The American War: The US In Vietnam

It was nor an invasion.

 

Your sources are not propaganda your sources are delusional bullshit and you never analyze anything

 

No they were not war criminals.

there were a very few American criminals of the type you described like Lt. Calley and they were not obeying orders.

Sorry you are full of BS

My Lai was an isolated criminal act

 

I'm still here, discussing the Vietnam War. You stopped doing that a while back so I stopped bothering. If you want to talk about the Vietnam War then get informed & get involved. I've done the hard work, as have a few others here. I don't necessarily agree with them, but I respect that they have at least acquired some knowledge.

You also don't have the first clue who my sources are because that would involve you reading books written by historians. You've made it pretty clear that you prefer people who feed your political views and anyone else just has to be 'propaganda'. They have a tendency to repeat more or less the same thing with very slight modifications. I've already discussed this & tire of repetition.

If you want to play big boy games then you follow big boy rules - do the reading, produce some grown up sources and construct some grown up arguments. If and when you do I'm happy to engage. Until then I've wasted a fair bit more time on you than you deserve.

 

It wasn't as isolated as you might choose to think. It was certainly unusually large and it ultimately got more publicity than a lot of smaller versions in part due to the unusual number of photographs taken, but killing civilians was more common place than a lot of Americans are comfortable admitting.

Chase down a book called 'Tiger Force'. It gives a very detailed account of much smaller scale killings. What makes this book unusual is that it doesn't just rely on interviews with people 30-50 years on, it uses material from a US Army investigation at the time (there were, of course, no prosecutions). There is no reason to believe this unit was 'typical', but it does suggest that the murder of civilians was not just a few 'isolated incidents'. Provided others in a unit said nothing and there was no media coverage there would be no evidence. This doesn't even get into issues to do with the liberal use of firepower.

This isn't to say that the BS spouted by the ill informed & politically motivated is legit, but people's attempts to defend unfair allegations have often over corrected. Bad things happened. Far too many bad things.

 

I am very familiar with Tiger force and what they were involved in. That history has been around quite a while.

If anything it only reinforces what I stated. Yes they did commit some illegal killings but no massacres on the scale of My Lai.

It is interesting that when people criticize units such as tiger force they end up criticizing them for minor crimes such as collecting ears. This sort of thing does not compare to My Lai.

No one is denying criminals committed murder and rape and other crimes during the war.

There was no other crime on the scale of My Lai however and that is fact. Unless you include the many many such massacres committed by the communists. IF there were other such crimes committed by Americans they could be named and identified. Strange how there is little or no condemnation for the massacre of civilians by the NVA in Hue city

I have no doubt there is some truth to what you say that over correction can happen and we cannot forget other crimes did occur and other criminals did exist. Some were prosecuted and some got away with it.

It is in fact the very scale and size of My Lai which makes it so unique and when people claim it was normal they cannot provide evidence. Even Calley himself failed miserably when he claimed it was how he was ordered and instructed to conduct the war. He or his attorneys could provide nothing whatsoever to substantiate that claim.

Even the accusations of bombing is twisted and spun. This is a tricky area and probably the one where I agree with you most. Yes we did a lot of bombing but notice how critics always want to point out the tonnage as in more than all of WWII or more than 300 hiroshima nukes or whatever. Yes that is all true but also irrelevant.

There is no doubt that some of our bombing caused massive casualties to military and civilian alike. However it would be very difficult to specify when and where. For example there was never any carpet bombing of the city of hanoi. There were massive bombing missions that hit military targets in hanoi. Being in or near the city those missions certainly caused civilian casualties, but no where NEAR the casualties which would have been inflicted had we simply ignored specific targets and saturated the city in general with bombs. If the city had been bombed the way many critics claimed it simply would no longer be there.

One must also remember that the war lasted ten years so that tonnage of bombs was spread over much longer period than WWII. In addition most of that bombing was tactical in nature not strategic. Often used to defeat enemy units in the field. In many cases ( such as what we see in movies ) they caught the enemy and bombed them killing many and destroying their military units. The reality is quite different however as many missions simply dropped those bombs on uninhabited jungle where the enemy was long gong by the time they exploded.

You can use ten times the number of bombs dropped in WWII but if you are hitting nothing with them then it means nothing.

Therefore saying we dropped lots of bombs is meaningless but denying we killed civilians with some of them would also be false.

 

The issue with Tiger Force wasn't that they collected ears, but that some of the people they collected them from should never have been killed. There was plenty of contemporary testimony about what several members of that unit did.

The point about the size of My Lai is a bit of a red herring, as is referring to Communist atrocities. Neither speak to the wider issue. There was far too much 'casual' killing - not big massacres & not always intended, but wrong & utterly corrosive of the war effort.

You are right about the bombing. It has been misrepresented in some respects. In others, however, it has never been properly understood. There were parts of Nth Vietnam - inhabited parts - that were moonscaped. Cities & towns south of Hanoi got hit very, very hard. Little has been said about that at the time or since - most of the focus was on Hanoi & Haiphong.

My issue has long been with the 'overwhelming firepower' aspect of the war. The use of artillery & air power. That may not have been a war crime, but it did result in unnecessary death & destruction. The moment you start killing people & destroying their property to 'save' them in a war like this you have lost.

