The Vietnam War was a brutal campaign. As Americans were rocked by social shifts at
home, the Vietnam War's many faults shook their collective conscience. When the campaign's
cruelties became known, many were horrified.
After North Vietnam allegedly attacked American vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, the
U.S began its full-scale involvement in the Vietnam War. However, In 1959 the CIA began
recruiting South Vietnamese men for espionage and sabotage efforts. Frequently hired out
of high school, the commandos were promised $2,000 annually plus $100 monthly to their
families.
Every one of these commandos that entered North Vietnam were captured or killed. By
1965, the U.S. military started telling the relatives of captive commandos that their
loved ones had died in the line of duty. However, hundreds had actually survived.
Ex-intelligence analyst Sedgwick Tourison explained that the military wanted to save
money. By declaring the prisoners of war were deceased, it allowed the military to stop
monthly payments to the grieving families. Moreover, the mission had been a humiliating
failure, and officials worried the commandos were undercover Communists.
But the captured commandos actually withstood years, sometimes decades, of torture. After
the war, 281 survivors sought payment, but their service was no longer officially acknowledged.
Finally, after months of media coverage, the government confirmed the cover-up in 1996.
Despite pushback from the Pentagon, the commandos eventually won a court battle for back pay.
Many GIs in Vietnam left behind illegitimate children. Often the offspring of white or
black men and Vietnamese women, these babies resembled blended enemies. Many of their mothers
didn't view them as their children but as burdens and would often leave them in trash
cans and at orphanage entrances.
The Vietnamese dubbed them "children of the dust," and they often became street-beggars.
Even those who were adopted were sometimes given away by their new parents. Peers picked
on them for being poor and parentless. Many wished to walk away from Vietnam altogether
and find their American fathers.
However, the U.S. refused to pay attention to the children's pain. In 1970 the Defense
Department defended its stance, stating that,
"[The orphans' wellbeing] has never been and is not now considered an area of government
responsibility."
That tune changed in 1975. As North Vietnamese troops prepared to topple Saigon, rumors circulated
that the incoming Communists would slaughter anyone connected to America. President Gerald
Ford green-lit Operation Babylift, which evacuated 2,547 orphans via airlift. The first official
flight crashed, killing 138 people, 78 of whom were children.
People tend to accept war over less frequent instances of torture. As Dr. Darius Rejali
observed,
"[Torture] gives one person absolute power over another."
This distorts the torturer's morals and worsens the society that condones it. While war takes
a greater material toll, torture breeds inhumanity. Perhaps that's why South Vietnam and America
kept silent about placing people in tiger cages.
A former prisoner compared them to coffins. Constructed by French colonialists in 1940,
tiger cages were designed to hold prisoners of war. But South Vietnam used them to detain
anyone deemed politically dangerous, including civilians with anti-Government leanings.
The New York Times described the original cages as "small concrete trenches with bars
on top" which tightly packed five to seven people. Newer units provided by the United
States contained a single inmate. North Vietnam, meanwhile, had its own incarnation of tiger
cages. These were claustrophobic bamboo enclosures used to torture captive troops.
Guards would starve prisoners and hit them with sticks. One prisoner remembered being
force-fed soapy water and given electric shocks. A pair of sisters, arrested for attempting
to aid Communists, spent seven years in tiger cages, where they were burned with quicklime.
It's estimated that South Vietnam kept 20,000 to 200,000 prisoners in tiger cages, sometimes
for years without trial. The practice came to light after two U.S. Congressmen visited
South Vietnam in 1970 and reported the horrors they witnessed.
It's hard to quantify the harm caused by combat exposure and torture because, as the medical
journal The Lancet noted, soldiers tend to be healthier than the average person. Even
so,
"The US Department of Veterans Affairs found that deaths were twice as common among Vietnam
veterans who experienced severe wartime stress."
Some struggled with PTSD and substance abuse 40 years after coming home, not to mention
increased back, joint, and neurological problems.
Arizona Senator John McCain was never physically the same after surviving over five years as
a prisoner of war. In 1967 McCain's plane was struck by a missile, forcing him to eject.
In the process, he broke both arms and a leg. Then his captors wrecked his right shoulder
before bayoneting him. They later performed a shoddy surgery on his leg, leaving him with
a limp. To force a false confession, guards beat him every two or three hours for four
days. McCain became incapable of lifting his arms above his shoulders.
"He waves like this. And that's because he can't lift his arms over his shoulders."
Future Congressman Sam Johnson suffered seven years in captivity. He spent 42 months in
solitary confinement, his legs confined by stocks or shackles while he laid on a cement
bed. Other prisoners of war endured having all four limbs bound together and then hung
from meat hooks for hours or days.
Reflecting on what he witnessed in Vietnam, platoon medic Larry Cottingham remarked,
"There was a period when just about everyone had a necklace of ears."
