one killer" ofunarmed civilians, he wrote, explaining thathelicopters "would hover over a guy in thefields till he got scared and run and they'd zaphim" and that the Ninth Division's snipersgunned down farmers from long range toincrease the body count. He reported that itwas common to detain unarmed civilians andforce them to walk in front of a unit's point manin order to trip enemy booby traps. "None [of]us wanted to get blown away," he wrote, "but itwasn't right to use...civilians to set the minesoff." He also explained the pitifully lowweapons ratio:

"Compare them [body countrecords] with the number ofweapons we got . Not thecashays [caches] , or theweapons we found after a bigfight with the hard cores, but adead VC with a weapon. TheGeneral just had to know aboutthe wrong killings over theweapons . I f we repor tedweapons we had to turn them in,

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so we would say that theweapons was destroyed bybullets or dropped in a canal orpad[d]y. In the dry season,before the monsoons, there wasplaces where lots of the canalswas dry and all the pad[dies]were. The General must haveknown this was made up."

According to the Concerned Sergeant, thesekillings all took place for one reason: "theGeneral in charge and all the commanders,riding us all the time to get a big body count."He noted, "Nobody ever gave direct orders to'shoot civilians' that I know of, but the resultsdidn't show any different than if...they hadordered it. The Vietnamese were dead, victimsof the body count pressure and nobody caredenough to try to stop it."

The Butcher of the Delta and Rice PaddyDaddy

During Ewell's time commanding the NinthDivision, from February 1968 to April 1969, hisunits achieved remarkably high kill ratios.While the historical US average was ten to one,Ewell's troops reportedly achieved seventy-sixto one in March 1969. Ewell's obsession withbody count was enthusiastically shared by hisdeputy, then Col. Ira "Jim" Hunt, who served asa brigade commander in the Ninth Division andas Ewell's chief of staff.

"Hunt, who was our BrigadeCommander for awhile and thenwas an assistant general...usedto holler and curse over therad io and ta lk about thegoddamn gooks, and tell theg u n s h i p s t o s h o o t t h esonofabitches, this is a free firezone," wrote the ConcernedSergeant. Hunt, he said, "didn'tcare about the Vietnamese or us,he just wanted the most ofeverything, including body

count"; "Hunt was...alwayscussing and screaming over therad io f rom h is C and See[ C o m m a n d a n d C o n t r o lhelicopter] to the GIs or theg u n s h i p s t o s h o o t s o m eVietnamese he saw runningwhen he didn't know if they hada weapon or was women orwhat."

The sergeant wrote that his unit's artilleryforward observer (FO) "would tell my companycommander he couldn't shoot in the villagebecause it was in the population overlay." Thebattalion commander would then "get mad andcuss over the radio at my company commanderand...declare a contact [with the enemy] so theFO would shoot anyway. I was there, and wewasn't in contact but my company commanderand the FO would do anything to get the COL[colonel] off there back." He went on, "Hewouldn't even listen when the FO wanted towait till after dark and use air burst WP [whitephosphorus] rounds to adjust...so as not to zapany hooches." Instead, the colonel said "it hadto be HE [high explosive] right in the houses."

In a 2006 interview I conducted with DeborahNelson, then a reporter for the Los AngelesTimes, Ira Hunt claimed that the Ninth Divisiondid not fire artillery near villages. He alsodenied any knowledge of the ConcernedSergeant's allegations and argued against thenotion that a command emphasis on body countled to the mass killing of civilians. "No one'sgoing to say that innocent civilians aren't killedin wartime, but we try to keep it down to theabsolute minimum," he said. "The civiliandeaths are anathema, but we did our best toprotect civilians. I find it unbelievable thatpeople would go out and shoot innocentcivilians just to increase a body count." Butinterviews with several participants in SpeedyExpress, together with public testimony andpublished accounts, strongly confirm theallegations in the sergeant's letters.

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The Concerned Sergeant 's battal ioncommander, referred to in the letters, was thelate David Hackworth, who took command ofthe Ninth Division's 4/39th Infantry in January1969. In a 2002 memoir, Steel My Soldiers'Hearts, he echoed the sergeant's allegationsabout the overwhelming pressure to producehigh body counts. "A lot of innocent Vietnamesecivilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have the highest count in theland," he wrote. He also noted that when Huntsubmitted a recommendation for a citation,citing a huge kill ratio, he left out theuncomfortable fact that "the 9th Division hadthe lowest weapons-captured-to-enemy-killedratio in Vietnam."

