11.21.08
A My Lai a Month
RG mail
TruthOut 13 November 2008
A My Lai a Month
by Nick Turse, The Nation
By the mid-1960s, the Mekong Delta, with its verdant paddies and
canal-side hamlets, was the rice bowl of South Vietnam and home to
nearly 6 million Vietnamese. It was also one of the most important
revolutionary strongholds during the Vietnam War. Despite its military
significance, State Department officials were “deeply concerned” about
introducing a large number of US troops into the densely populated
area, fearing that it would be impossible to limit civilian carnage.
Yet in late 1968, as peace talks in Paris got under way in earnest, US
officials launched a “land rush” to pacify huge swaths of the Delta
and bring the population under the control of the South Vietnamese
government in Saigon. To this end, from December 1968 through May
1969, a large-scale operation was carried out by the Ninth Infantry
Division, with support from nondivision assets ranging from helicopter
gunships to B-52 bombers. The offensive, known as Operation Speedy
Express, claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 at a cost of only 267
American lives. Although guerrillas were known to be well armed, the
division captured only 748 weapons.
In late 1969 Seymour Hersh broke the story of the 1968 My Lai
massacre, during which US troops slaughtered more than 500 civilians
in Quang Ngai Province, far north of the Delta. Some months later, in
May 1970, a self-described “grunt” who participated in Speedy Express
wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army chief
of staff, saying that the Ninth Division’s atrocities amounted to “a
My Lai each month for over a year.” In his 1976 memoir A Soldier
Reports, Westmoreland insisted, “The Army investigated every case [of
possible war crimes], no matter who made the allegation,” and claimed
that “none of the crimes even remotely approached the magnitude and
horror of My Lai.” Yet he personally took action to quash an
investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the
soldier’s letter.
I uncovered that letter and two others, each unsigned or signed only
“Concerned Sergeant,” in the National Archives in 2002, in a
collection of files about the sergeant’s case that had been
declassified but forgotten, launching what became a years-long
investigation. Records show that his allegations - of helicopter
gunships mowing down noncombatants, of airstrikes on villages, of
farmers gunned down in their fields while commanders pressed
relentlessly for high body counts - were a source of high-level
concern. A review of the letter by a Pentagon expert found his claims
to be extremely plausible, and military officials tentatively
identified the letter writer as George Lewis, a Purple Heart recipient
who served with the Ninth Division in the Delta from June 1968 through
May 1969. Yet there is no record that investigators ever contacted
him. Now, through my own investigation - using material from four
major collections of archival and personal papers, including
confidential letters, accounts of secret Pentagon briefings,
unpublished interviews with Vietnamese survivors and military
officials conducted in the 1970s by Newsweek reporters, as well as
fresh interviews with Ninth Division officers and enlisted personnel -
I have been able to corroborate the sergeant’s horrific claims. The
investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian slaughter on a
scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army’s
highest levels. The killings were no accident or aberration. They were
instead the result of command policies that turned wide swaths of the
Mekong Delta into “free-fire zones” in a relentless effort to achieve
a high body count. While the carnage in the Delta did not begin or end
with Speedy Express, the operation provides a harsh new snapshot of
the abject slaughter that typified US actions during the Vietnam War.
The Concerned Sergeant
An inkling that something terrible had taken place in the Mekong Delta
appeared in a most unlikely source - a formerly confidential September
1969 Senior Officer Debriefing Report by none other than the commander
of the 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’s office and to other high-ranking
officials, Ewell candidly noted that while the Ninth Division stressed
the “discriminate and selective use of firepower,” in some areas of
the Delta “where this emphasis wasn’t applied or wasn’t feasible, the
countryside looked like the Verdun battlefields,” the site of a
notoriously bloody World War I battle.
That December, a document produced by the National Liberation Front
sharpened the picture. It reported that between December 1, 1968, and
April 1, 1969, primarily in the Delta provinces of Kien Hoa and Dinh
Tuong, the “9th Division launched an ‘express raid’” and “mopped up
many areas, slaughtering 3,000 people, mostly old folks, women and
children, and destroying thousands of houses, hundreds of hectares of
fields and orchards.” But like most NLF reports of civilian
atrocities, this one was almost certainly dismissed as propaganda by
US officials. A United Press International report that same month, in
which US advisers charged the division with having driven up the body
count by killing civilians with helicopter gunships and artillery, was
also largely ignored.