 

If the point to May Lai is not it's size and scope then why is it constantly cited as an EXAMPLE of American war crimes opposed to the isolated crime which it was?

I acknowledge that some members of tiger force were guilty of murder on some occasions but again if that is the issue why is the more trivial issue of collecting ears always cited/

You may consider it more important to focus on murder and I respect that but overwhelmingly few address those specifics and focuses on the more insignificant crap.

 

Well, your lads went in and shot at a lot of people.
I suppose it was a tea party.

 

Yes we did the same thing in WWI but we did not invade France. OR the UK in WWII.

 

So mass murder of civilians isn't a war crime?
Probably not for Americans because you lot have done it a lot.

 

You were late as usual.

 

Part of this debate is whose sources are credible. You've only insisted that your sources (which seem to be American mainstream) are credible which isn't enough. I want to know if your sources agree with what Smedley Butler* said was happening back when he was active. The American mainstream doesn't agree with Smedley Butler which discredits the mainstream. If your sources don't agree with Smedley Butler, your sources are discredited. I can understand why you want to avoid this; I think you know your sources are propaganda.

Do you maintain that Smedley Butler was lying, or telling the truth? What do your sources say about that? Please link to a few of them so we can see what they are.


*
https://fas.org/man/smedley.htm
https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

 

Other than My Lai which was investigated and perpetrators prosecuted there was no such deliberate mass murder.

 

Still saved the UKs and france's ass twice

 

Butler is not a source relevant to Vietnam and none of your sources on any thread have ever been credible

 

Not really, the UK had done all the hard work before you joined in.
Stopping a runaway train is always harder than pushing it back.

 

In which war?

In WWI the UK was on the verge of complete defeat they even had massive mutiny where the british army simply refused to fight.

Getting bombed every day in WWII was not hard work.

Sorry your history of the world wars is as incomplete and limited as vietnam

 

Haha sure. Sure they did...by hard work you mean, picking up the phone and begging the US to save them?

 

Rubbish.
The US forces had a long history of murder and rape of local civilians, but most of your war criminals were protected from justice, as was attempted with the My Lai war crimes.
More of a 'your lies' cover up.

 

Wrong not rubbish and it you lying outright.

There are incidents in every war by every side of rape and murder but the LONG history you refer to is fiction.

There was no such attempt at a cover up with My Lai ( except by the perpetrators) the military tried very hard to bring the perpetrators to justice

 

Are you sure?
The US armed forces have been raping their way through populations since you raped and murdered your Indian girls as you stole their lands.
Since that's been going on since the US of Arse was created, it's a pretty long history.

As for the cover up, you're way wrong.

http://nypost.com/2014/03/15/richard-nixon-and-the-my-lai-massacre-coverup/

 

Your generalization of all things America and it's military has done is based on partisan spin and ignorance of history.

Once again incidents of rape and murder happen on all sides of every war but there is no history as you describe.

The NY POST is not a credible source and there was no cover up except by the perpetrators. The military investigated rigorously and brought criminal charges against many.

In addition My Lai was in fact an isolatd incident which is fact you cannot refute.

I get it you have a pathological obsessive hatred of the USA and it's military. No problem.

You need to stop confusing that with informed knowledge

 

The BBC article was written in 2013 not 1968. Americans and even Europeans who civilian population who actually experienced war saw things differently back in 1968 or when the My Lia incident became public in 1971.

My Lai was VC. I read the orders that were issued to Lt, Calley and he followed those orders even though the orders may have been unlawful orders.
Back before 1971 Americans in the military weren't schooled on unlawful orders or even the Geneva Convention because North Vietnam didn't recognized the rules of war. Below the 17th parallel the NVA and VC did not take prisoners. So through boot camp until you arrived in sunny Vietnam the Code of Conduct was taught over and over until it was embedded in your brain housing group. Even today 48 years later I know the Code of Conduct without even having to look it up. Especially Article ll.
II
"I will never surrender of my own free will. If in command, I will never surrender the members of my command while they still have the means to resist."

Being captured or surrendering was never an option in Vietnam if you were below the 17th parallel.

During the Pacific Theatre during WW ll , U.S. Marines by August 14th 1942 wouldn't take prisoners in battle. If prisoners were needed to gather intelligence there were special units who went out looking for a Jap to capture. Prisoners would only be taken after the battle was won during the mopping up phase of the battle. The U.S. Army would soon adopt the same policy in the Pacific.

The U.S. military were guest of the South Vietnam government so no war crime was committed at My Lai. American troops came under RVN law. The Saigon government refused or didn't demand that Lt, Calley be charged of any crime and approved of Lt. Calley's actions. It was the young liberal loons who never served or never seen war up close who demanded that Lt. Calley be charged of a crime. So Lt. Calley was charged for murder under the UCMJ.


Here's how Americans saw things back in 1971. Remember the majority of Americans were of the "Greatest Generation" where 80% of the males of that generation served in the military during WW ll.

 

Nobody in the field is going to refuse to obey orders, illegal or not, unless they're nuts. Calley was indeed a scapegoat.