During Speedy Express, Maj. William Taylor Jr.saw Hunt in action, too, and in a Septemberinterview he echoed the Concerned Sergeant'sassessment. Now a retired colonel and senioradviser at the Center for Strategic andInternational Studies, Taylor recalled flyingover rice paddies with Hunt: "He saidsomething to the pilot, and all of a sudden thedoor gunner was firing a .50-caliber machinegun out the door, and I said, 'What the hell isthat?' He said, 'See those black pajamas downthere in the rice paddies? They're Vietcong. Wejust killed two of them.'" Immediatelyafterward, Hunt spoke again to the pilot. "Hewas talking body count," Taylor said."Reporting body count." Later he asked Hunthow he could identify VC from the helicopter,without seeing weapons or receiving groundfire. "He said, 'Because they're wearing blackpajamas.' I said, 'Well, Sir, I thought workers inthe fields wore black pajamas.' He said, 'No,not around here. Black pajamas are Vietcong.'"

Like Hackworth, Taylor recalled an overridingemphasis on body count. It was "the mostimportant measure of success, and it camefrom the personal example of the NinthDivision commander, General Julian Ewell," hesaid. "I saw it directly. Body count waseverything."

In August I spoke with Gary Nordstrom, acombat medic with the Ninth Division'sCompany C, 2/39th Infantry, during SpeedyExpress, who described how the body countemphasis filtered down to the field. "For allenlisted people, that was the mentality," herecalled. "Get the body count. Get the bodycount. Get the body count. It was prevalenteverywhere. I think it was the mind-set of theofficer corps from the top down." In multipleinstances, his unit fired on Vietnamese for noother reason than that they were running. "Onat least one occasion," he said, "I went andconfirmed that they were dead."

In recent months, I spoke with two NinthDivision officers who feuded with Ewell overdivision policies. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard,who commanded the division's five artillerybattalions during his 1968-69 tour, spoke to meof Ewell's heavy emphasis on body count andsaid he was never apprised of any restrictionsabout firing in or near villages. "There isn't anyquestion that our operations resulted in civiliancasualties," he told me in July. Gard recalledarguing with Ewell once about firing artilleryon a village after receiving mortar fire from it."I told him no, I thought it was unwise to dothat," he said in a 2006 interview with me andDeborah Nelson. "We had a confrontation onthe issue." Gard also served with Hunt, whomhe succeeded as division chief of staff. Whenasked if Hunt, too, pressed for a large bodycount, Gard responded, "Big time." "Jim Huntdubbed himself 'Rice Paddy Daddy,'" Gardrecalled, referring to Hunt's radio call sign. "Hewent berserk."

Maj. Edwin Deagle served in the division fromJuly 1968 until June 1969, first as an aide toEwell and Hunt and then as executive officer(XO) of the division's 2/60th Infantry duringSpeedy Express. In September he spoke to meabout "the tremendous amount of pressure thatEwell put on all of the combat unit operations,including artillery, which tended to createcircumstances under which the number of

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civilian casualties would rise." Concernedspecifically that pressure on artillery units haderoded most safeguards on firing near villages,he confronted his commander. "We'll end upkilling a lot of civilians," he told Ewell.

Deagle further recalled an incident after hetook over as XO when he was listening on theradio as one of his units stumbled into anambush and lost its company commander,leaving a junior officer in charge. Confused andunable to outmaneuver the enemy forces, thelieutenant called in a helicopter strike withimprecise instructions. "They f ired atremendous amount of 2.75 [mm rockets] intothe town," Deagle recalled, "and that killed atotal of about 145 family members orVietnamese civil ians."

Deagle undertook extensive statistical analysisof the division and found that the 2/60th, one often infantry battalions, accounted for adisproportionate 40 percent of the weaponscaptured. Yet even in his atypical battalion, abody count mind-set prevailed, according tocombat medic Wayne Smith, who arrived in thelast days of Speedy Express and ultimatelyserved with the 2/60th. "It was all about bodycount," he recalled in June. When it came tofree-fire zones, "Anyone there was fair game,"Smith said. "That's how [it] went down.Sometimes they may have had weapons. Othertimes not. But if they were in an area, we damnsure would try to kill them."