Then, in May 1970, the Concerned Sergeant’s ten-page letter arrived in
Westmoreland’s office, charging that he had “information about things
as bad as My Lai” and laying out, in detail, the human cost of
Operation Speedy Express.
In that first letter, the sergeant wrote not of a handful of massacres
but of official command policies that had led to the killings of
thousands of innocents:
Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by
pushing the body the count so hard, we were “told” to kill many times
more Vietnamese than at My Lai, and very few per cents of them did we
know were enemy….
In case you don’t think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way,
I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to
20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50
a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000
body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its
lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My
Lai each month for over a year….
The snipers would get 5 or 10 a day, and I think all 4 batalions had
sniper teams. Thats 20 a day or at least 600 each month. Again, if I
am 10% right then the snipers [alone] were a My Lai every other month.
In this letter, and two more sent the following year to other
high-ranking generals, the sergeant reported that artillery,
airstrikes and helicopter gunships had wreaked havoc on populated
areas. All it would take, he said, were a few shots from a village or
a nearby tree line and troops would “always call for artilery or
gunships or airstrikes.” “Lots of times,” he wrote, “it would get
called for even if we didn’t get shot at. And then when [we would] get
in the village there would be women and kids crying and sometimes hurt
or dead.” The attacks were excused, he said, because the areas were
deemed free-fire zones.
The sergeant wrote that the unit’s policy was to shoot not only
guerrilla fighters (whom US troops called Vietcong or VC) but anyone
who ran. This was the “Number one killer” of unarmed civilians, he
wrote, explaining that helicopters “would hover over a guy in the
fields till he got scared and run and they’d zap him” and that the
Ninth Division’s snipers gunned down farmers from long range to
increase the body count. He reported that it was common to detain
unarmed civilians and force them to walk in front of a unit’s point
man in order to trip enemy booby traps. “None [of] us wanted to get
blown away,” he wrote, “but it wasn’t right to use … civilians to
set the mines off.” He also explained the pitifully low weapons ratio:
compare them [body count records] with the number of weapons we got.
Not the cashays [caches], or the weapons we found after a big fight
with the hard cores, but a dead VC with a weapon. The General just had
to know about the wrong killings over the weapons. If we reported
weapons we had to turn them in, so we would say that the weapons was
destroyed by bullets or dropped in a canal or pad[d]y. In the dry
season, before the moonsons, there was places where lots of the canals
was dry and all the pad[dies] were. The General must have known this
was made up.
According to the Concerned Sergeant, these killings all took place for
one reason: “the General 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 results
didn’t show any different than if … they had ordered it. The
Vietnamese were dead, victims of the body count pressure and nobody
cared enough to try to stop it.”
The Butcher of the Delta and Rice Paddy Daddy
During Ewell’s time commanding the Ninth Division, from February 1968
to April 1969, his units achieved remarkably high kill ratios. While
the historical US average was ten to one, Ewell’s troops reportedly
achieved seventy-six to one in March 1969. Ewell’s obsession with body
count was enthusiastically shared by his deputy, then Col. Ira “Jim”
Hunt, who served as a brigade commander in the Ninth Division and as
Ewell’s chief of staff.
“Hunt, who was our Brigade Commander for awhile and then was an
assistant general … used to holler and curse over the radio and talk
about the goddamn gooks, and tell the gunships to shoot the
sonofabitches, this is a free fire zone,” wrote the Concerned
Sergeant. Hunt, he said, “didn’t care about the Vietnamese or us, he
just wanted the most of everything, including body count”; “Hunt was
… always cussing and screaming over the radio from his C and See
[Command and Control helicopter] to the GIs or the gunships to shoot
some Vietnamese he saw running when he didn’t know if they had a
weapon or was women or what.”
The sergeant wrote that his unit’s artillery forward observer (FO)
“would tell my company commander he couldn’t shoot in the village
because it was in the population overlay.” The battalion commander
would then “get mad and cuss over the radio at my company commander
and … declare a contact [with the enemy] so the FO would shoot
anyway. I was there, and we wasn’t in contact but my company commander
and the FO would do anything to get the COL [colonel] off there back.”
