This war has already produced many well-documented stories of murder, rape and torture inflicted by American servicemen on civilians or prisoners of war. Why should it be so hard to believe American soldiers taunted a disfigured civilian or ran over a dog? That stuff is perfectly consistent with how American soldiers have behaved in every war (with the possible exception of WWI, in which most of the combat was somewhat isolated from the civilian population).

As an interrogator in Vietnam, I arrived at a field hospital to talk to an incoming POW who had been reported by radio as having "light" injuries. The people at the hospital showed me a body with a bullet hole in the chest.They said he arrived that way. Draw your own conclusions.

I also interviewed a farmer the tip of whose penis had been shot off. Someone in a passing truckload of GIs had popped one at him. Couldn't identify perpetrator, so CA gave him some money and let it go at that.

Another problem we were aware of was GIs shooting water buffaloes--again, usually from passing vehicles. Aside from the fact that it was common for kids to be riding them, the water buffalo was a typical farmer's biggest investment, comparable to an American farmer's tractor. Its loss was a major financial blow. Yeah, we'd pay them for it in some cases. But that scarcely made wanton destruction all right, from either the military discipline or the civilian relations points of view.

Many times I saw GIs verbally abuse Vietnamese civilians (never called anything but "gooks," or "goddam gooks") or force Vietnamese women to listen to what the GIs considered very witty sexual banter. GIs thought nothing of bluntly offering a woman money for quick sex, regardless that the woman obviously was not a prostitute. I spoke with Viets who thought that most Americans were little better than animals in the coarseness and stupidity of their behavior.

The simple fact is that war almost invariably degrades conduct, and that Americans have for too long believed that American soldiers are somehow exempt from that. Bullshit.

Fritz - See my comments on Carter's article at <link>. I'd agree with you that:

"The simple fact is that war almost invariably degrades conduct, and that Americans have for too long believed that American soldiers are somehow exempt from that."

I really don't know what the war in Vietnam looked like from the intelligence perspective. From my grunt's eye view of it, tho, I would argue that the conduct of every American GI did not always automatically descend into the third circle of Hell. For some, it never did. Most of us tried desparately to maintain some shred of decency amid the madness. Some were pushed over the edge to real war crimes and provided the fodder for accusations of "baby killer". Anyone who argues that the latter didn't or couldn't happen either was not there or put their head in the sand when it did happen. Now as then, the American public did not want to believe the latter happened. This administration and the neocon right have a large stake in maintaining the fiction of the nobility of war, and, in particular, the constant nobility of the American GI. Some on the left have a similarly large stake in the permanent war criminal status of every American wearing the uniform.

The truth of it, as Carter alludes, is somewhere in between. War is ugly and profane. It always has been and it always will be. Yet courage, heroism, nobility and common decency exist there too. We cannot as a nation accept the price the former requires at the expense of only believing the latter.

PlSgt,

Please keep posting here. People need to understand that war is not a John Wayne movie.

My older sister is a very nice and intelligent person, but she drives me mad with her NeoCon jingoism. I do not hate America, the police nor the military and I get incredibly frustrated by uber-authoritarians who refuse to believe that a cop or a soldier could ever do anything wrong. I believe that is a very dangerous state of mind for people living in a free country.

I understand why my Sis has this attitude. She works in city government and is good friends with the Police Chief. Her husband was drafted and had to leave for Nam two weeks after their wedding. My brother-in-law is a very honorable man who never discusses his war experiences. I have no doubt that he was one of the many American GI's who really tried to maintain his honor while he endured that Hell. I've met the Police Chief and he seems like a great guy also.

But I also know soldiers who served in Nam that didn't uphold any standards of virtue. I've seen some of these guy's photo collections which include GI's keeping slotted VC ears on their belts as trophies. They have photos of dead VC with their penises cut off and inserted in their mouths. A person who has little moral fiber in peacetime runs wild when given a license to kill.

John Kerry was excoriated for revealing these uncomfortable truths while trying to end our engagement in Viet Nam. Free people need to know the truth. If we didn't take war so lightly, perhaps we would demand a more rigorous justification from our leaders before we go to war.

Policemen perform a valuable and often thankless service to our communities. But pretending that their power cannot be abused is sure to bring about abuse of their power.

We can't move forward by sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that we live in a 1950's era television show.

I a veteran of the better part, until WIA & evacuated on a stretcher very late in, ten months & a couple of weeks into, the second, of two year-long tours in Viet-Nam strongly agree with PlSgt that most of us attempted to maintain standards of decency even in the midst of combat, but unfortunately there apparently were exceptions to the rule, guys who gave free rein to their most base instincts, although neither of my tours did I witness any such behavior.