Another American to witness the carnage wasJohn Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenantco lone l who became the ch ie f o f USpacification efforts in the Mekong Delta inFebruary 1969. He flew along on some of theNinth Division's night-time helicopteroperations. According to notes from anunpublished 1975 interview with New YorkTimes Vietnam War correspondent NeilSheehan, Vann's deputy, Col. David Farnham,said Vann found that troops used early night-vision devices to target any and all people,

homes or water buffalo they spotted. Noattempt was made to determine whether thepeople were civilians or enemies, and a largenumber of noncombatants were killed orwounded as a result.

Louis Janowski, who served as an adviser in theDelta during Speedy Express, saw much of thesame and was scathing in an internal 1970 end-of-tour report. In it, he called other Deltahelicopter operations, known as the Phantomprogram, a form of "non selective terrorism." "Ihave flown Phantom III missions and havemedivaced [helicopter evacuated] enoughelderly people and children to firmly believethat the percentage of Viet Cong killed bysupport assets is roughly equal to thepercentage of Viet Cong in the population," hewrote, indicating a pattern of completelyindiscriminate killing. "That is, if 8% of thepopulation [of] an area is VC about 8% of thepeople we kill are VC."

An adviser in another Delta province, JeffreyRecord, also witnessed the carnage visited oncivilians by the Phantom program duringSpeedy Express. In a 1971 Washington Monthlyarticle, Record recalled watching as helicoptergunships strafed a herd of water buffalo andthe six or seven children tending them.Seconds later, the tranquil paddy had been"transformed into a bloody ooze littered withbits of mangled flesh," Record wrote. "The deadboys and the water buffalo were added to theofficial body count of the Viet Cong."

The Cover-Up

In April 1969 Ewell was promoted to head IIField Force, Vietnam, then the largest UScombat command in the world. That samemonth, in an AP story, Ira Hunt defended thebody count against those who called it a"terrible measure of progress." The story alsoquoted a senior officer who denied deliberatelykilling noncombatants, while granting thatnoncombatant deaths resulted from NinthDivision operations. "'Have we killed innocent

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civilians?' [he] asked rhetorically during aninterview. 'Hell yes,' he replied, 'but so do theSouth Vietnamese.'"

In the spring of 1970, as Ewell was readying toleave Vietnam to serve as the top US militaryadviser at the Paris peace talks, R. KenleyWebster, the Army's acting general counsel,read the Concerned Sergeant's letter at ArmySecretary Stanley Resor's request. According toa memo Webster wrote at the time, which wasamong the documents I uncovered in theNational Archives, he was "impressed by itsforcefulness" and "sincerity" and commissionedan anonymous internal report from a respectedVietnam veteran. That report endorsed theConcerned Sergeant's contentions:

It is common knowledge that anofficer's career can be made ordestroyed in Vietnam.... Undersuch circumstances--and especiallyif such incentives as stand-downs,R&R [ res t and re laxat ion]allocations, and decorations aretied to body count figures--thepressure to kill indiscriminately, orat least report every Vietnamesecasualty as an enemy casualty,would seem to be practicallyirresistible.

In June 1970 Webster sent a memo, with thereview, to Resor, recommending that he conferwith Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, bythen the top commander in Vietnam, about thematter. According to Army documents, Resorand Abrams discussed the allegations, but noinvestigation was launched.

News of the atrocities in the Delta was alreadyleaking into public view. That winter, veteransof Speedy Express spoke out about the killingof civilians at the National Veterans' Inquiry inWashington, and the Winter SoldierInvestigation in Detroit. In April 1971, at

hearings chaired by Representative RonaldDellums, Vietnam veteran West Point graduatestestified to Ewell's "body count mania." Thatsame month, Record's Washington Monthlypiece appeared.

Within days, Robert Komer, formerly a deputyto Westmoreland and chief of pacificationefforts in Vietnam, wrote to Vann seeking hisassessment of the article and noting, "It ringsall too true!" In early May 1971, Vann repliedto Komer, by then a consultant with the RANDCorporation, that "the US is on very shakyground on either the Phantom or other 'hunter-killer' airborne missions and literally hundredsof horrible examples have been documented byirate advisors, both military and civilian."

By this time, Ira Hunt had returned fromVietnam and, in a strange twist of fate, wasleading the Army's investigation of Col. OranHenderson, the brigade commander whose unitcarried out the My Lai massacre. AlthoughHunt recommended only an Article 15--a mild,nonjudicial punishment--Henderson was court-martialed. On May 24 Henderson dropped abombshell, stating that the mass killing was noaberration. "Every unit of brigade size has itsMy Lai hidden someplace," he said. The onlyreason they remained unknown was "every unitdoesn't have a Ridenhour." In fact, Hunt'sbrigade did have a whistleblower like RonRidenhour, but instead of sending letters todozens of prominent government and militaryofficials, the Concerned Sergeant fatefully kepthis complaints within the Army--fearing, hewrote, that going public would get the Army "inmore trouble."