He went on, “He wouldn’t even listen when the FO wanted to wait till
after dark and use air burst WP [white phosphorus] rounds to adjust
… so as not to zap any hooches.” Instead, the colonel said “it had
to be HE [high explosive] right in the houses.”
In a 2006 interview I conducted with Deborah Nelson, then a reporter
for the Los Angeles Times, Ira Hunt claimed that the Ninth Division
did not fire artillery near villages. He also denied any knowledge of
the Concerned Sergeant’s allegations and argued against the notion
that a command emphasis on body count led to the mass killing of
civilians. “No one’s going to say that innocent civilians aren’t
killed in wartime, but we try to keep it down to the absolute
minimum,” he said. “The civilian deaths are anathema, but we did our
best to protect civilians. I find it unbelievable that people would go
out and shoot innocent civilians just to increase a body count.” But
interviews with several participants in Speedy Express, together with
public testimony and published accounts, strongly confirm the
allegations in the sergeant’s letters.
The Concerned Sergeant’s battalion commander, referred to in the
letters, was the late David Hackworth, who took command of the Ninth
Division’s 4/39th Infantry in January 1969. In a 2002 memoir, Steel My
Soldiers’ Hearts, he echoed the sergeant’s allegations about the
overwhelming pressure to produce high body counts. “A lot of innocent
Vietnamese civilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive
to have the highest count in the land,” he wrote. He also noted that
when Hunt submitted a recommendation for a citation, citing a huge
kill ratio, he left out the uncomfortable fact that “the 9th Division
had the lowest weapons-captured-to-enemy-killed ratio in Vietnam.”
During Speedy Express, Maj. William Taylor Jr. saw Hunt in action,
too, and in a September interview he echoed the Concerned Sergeant’s
assessment. Now a retired colonel and senior adviser at the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, Taylor recalled flying over rice
paddies with Hunt: “He said something to the pilot, and all of a
sudden the door gunner was firing a .50-caliber machine gun out the
door, and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ He said, ‘See those black
pajamas down there in the rice paddies? They’re Vietcong. We just
killed two of them.’” Immediately afterward, Hunt spoke again to the
pilot. “He was talking body count,” Taylor said. “Reporting body
count.” Later he asked Hunt how he could identify VC from the
helicopter, without seeing weapons or receiving ground fire. “He said,
‘Because they’re wearing black pajamas.’ I said, ‘Well, Sir, I thought
workers in the fields wore black pajamas.’ He said, ‘No, not around
here. Black pajamas are Vietcong.’”
Like Hackworth, Taylor recalled an overriding emphasis on body count.
It was “the most important measure of success, and it came from the
personal example of the Ninth Division commander, General Julian
Ewell,” he said. “I saw it directly. Body count was everything.”
In August I spoke with Gary Nordstrom, a combat medic with the Ninth
Division’s Company C, 2/39th Infantry, during Speedy Express, who
described how the body count emphasis filtered down to the field. “For
all enlisted people, that was the mentality,” he recalled. “Get the
body count. Get the body count. Get the body count. It was prevalent
everywhere. I think it was the mind-set of the officer corps from the
top down.” In multiple instances, his unit fired on Vietnamese for no
other reason than that they were running. “On at least one occasion,”
he said, “I went and confirmed that they were dead.”
In recent months, I spoke with two Ninth Division officers who feuded
with Ewell over division policies. Retired Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, who
commanded the division’s five artillery battalions during his 1968-69
tour, spoke to me of Ewell’s heavy emphasis on body count and said he
was never apprised of any restrictions about firing in or near
villages. “There isn’t any question that our operations resulted in
civilian casualties,” he told me in July. Gard recalled arguing with
Ewell once about firing artillery on a village after receiving mortar
fire from it. “I told him no, I thought it was unwise to do that,” he
said in a 2006 interview with me and Nelson. “We had a confrontation
on the issue.” Gard also served with Hunt, whom he succeeded as
division chief of staff. When asked if Hunt, too, pressed for a large
body count, Gard responded, “Big time.” “Jim Hunt dubbed himself ‘Rice
Paddy Daddy,’” Gard recalled, referring to Hunt’s radio call sign. “He
went berserk.”