Far more representative of the typical behavior of the American G.I. in Viet-Nam was a demonstrated friendliness toward children, treating Viet kids as if they were their younger bothers & sisters left behind in the States.

Nonethelessm like it or not, war at the sharp end, down in the trenches, so to speak, is inherently a very nasty business and that's never going to change.

In addition to possible isolated instances of deliberate atrocity, there are in combat zones endless possibilities for stupid or not so stupid mistakes to cause horrible incidents. For instance, friendly-fire accidents, usually of no particular person's fault, are not all that uncommon.

After all, there's so much in the way of lead, shell & grenade fragments flying about on a battlefield that it's a bleed'n wonder that there aren't far many more instances of friendly fire deaths & wounds occuring than there actually are.

Such things are bound to happen & I'm well & truly tired of home-front easy-chair hereos second guessing our G.I.s in Iraq & in Afghanistan over such incidents.

Lieutenant, 1st Infantry Division in III Corps T(atical) A(rea) of O(perations) in Viet-Nam, 1966-7; Captain, 101st Airborne, in northern I Corps, 1969-70

all of you guys have made very valid points and observations. As an Army nurse in VN, I saw a lot of really what I can only describe as wierd stuff. I came on shift at the intake one morning, and there was this guy strutting around with a string of what he said were VC ears (depicting his "kills") tied onto his bandolier. Thing was, the guy was no grunt, but a clerk in the base supply company, had been in country only 7 weeks or so, and still hadn't gotten all the cosmolene cleaned off his weapon. then there was the full bird whose entourage was ambushed just outside Chu Lai and his driver was killed. It was the Col's first outing to the bush and it so unnerved him he tried to kill his houseboy with his dress sabre.

More heartwrenching were the boys I tended to at home. The year I returned from SE Asia, I was assigned to Brooke Medical Center, in San Antonio. When I worked graveyard shift, I would hear these young men crying in their sleep, screaming at non-existent enemies. Dayshift would see these same men sitting and staring into space, remembering or reliving the horrors of what they experienced.

I also saw the pictures that the grunts would bring in from the bush of bodies piled high, the burned villages, the downcast faces of the displaced VietNamese. There were also pictures of the young VN Women that some of them loved, and some of the children who had GI dads.

I have some good memories and some bad and some purely awful, but i wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

Everybody knows they are exceptions. It was the GI hoodlums, vandals, terrorizers, drunken assholes, highway cowboys, and sexual predators that bothered me. It was the constant racism and assumption of American superiority. My Lais get reported (eventually), but GIs behaving like swaggering boors never gets reported. The fact that GI life, in that war, was a crappy mixture of fear, violence, racism, boredom, rock, booze and pot never got reported till it was over.

I remember listening to cherries, two weeks in-country, joining eagerly in fuck-the-gooks sessions. They'd had about zero experience of the people, but they knew what the prevailing feeling was and wanted to show they had it. Education didn't matter. One of my buddies was a graduate of a good college, planning on grad school when he got out. He couldn't stand to have Viets touch him, would react rudely if they did. In their culture, friends and comrades touch lightly as a sign of solidarity. He knew that, but he said it made him feel "creepy." (He had the wrong job, since we had to work closely with ARVN interpreters and interrogators.) I remember listening to a major (an MI major) rant about how everything gooks did was "shitty" and unworthy of "American boys."

And, as my anecdotes in the top post make clear, this wasn't just a matter of manners. People really got hurt. I even left out the constant accidents on QL1, caused by GIs barrel-assing down the road, forcing the carts, cyclos and bicycles off. There were fatalities. I was one of the first Americans on the scene of an accident, caused by a GI, that injured a kid. I really thought we might get shot. The crowd was angry and there were PFs carrying their rifles. To our great good fortune a bunch of ARVN MPs showed up in about ten minutes and took charge. The people were willing to let ARVNs tell them what to do, but they'd had about as much American arrogance as they wanted to take.

"a crappy mixture of fear, violence, racism, boredom, rock, booze and pot" and based on my experience as a very young (turned 21 in Nam) platoon commander, I agree with everything you said in this thread. One big trouble with occupation/COIN duty is it puts you in constant contact with non-combatants. Language and culture problems day after day erode good will. The locals come to hate you; you may well come to despise them. You're at an age where your judgement/impulse control probably aren't your strong suit It's a bad mix.