The lack of public exposure allowed themilitary to paper over the allegations. InAugust 1971, well over a year after thesergeant's first letter to Westmoreland, anArmy memo noted that the Cr iminalInvestigation Division was finally attempting toidentify and locate the letter writer--not toinvestigate his claims but "to prevent his

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complaints [from] reaching Mr. Dellums." InSeptember Westmoreland's office directed CIDto identify the Concerned Sergeant and to"assure h im the Army i s beg inn inginvestigation of his allegations"; within days,CID reported that the division had "tentativelyidentified" him and would seek an interview.But on the same day as that CID report, aWestmoreland aide wrote a memo stating thatthe general had sought the advice of ThaddeusBeal, an Army under secretary and civilianlawyer, who counseled that since theConcerned Sergeant's letters were writtenanonymously, the Army could legitimatelydiscount them. In the memo, the aidesummarized Westmoreland's thoughts bysaying, "We have done as much as we can doon this case," and "he again reiterated he wasnot so sure we should send anything out to thefield on this matter of general war crimesallegations." Shortly thereafter, at a lateSeptember meeting between CID officials andtop Army personnel, the investigation that hadbarely been launched was officially killed.

Burying the Story

In 1971, something caught the eye of AlexShimkin, a Newsweek stringer fluent inVietnamese, as he pored over documentsissued by the US Military Assistance Command,Vietnam, or MACV, which coordinated all USmilitary activities in South Vietnam: theradically skewed ratio of enemy dead toweapons captured during Speedy Express. Atthe urging of Kevin Buckley, Newsweek'sSaigon bureau chief, and with no knowledge ofthe Concerned Sergeant's allegations, Shimkinbegan an exhaustive analysis of MACVdocuments that offered dates, locations anddetailed statistics. From there, he and Buckleybegan to dig.

They interviewed US civilian and militaryofficials at all levels, combed through civilianhospital records and traveled into areas of theDelta hardest hit by Speedy Express to talk to

Vietnamese survivors. What they learned--muchof it documented in unpublished interviews andnotes that I recently obtained from Buckley--echoed exactly what the Concerned Sergeantconfided to Westmoreland and the other topgenerals. Their sources all assured them therewas no shortage of arms among the enemy toaccount for the gross kills-to-weapons disparity.The only explanation for the ratio, theydiscovered, was that a great many of the deadwere civilians. Huge numbers of air strikes haddecimated the countryside. Withering artilleryand mortar barrages were carried out aroundthe clock. Many, if not most, kills were loggedby helicopters and occurred at night.

"The horror was worse than MyLai," one American official familiarwith the Ninth Infantry Division'soperations in the Delta toldBuckley. "But with the 9th, thecivilian casualties came in dribblesand were pieced out over a longtime. And most of them wereinflicted from the air and at night.Also, they were sanctioned by thecommand's insistence on high bodycounts." Another quantified thematter, stating that as many as5,000 of those killed during theoperation were civilians.

Accounts from Vietnamese survivors in KienHoa and Dinh Tuong echoed the scenariosrelated by the Concerned Sergeant. Buckleyand Shimkin spoke to a group of village elderswho knew of thirty civilians who were killedwhen US troops used them as human minedetectors. An elderly Vietnamese man fromKien Hoa told them, "The Americans destroyedevery house with artillery, air strikes or byburning them down with cigarette lighters.About 100 people were killed by bombing."Another man, Mr. Hien, recalled, "Thehelicopters shot up the area even in daylightbecause people working in their fields and

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gardens would become afraid when thehelicopters approached, and began to runaway."

Another older man from Kien Hoa, Mr. Ba,recalled, "When the Americans came in early1969 there was artillery fire on the villageevery night and several B-52 strikes whichplowed up the earth." Not only did MACVrecords show bombings in the exact area of thevillage; the account was confirmed byinterviews with a local Vietcong medic wholater joined the US-allied South Vietnameseforces. He told them that "hundreds of artilleryrounds landed in the village, causing manycasualties." He continued, "I worked for a[National Liberation] Front doctor and he oftenoperated on forty or more people a day. Hishospital took care of at least a thousand peoplefrom four villages in early 1969."