Maj. Edwin Deagle served in the division from July 1968 until June
1969, first as an aide to Ewell and Hunt and then as executive officer
(XO) of the division’s 2/60th Infantry during Speedy Express. In
September he spoke to me about “the tremendous amount of pressure that
Ewell put on all of the combat unit operations, including artillery,
which tended to create circumstances under which the number of
civilian casualties would rise.” Concerned specifically that pressure
on artillery units had eroded most safeguards on firing near villages,
he confronted his commander. “We’ll end up killing a lot of
civilians,” he told Ewell.
Deagle further recalled an incident after he took over as XO when he
was listening on the radio as one of his units stumbled into an ambush
and lost its company commander, leaving a junior officer in charge.
Confused and unable to outmaneuver the enemy forces, the lieutenant
called in a helicopter strike with imprecise instructions. “They fired
a tremendous amount of 2.75 [mm rockets] into the town,” Deagle
recalled, “and that killed a total of about 145 family members or
Vietnamese civilians.”
Deagle undertook extensive statistical analysis of the division and
found that the 2/60th, one of ten infantry battalions, accounted for a
disproportionate 40 percent of the weapons captured. Yet even in his
atypical battalion, a body count mind-set prevailed, according to
combat medic Wayne Smith, who arrived in the last days of Speedy
Express and ultimately served with the 2/60th. “It was all about body
count,” he recalled in June. When it came to free-fire zones, “Anyone
there was fair game,” Smith said. “That’s how [it] went down.
Sometimes they may have had weapons. Other times not. But if they were
in an area, we damn sure would try to kill them.”
Another American to witness the carnage was John Paul Vann, a retired
Army lieutenant colonel who became the chief of US pacification
efforts in the Mekong Delta in February 1969. He flew along on some of
the Ninth Division’s night-time helicopter operations. According to
notes from an unpublished 1975 interview with New York Times Vietnam
War correspondent Neil Sheehan, 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. No attempt
was made to determine whether the people were civilians or enemies,
and a large number of noncombatants were killed or wounded as a
result.
Louis Janowski, who served as an adviser in the Delta during Speedy
Express, saw much of the same and was scathing in an internal 1970
end-of-tour report. In it, he called other Delta helicopter
operations, known as the Phantom program, a form of “non selective
terrorism.” “I have flown Phantom III missions and have medivaced
enough elderly people and children to firmly believe that the
percentage of Viet Cong killed by support assets is roughly equal to
the percentage of Viet Cong in the population,” he wrote, indicating a
pattern of completely indiscriminate killing. “That is, if 8% of the
population [of] an area is VC about 8% of the people we kill are VC.”
An adviser in another Delta province, Jeffrey Record, also witnessed
the carnage visited on civilians by the Phantom program during Speedy
Express. In a 1971 Washington Monthly article, Record recalled
watching as helicopter gunships strafed a herd of water buffalo and
the six or seven children tending them. Seconds later, the tranquil
paddy had been “transformed into a bloody ooze littered with bits of
mangled flesh,” Record wrote. “The dead boys and the water buffalo
were added to the official body count of the Viet Cong.”
The Cover-Up
In April 1969 Ewell was promoted to head II Field Force, Vietnam, then
the largest US combat command in the world. That same month, in an AP
story, Ira Hunt defended the body count against those who called it a
“terrible measure of progress.” The story also quoted a senior officer
who denied deliberately killing noncombatants, while granting that
noncombatant deaths resulted from Ninth Division operations. “‘Have we
killed innocent civilians?’ [he] asked rhetorically during an
interview. ‘Hell yes,’ he replied, ‘but so do the South Vietnamese.’”