Buckley and Shimkin found records showingthat during Speedy Express, 76 percent of the1,882 war-injured civilians treated in the BenTre provincial hospital in Kien Hoa--whichserved only one tiny area of the vast Delta--were wounded by US firepower. And even thislarge number was likely an undercount ofcasualties. "Many people who were woundeddied on their way to hospitals," said one USofficial. "Many others were treated at home, orin hospitals run by the VC, or in smalldispensaries operated by the [SouthVietnamese Army]. The people who got to BenTre were lucky."

In November 1971 Buckley sent a letter toMACV that echoed the Concerned Sergeant'sclaims of mass carnage during Speedy Express.Citing the lopsided kills-to-weapons ratio,Buckley wrote, "Research in the area byNewsweek indicates that a considerableproportion of those people killed were non-combatant civilians." On December 2 MACVconfirmed the ratio and many of Buckley'sdetails: "A high percentage of casualties wereinflicted at night"; "A high percentage of the

casualties were inflicted by the Air Cavalry andArmy Aviation [helicopter] units"; but withcaveats and the insistence that MACV wasunable to substantiate the "claim that aconsiderable proportion of the casualties werenon-combatant civilians." Instead, MACVcontended that many of the dead wereunarmed guerrillas. In response to Buckley'srequest to interview MACV commanderCreighton Abrams, MACV stated that Abrams,who had been briefed on the ConcernedSergeant's allegations the year before, had "noadditional information." Most of Buckley'sfollow-up questions, sent in December, wentunanswered.

But according to Neil Sheehan's interview withColonel Farnham, who served as deputy toVann, by then the third-most-powerfulAmerican serving in Vietnam, word of theforthcoming Newsweek story had spread. Inlate 1971 or ear ly 1972 Vann met inWashington with Westmoreland and Army ViceChief of Staff Bruce Palmer Jr. Before themeeting Vann told Farnham about theupcoming Newsweek article and said that hewas ducking Buckley in order to avoidquestions about Speedy Express. At themeeting, which Farnham attended, Vann toldWestmoreland and Palmer that Ewell's NinthDivision had wantonly killed civilians in theMekong Delta in order to boost the body countand further the general's career, singling outnighttime helicopter gunship missions as theworst of the division's tactics. According toFarnham, Vann said Speedy Express was, ineffect, "many My Lais"--closely echoing thelanguage of the Concerned Sergeant. Farnhamsaid Westmoreland put on a "masterful job ofacting," claiming repeatedly that he had neverbefore heard such allegations. When Vannmentioned Buckley's upcoming exposé,Westmoreland directed his aide and Farnhamto leave the room because he, Palmer and Vannneeded to discuss "a very sensitive subject."

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In the end, Buckley and Shimkin's nearly 5,000-word investigation, including a compellingsidebar of eyewitness testimony fromVietnamese surv ivors , was n ixed byNewsweek's top editors, who expressedconcern that such a piece would constitute a"gratuitous" attack on the Nixon administration[see "The Vietnam Exposé That Wasn't," below,which discusses Buckley and Shimkin'sinvestigation of atrocities, including one by aNavy SEAL team led by future Senator BobKerrey]. Buckley argued in a cable that thepiece was more than an atrocity exposé. "It isto say," Buckley wrote in late January 1972,"that day in and day out that [the Ninth]Division killed non combatants with firepowerthat was anything but indiscriminate. Theapplication of firepower was based on thejudgment that anybody who ran was an enemyand indeed, that anyone who lived in the areacould be killed." A truncated, 1,800-word piecefinally ran in June 1972, but many key facts,eyewitness interviews, even mention of JulianEwell's name, were left on the cutting-roomfloor. In its eviscerated form, the articleresulted in only a ripple of interest.

Days before the story appeared, Vann died in ahelicopter crash in Vietnam and, a few weekslater, Shimkin was killed when he mistakenlycrossed North Vietnamese lines. The story ofSpeedy Express died, too.