In the spring of 1970, as Ewell was readying to leave Vietnam to serve
as the top US military adviser at the Paris peace talks, R. Kenley
Webster, the Army’s acting general counsel, read the Concerned
Sergeant’s letter at Army Secretary Stanley Resor’s request. According
to a memo Webster wrote at the time, which was among the documents I
uncovered in the National Archives, he was “impressed by its
forcefulness” and “sincerity” and commissioned an anonymous internal
report from a respected Vietnam veteran. That report endorsed the
Concerned Sergeant’s contentions:
It is common knowledge that an officer’s career can be made or
destroyed in Vietnam…. Under such circumstances - and especially if
such incentives as stand-downs, R&R [rest and relaxation] allocations,
and decorations are tied to body count figures - the pressure to kill
indiscriminately, or at least report every Vietnamese casualty as an
enemy casualty, would seem to be practically irresistible.
In June 1970 Webster sent a memo, with the review, to Resor,
recommending that he confer with Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams, by
then the top commander in Vietnam, about the matter. According to Army
documents, Resor and Abrams discussed the allegations, but no
investigation was launched.
News of the atrocities in the Delta was already leaking into public
view. That winter, veterans of Speedy Express spoke out about the
killing of civilians at the National Veterans’ Inquiry in Washington,
and the Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit. In April 1971, at
hearings chaired by Representative Ronald Dellums, Vietnam veteran
West Point graduates testified to Ewell’s “body count mania.” That
same month, Record’s Washington Monthly piece appeared.
Within days, Robert Komer, formerly a deputy to Westmoreland and chief
of pacification efforts in Vietnam, wrote to Vann seeking his
assessment of the article and noting, “It rings all too true!” In
early May 1971, Vann replied to Komer, by then a consultant with the
RAND Corporation, that “the US is on very shaky ground on either the
Phantom or other ‘hunter-killer’ airborne missions and literally
hundreds of horrible examples have been documented by irate advisors,
both military and civilian.”
By this time, Ira Hunt had returned from Vietnam and, in a strange
twist of fate, was leading the Army’s investigation of Col. Oran
Henderson, the brigade commander whose unit carried out the My Lai
massacre. Although Hunt recommended only an Article 15 - a mild,
nonjudicial punishment - Henderson was court-martialed. On May 24
Henderson dropped a bombshell, stating that the mass killing was no
aberration. “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden
someplace,” he said. The only reason they remained unknown was “every
unit doesn’t have a Ridenhour.” In fact, Hunt’s brigade did have a
whistleblower like Ron Ridenhour, but instead of sending letters to
dozens of prominent government and military officials, the Concerned
Sergeant fatefully kept his complaints within the Army - fearing, he
wrote, that going public would get the Army “in more trouble.”
The lack of public exposure allowed the military to paper over the
allegations. In August 1971, well over a year after the sergeant’s
first letter to Westmoreland, an Army memo noted that the Criminal
Investigation Division was finally attempting to identify and locate
the letter writer - not to investigate his claims but “to prevent his
complaints [from] reaching Mr. Dellums.” In September Westmoreland’s
office directed CID to identify the Concerned Sergeant and to “assure
him the Army is beginning investigation of his allegations”; within
days, CID reported that the division had “tentatively identified” him
and would seek an interview. But on the same day as that CID report, a
Westmoreland aide wrote a memo stating that the general had sought the
advice of Thaddeus Beal, an Army under secretary and civilian lawyer,
who counseled that since the Concerned Sergeant’s letters were written
anonymously, the Army could legitimately discount them. In the memo,
the aide summarized Westmoreland’s thoughts by saying, “We have done
as much as we can do on this case,” and “he again reiterated he was
not so sure we should send anything out to the field on this matter of
general war crimes allegations.” Shortly thereafter, at a late
September meeting between CID officials and top Army personnel, the
investigation that had barely been launched was officially killed.
Burying the Story
In 1971, something caught the eye of Alex Shimkin, a Newsweek stringer
fluent in Vietnamese, as he pored over documents issued by the US
Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, or MACV, which coordinated all
US military activities in South Vietnam: the radically skewed ratio of
enemy dead to weapons captured during Speedy Express. At the urging of
Kevin Buckley, Newsweek’s Saigon bureau chief, and with no knowledge
of the Concerned Sergeant’s allegations, Shimkin began an exhaustive
analysis of MACV documents that offered dates, locations and detailed
statistics. From there, he and Buckley began to dig.