Ewell retired from the Army in 1973 as alieutenant general but was invited by the Armychief of staff to work with Ira Hunt in detailingtheir methods to aid in developing "futureoperational concepts." Until now, Ewell andHunt had the final word on Operation SpeedyExpress, in their 1974 Army Vietnam Studiesbook Sharpening the Combat Edge. While thename of the operation is absent from the text,they lauded both the results and the brutaltechniques decried by the Concerned Sergeant,including nighttime helicopter operations andthe aggressive use of snipers. In the book'sfinal pages, they made oblique reference to the

allegations that erupted in 1970 only to bequashed by Westmoreland. "The 9th InfantryDivision and II Field Force, Vietnam have beencriticized on the grounds that 'their obsessionwith body count' was either basically wrong orelse led to undesirable practices," they wrote,before quickly dispatching those claims. "Thebasic inference that they were 'obsessed withbody count' is not true," they wrote, assertinginstead that their methods ended up"'unbrutalizing' the war."

Ewell now lives in Virginia. During a 2006 visitI made to his home with Deborah Nelson,Ewell's wife told us he no longer grantsinterviews. Ira Hunt retired from active duty in1978 as a major general. He too lives inVirginia.

George Lewis, the man tentatively identified bythe Army as the Concerned Sergeant, hailedfrom Sharpsburg, Kentucky. He was awarded aPurple Heart as well as Army CommendationMedals with a "V" for valor for his service inVietnam and was formally discharged in 1974.Lewis died in 2004, at age 56, before I was ableto locate him.

To this day, Vietnamese civilians in the MekongDelta recall the horrors of Operation SpeedyExpress and the countless civilians killed todrive up body count. Army records indicate thatno Ninth Infantry Division troops, let alonecommanders, were ever court-martialed forkilling civilians during the operation.

Addendum:

The Vietnam Exposé That Wasn't

Although he was the son of a military man, AlexShimkin went to Vietnam not as a soldier but asa civilian with International Voluntary Services(IVS), a nongovernmental humanitarian relieforganization. Born in Washington, DC, andraised in Urbana, Illinois, Shimkin dropped outof college to work in the civil rights movementbefore finishing his degree and heading off to

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Vietnam in early 1969. There, while working oncommunity development projects, he becamefluent in Vietnamese. He left IVS in 1971,having earned a reputation for his ability toferret out hard-to-find information and hisencyclopedic knowledge of Vietnam, its peopleand the intricacies of the war; Newsweek'sSaigon bureau chief Kevin Buckley soon hiredhim as a stringer. Shimkin ultimately plannedto write the definitive history of the VietnamWar and, the very next year, was accepted intoPrinceton University for graduate studies.

Buckley, now a contributing editor at Playboyand adjunct professor at Columbia University'sSchool of Journalism, told me, "Alex Shimkinopened my eyes and showed me things aboutthe war that I had missed even after nearly fouryears in Vietnam. Traveling with him andlistening to him tell me what Vietnamese in theMekong Delta were saying, especially whenthey did not know he understood Vietnamese,was one of the most informative and powerfulexperiences of my life."

"Pacif ication's Deadly Price," a jointinvestigation into the slaughter of Vietnamesecivilians by US troops during Operation SpeedyExpress [see "A My Lai a Month," The Nation,December 1, 2008], was the crowningachievement of the two men's workingpartnership. But the potentially explosive storywas held for months and finally published onlyin gutted form on June 19, 1972. Furtherundermining their investigation's impact,Newsweek allowed a former top US official inVietnam, who had secretly learned of theexistence of "hundreds" of examples of the verykinds of killings Buckley and Shimkin sought toexpose, to critique the story in its own pages,without allowing for a full rebuttal. Recently,Buckley shared with me the unexpurgatedversion of the story and subsequent drafts,along with his and Shimkin's original notes.

Although a Vietnam veteran, who identifiedhimself at the time only as "Concerned

Sergeant," sought to expose the horrors ofOperation Speedy Express, his protests neverreached reporters. Instead, Buckley andShimkin's investigation began with Shimkin'scareful study of press releases and otherofficial documents produced by the US MilitaryAssistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV. Inthese documents, he found the first clues oflarge-scale slaughter carried out fromDecember 1968 through May 1969. Acting onthose leads, he and Buckley commenced amonths-long investigation, interviewing UScivilian officials and military officers, analyzingcivilian hospital records and traveling, on footand by jeep, boat and raft into the Delta tointerview Vietnamese survivors of SpeedyExpress.

Buckley and Shimkin's investigation revealedthat the grossly disproportionate kills-to-weapons-recovered ratio of 14.5 to 1 achievedby the Ninth Infantry Division during SpeedyExpress was not due to a lack of weaponsamong the guerrillas, but the fact thatthousands of civilians were killed. They learnedthat most of these deaths were the day-to-dayresult of civilians, individually or in smallclusters, being fired upon at night and from theair. They uncovered multiple mass killings aswell. Shimkin's notes show that he foundevidence of one massacre by US forces inFebruary 1969 that left forty to f i f tyVietnamese, mostly women and children,injured or dead. Interviewing an injuredsurvivor as well as a woman who had lost hermother in the bloodbath, Shimkin learned thatUS troops had ambushed a flotilla of civiliansampans near the border of the Delta provincesof Kien Phong and Dinh Tuong.

In their analysis of disproportionate kill ratios,Buckley and Shimkin came across otheratrocities, one of which would finally makewaves some thirty years later. Shimkin's reviewof official MACV documents found that onFebruary 11, 1969, Ninth Infantry Divisiontroops engaged three motorized sampans,

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reportedly killing twenty-one enemies, withoutany US casualties. On February 17, Americanground and helicopter forces destroyed foursampans, killing ten, again with no UScasualties. Then at 1 am on February 26,according to Shimkin's summary of the MACVreports, "a U.S. Navy SEAL team was takenunder fire by an unknown size enemy force....Results: 21 enemy killed, two structuresdestroyed, and two individual weaponscaptured. There were no U.S. casualties."

That last mission came to prominence when itwas revealed that future Senator Bob Kerreyled the SEALs on that February 26 operationinto the village of Thanh Phong. Kerrey laterclaimed that the civilians died in cross-fire, butVietnamese from the village and the mostexperienced member of Kerrey's team recall anoutright massacre. What no one disputes is thatmembers of the SEAL team first used knivesthen unleashed a fusillade of at least 1,200rounds that left more than twenty civilians,many of them massed together in the middle ofthe hamlet, dead. Kerrey received a bronze starfor his actions that night, and the civilians wereadded to the enemy body count.

In 1998 Newsweek killed a story about thatmassacre, by reporter Gregory Vistica. AsVistica wrote in his 2003 book, The Educationof Lieutenant Kerrey, when Kerrey bowed outof the upcoming presidential race, a top editorat the magazine told him that publishing "apiece on Kerrey's actions in Vietnam...wouldunfairly be piling on." The massacre wouldremain Kerrey's secret until Vistica, having leftNewsweek, published an exposé in The NewYork Times Magazine in 2001.

Twenty-six years before its editors killedVistica's article, Newsweek held, and theneviscerated, Buckley and Shimkin's story onmuch the same logic. In January 1972, Buckleycabled the first draft of his and Shimkin'sarticle from Saigon to New York. The pieceexposed killing on a massive scale and

appeared to conclusively answer the questionthat the reporters asked in the story's lead:"Was My Lai only a particularly gruesomeapplication of a policy which in fact killed manymore civilians than were killed in that smallvillage?"

The inside word, at MACV and the Pentagon,was that the military was deeply concernedabout Buckley and Shimkin's findings. Butinstead of rushing the story into print,Newsweek pushed back on the piece, with NewYork editors objecting to Buckley's linking ofMy Lai and Speedy Express; claiming thata r t i c l e s a b o u t c i v i l i a n s k i l l e d b y"indiscriminate" fire were nothing new; andrequesting that the draft be radicallyshortened. Buckley--in heretofore privatecables--responded by pointing out that themilitary was afraid specifically because thearticle dealt with command policies. "[D]ay inand day out," Buckley wrote, the Ninth Division"killed non combatants with firepower that wasanything but discriminate."

Shimkin headed back into the Delta for furtherreport ing, where he turned up moreVietnamese witnesses, and Buckley rewrote thearticle striving to get the piece into print beforehis scheduled departure from Indochina. At theopening of the new draft, Buckley wrote: "Fouryears here have convinced me that terriblecrimes have been committed in Vietnam.Specifically, thousands upon thousands ofunarmed, non-combatant civilians have beenkilled by American firepower. They were notkilled by accident. The American way offighting this war made their deaths inevitable."He presciently predicted that with theVietnamization of the war, it was likely that"there may never be an accounting for thesecrimes."

Buckley handed over the reins of the bureauand took a long vacation with the article still inlimbo. When he returned to New York in thespring of 1972, he again pushed for its

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publication, finally asking for the right tofreelance it. The Newsweek editors said no,fearing it would seem as if they were toofainthearted to publish it. "At last I got a reasonout of the editor Kermit Lansner," Buckley saida few years later in an interview with PhillipKnightley, author of The First Casualty: TheWar Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, andMyth-Maker, from the Crimea to Vietnam. "Hetold me that it would be a gratuitous attack onthe [Nixon] administration at this point to doanother story on civilian deaths after the presshad given the army and Washington such ahard time over My Lai."