They interviewed US civilian and military officials at all levels,
combed through civilian hospital records and traveled into areas of
the Delta hardest hit by Speedy Express to talk to Vietnamese
survivors. What they learned - much of it documented in unpublished
interviews and notes that I recently obtained from Buckley - echoed
exactly what the Concerned Sergeant confided to Westmoreland and the
other top generals. Their sources all assured them there was no
shortage of arms among the enemy to account for the gross
kills-to-weapons disparity. The only explanation for the ratio, they
discovered, was that a great many of the dead were civilians. Huge
numbers of airstrikes had decimated the countryside. Withering
artillery and mortar barrages were carried out around the clock. Many,
if not most, kills were logged by helicopters and occurred at night.
“The horror was worse than My Lai,” one American official familiar
with the Ninth Infantry Division’s operations in the Delta told
Buckley. “But with the 9th, the civilian casualties came in dribbles
and were pieced out over a long time. And most of them were inflicted
from the air and at night. Also, they were sanctioned by the command’s
insistence on high body counts.” Another quantified the matter,
stating that as many as 5,000 of those killed during the operation
were civilians.
Accounts from Vietnamese survivors in Kien Hoa and Dinh Tuong echoed
the scenarios related by the Concerned Sergeant. Buckley and Shimkin
spoke to a group of village elders who knew of thirty civilians who
were killed when US troops used them as human mine detectors. An
elderly Vietnamese man from Kien Hoa told them, “The Americans
destroyed every house with artillery, airstrikes or by burning them
down with cigarette lighters. About 100 people were killed by
bombing.” Another man, Mr. Hien, recalled, “The helicopters shot up
the area even in daylight because people working in their fields and
gardens would become afraid when the helicopters approached, and began
to run away.”
Another older man from Kien Hoa, Mr. Ba, recalled, “When the Americans
came in early 1969 there was artillery fire on the village every night
and several B-52 strikes which plowed up the earth.” Not only did MACV
records show bombings in the exact area of the village; the account
was confirmed by interviews with a local Vietcong medic who later
joined the US-allied South Vietnamese forces. He told them that
“hundreds of artillery rounds landed in the village, causing many
casualties.” He continued, “I worked for a [National Liberation] Front
doctor and he often operated on forty or more people a day. His
hospital took care of at least a thousand people from four villages in
early 1969.”
Buckley and Shimkin found records showing that during Speedy Express,
76 percent of the 1,882 war-injured civilians treated in the Ben Tre
provincial hospital in Kien Hoa - which served only one tiny area of
the vast Delta - were wounded by US firepower. And even this large
number was likely an undercount of casualties. “Many people who were
wounded died on their way to hospitals,” said one US official. “Many
others were treated at home, or in hospitals run by the VC, or in
small dispensaries operated by the [South Vietnamese Army]. The people
who got to Ben Tre were lucky.”
In November 1971 Buckley sent a letter to MACV that echoed the
Concerned Sergeant’s claims of mass carnage during Speedy Express.
Citing the lopsided kills-to-weapons ratio, Buckley wrote, “Research
in the area by Newsweek indicates that a considerable proportion of
those people killed were non-combatant civilians.” On December 2 MACV
confirmed the ratio and many of Buckley’s details: “A high percentage
of casualties were inflicted at night”; “A high percentage of the
casualties were inflicted by the Air Cavalry and Army Aviation
[helicopter] units”; but with caveats and the insistence that MACV was
unable to substantiate the “claim that a considerable proportion of
the casualties were non-combatant civilians.” Instead, MACV contended
that many of the dead were unarmed guerrillas. In response to
Buckley’s request to interview MACV commander Creighton Abrams, MACV
stated that Abrams, who had been briefed on the Concerned Sergeant’s
allegations the year before, had “no additional information.” Most of
Buckley’s follow-up questions, sent in December, went unanswered.
But according to Neil Sheehan’s interview with Colonel Farnham, who
served as deputy to Vann, by then the third-most-powerful American
serving in Vietnam, word of the forthcoming Newsweek story had spread.