The story of Speedy Express should have beenmore explosive than Seymour Hersh's expose ofMy Lai, but it wasn't. Buckley and Shimkin'soriginal 4,700-word draft was whittled down to1,800 words. The lost material included thefinal paragraphs from their original draft,which closed with a series of questions theyhad posed to the US military that wentunanswered--and a challenge:

"The facts which are readilyavailable suggest answers tomany of Newsweek's questions.And the answers suggest that'Speedy Express' was a successat a criminal price. [MACV] saidthat if Newsweek could provideinformation to indicate civilianswere killed in large numbers'the command would like theopportunity to follow up on it.' Ithas that opportunity now."

"Pacification's Deadly Price," was devastated byediting that excised much of Buckley andShimkin's reporting, including an entire sidebarof Vietnamese witnesses. In the end, militaryofficials were never pressed on the findings ofthe investigation and were able to ride out theminor flurry of interest it generated. Had theArmy been called to account; had a majorofficial investigation, akin to the Peers

Commission that unraveled the details of theMy Lai massacre, been carried out; had theclaims of the Concerned Sergeant, the SpeedyExpress whistleblower, surfaced in the process;the story of Speedy Express might havetransformed how the American way of warfarewas understood.

That never happened.

John Paul Vann, a retired Army lieutenantcolonel who became a high-ranking civilianofficial in Vietnam, ducked Buckley andShimkin as they investigated Speedy Express,and he died in a helicopter crash days beforetheir story was published. His Newsweekobituary, with a laudatory quote from RobertKomer, the former US pacification chief inVietnam and deputy to MACV commander Gen.William Westmoreland, shared page two of thearticle. At Vann's funeral, Komer delivered theeulogy, and Westmoreland, who had received adetailed letter from the Concerned Sergeanttwo years before, was a pallbearer.

About a month after Vann was buried, AlexShimkin accidentally crossed North VietnameseArmy lines in Quang Tri Province. A July 24,1972, report in Newsweek noted that acolleague saw him fall to the ground asgrenades landed near him. He was, accordingto the article, the magazine's "fourth majorcasualty in the war in Indochina."

A week later, Newsweek published a letter byRobert Komer that critiqued "Pacification'sDeadly Price" on the grounds that SpeedyExpress was, in his eyes, "not part of the'pacification' program," as Buckley contended,while largely disregarding, in Komer's words,"whatever the U.S. Ninth Division allegedlydid." Although it was well known that militaryand pacification efforts were inseparablylinked, Komer accused the magazine of tyingSpeedy Express to such efforts "to get astriking headline," and he even invoked Vann'sname to paint the piece as a "slur" on"American pacification workers."

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Buckley later told Knightley, "I pressedNewsweek to run a second piece. I wanted toexpose the Pentagon's defense and demolish[Komer's letter]. But Newsweek refused tocarry a second article and I was allowed only atiny rebuttal to Komer." Neither Buckley norNewsweek knew that more than a year earlier,in April 1971, Komer had written a personalnote to Vann about allegations of civilianslaughter by US helicopters in the Delta inwhich he confided that the reports sounded "alltoo true." And in May 1971, Vann, who thatmonth became the third most powerfulAmerican serving in Vietnam, responded that"literally hundreds of horrible examples havebeen documented by irate advisors, bothmilitary and civilian." Needless to say, Komernever mentioned this in his letter to Newsweek.

Research support for this article was providedby the Investigative Fund of The NationInstitute. Research assistance was provided by

George Schulz of the Center for InvestigativeReporting, Sousan Hammad and SophieRagsdale.

Nick Turse is the associate editor and researchdirector of Tomdispatch.com. He is the authorof The Complex: How the Military Invades OurEveryday Lives and a forthcoming history of USwar crimes in Vietnam, Kill Anything ThatMoves (both Metropolitan).

This two-part article appeared in the December1 , 2 0 0 8 e d i t i o n o f T h e N a t i o n(http://www.thenation.com) and on line onNovember 13, 2008.It was posted at JapanFocus on November 21, 2008

Recommended Citation: Nick Turse, “A My Laia Month: How the US Fought the VietnamWar” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 47-6-08,November 21, 2008