In late 1971 or early 1972 Vann met in Washington with Westmoreland
and Army Vice Chief of Staff Bruce Palmer Jr. Before the meeting Vann
told Farnham about the upcoming Newsweek article and said that he was
ducking Buckley in order to avoid questions about Speedy Express. At
the meeting, which Farnham attended, Vann told Westmoreland and Palmer
that Ewell’s Ninth Division had wantonly killed civilians in the
Mekong Delta in order to boost the body count and further the
general’s career, singling out nighttime helicopter gunship missions
as the worst of the division’s tactics. According to Farnham, Vann
said Speedy Express was, in effect, “many My Lais” - closely echoing
the language of the Concerned Sergeant. Farnham said Westmoreland put
on a “masterful job of acting,” claiming repeatedly that he had never
before heard such allegations. When Vann mentioned Buckley’s upcoming
exposé, Westmoreland directed his aide and Farnham to leave the room
because he, Palmer and Vann needed to discuss “a very sensitive
subject.”
In the end, Buckley and Shimkin’s nearly 5,000-word investigation,
including a compelling sidebar of eyewitness testimony from Vietnamese
survivors, was nixed by Newsweek’s top editors, who expressed concern
that such a piece would constitute a “gratuitous” attack on the Nixon
administration [see "The Vietnam Exposé That Wasn't," at
thenation.com, which discusses Buckley and Shimkin's investigation of
atrocities, including one by a Navy SEAL team led by future Senator
Bob Kerrey]. Buckley argued in a cable that the piece was more than an
atrocity exposé. “It is to say,” Buckley wrote in late January 1972,
“that day in and day out that [the Ninth] Division killed non
combatants with firepower that was anything but indiscriminate. The
application of firepower was based on the judgment that anybody who
ran was an enemy and indeed, that anyone who lived in the area could
be killed.” A truncated, 1,800-word piece finally ran in June 1972,
but many key facts, eyewitness interviews, even mention of Julian
Ewell’s name, were left on the cutting-room floor. In its eviscerated
form, the article resulted in only a ripple of interest.
Days before the story appeared, Vann died in a helicopter crash in
Vietnam and, a few weeks later, Shimkin was killed when he mistakenly
crossed North Vietnamese lines. The story of Speedy Express died, too.
Ewell retired from the Army in 1973 as a lieutenant general but was
invited by the Army chief of staff to work with Ira Hunt in detailing
their methods to aid in developing “future operational concepts.”
Until now, Ewell and Hunt had the final word on Operation Speedy
Express, in their 1974 Army Vietnam Studies book Sharpening the Combat
Edge. While the name of the operation is absent from the text, they
lauded both the results and the brutal techniques decried by the
Concerned Sergeant, including nighttime helicopter operations and the
aggressive use of snipers. In the book’s final pages, they made
oblique reference to the allegations that erupted in 1970 only to be
quashed by Westmoreland. “The 9th Infantry Division and II Field
Force, Vietnam have been criticized on the grounds that ‘their
obsession with body count’ was either basically wrong or else led to
undesirable practices,” they wrote, before quickly dispatching those
claims. “The basic inference that they were ‘obsessed with body count’
is not true,” they wrote, asserting instead that their methods ended
up “‘unbrutalizing’ the war.”
Ewell now lives in Virginia. During a 2006 visit I made to his home
with Deborah Nelson, Ewell’s wife told us he no longer grants
interviews. Ira Hunt retired from active duty in 1978 as a major
general. He too lives in Virginia.
George Lewis, the man tentatively identified by the Army as the
Concerned Sergeant, hailed from Sharpsburg, Kentucky. He was awarded a
Purple Heart as well as Army Commendation Medals with a “V” for valor
for his service in Vietnam and was formally discharged in 1974. Lewis
died in 2004, at age 56, before I was able to locate him.
To this day, Vietnamese civilians in the Mekong Delta recall the
horrors of Operation Speedy Express and the countless civilians killed
to drive up body count. Army records indicate that no Ninth Infantry
Division troops, let alone commanders, were ever court-martialed for
killing civilians during the operation.
——-
Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
TomDispatch.com. He is the author of “The Complex: How the Military
Invades Our Everyday Lives” and a forthcoming history of US war crimes
in “Vietnam, Kill Anything That Moves” (both Metropolitan).
Research support for this article was provided by the Investigative
Fund of The Nation Institute. Research assistance was provided by
George Schulz of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Sousan Hammad
and Sophie Ragsdale.