Cottingham served as part of the Tiger Force, a unit assembled in 1966 to out-guerrilla
the Vietcong. Initially hailed as heroes, the Tiger Force soon saw killing as, quote,
"the way to live," according to one Tiger.
In 1967 the Tiger Force executed an untold number of defenseless villagers. As a former
member recounted,
"We weren't even keeping count. I knew it was wrong, but it was an acceptable practice."
Not everyone found it acceptable, though. Tiger Force member Gerald Bruner threatened
to shoot his fellow soldiers if they kept killing civilians. However, a superior officer
ordered Bruner to see a psychiatrist and scolded him for speaking up. A second dissenter was
also silenced.
Based on eyewitness accounts and government documents, the Toledo Blade, which broke the
story in 2003, estimated the Tiger Force killed hundreds of helpless people. The soldiers
scalped and beheaded people for their belongings and for sport.
Twenty-seven members admitted that collecting ears as trophies was routine. Survivors described
digging mass graves for the victims. A four-year investigation by the military confirmed 18
culprits, none of whom faced formal consequences. Some soldiers later grappled with guilt and
needed psychological counseling, but others remained remorseless.
"I'm awful sick of it and I'll be so glad to go home. I don't know, it's the worst area
I've been in since I've been in Vietnam."
In January 1968, fighting intensified with the Tet Offensive, which saw North Vietnam
gaining ground against the U.S. A group of American infantrymen, known as Charlie Company,
took a huge hit with 28 casualties. In March the men moved on the village of My Lai with
orders to eradicate Communists. They encountered kids, mothers, and elderly men. Commanding
officer Lieutenant William Calley wanted them all dead.
Private Paul Meadlo had been giving kids candy when he received the order to shoot them.
He reportedly cried as he fired his weapon. Meadlo's mother would later lament,
"I sent them a good boy and they made him a murderer."
Meadlo wasn't alone. Charlie Company killed 504 villagers. Some soldiers abused women
and girls before gunning them down. They killed babies and burned down homes. A My Lai survivor
said soldiers laughed amid the slaughter.
The mayhem ended when helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson threatened to shoot Charlie Company
if it didn't desist. In the aftermath, William Calley's supporters harassed Thompson for
his heroism. After a year-long government cover-up, a whistleblower blew the lid off
with help from journalist Seymour Hersh. Fourteen men stood trial, but only Calley was convicted.
In 1971 he received a life sentence. In 1974 he received parole.
In 1969, the same year the public learned about the My Lai Massacre, more lies were
told about a separate massacre. The Nixon Administration started covertly carpet-bombing
Cambodia and kept Congress out of the loop for months. It didn't tell the public at all.
Nixon dropped 540,000 tons of bombs and killed between 150,000 and 500,000 civilians. The
resulting mayhem allowed a pro-American general to overthrow Cambodia's government. The country's
ousted ex-leader threw his support behind the Khmer Rouge.
Led by Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge were Cambodian Communists who employed guerrilla tactics.
They used the bombings as a political weapon, amassing enough momentum to overwhelm Cambodia's
pro-U.S. forces. The Khmer Rouge went on to implement oppressive policies and engage in
atrocities that resulted in the deaths of between 1 million and 3 million people. When
Pol Pot's chief torturer stood trial for his crimes, he partly blamed Nixon's carpet-bombing
campaign for the Khmer Rouge's reign.
Nixon wanted to keep the bombing of Cambodia under wraps, even if it meant wrapping up
a murder trial before it started.
That year the Green Berets conducted a top-secret operation to find out how effective the Cambodia
bombings were. To the Berets' dismay, one of their operatives, Thai Khac Chuyen, appeared
to be a Communist spy.
Newsweek reported that Chuyen underwent three days of questioning which failed to yield
a confession. Three Berets then shot Chuyen in the head for supposedly stabbing them in
the back. Then they dumped him in a body of water.
Chuyen's wife uncovered the killing with the help of a general who despised the Green Berets.
Eight men faced criminal charges, but Nixon wanted officials to scrap the case. So, a
Congressman friend of Nixon threatened to block defense funding if the Army didn't stop
the case, which it did.
However, military analyst Daniel Ellsberg discovered the cover-up and leaked the Pentagon
Papers, showing deception by the U.S. government during the Vietnam War.
On May, 12, 1975, Cambodia's Communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, commandeered an American
cargo ship.
A Marine-led rescue effort ensued. One hundred Marine reinforcements were sent to the Cambodian
island of Koh Tang after the ship and its crew had already been recovered. The reinforcements
were informed they would face up to 40 old men and farmers.
But Koh Tang was crawling with up to 200 armed and battle-tested soldiers. Defense officials
knew about the fighters, but nobody told the Marines. Suddenly, the rescuers needed rescuing.
Three Marines, named Gary Hall, Joseph Hargrove, and Danny Marshall went missing. The military
maintained that the men, quote, "disobeyed orders" by failing to reach rescue choppers
on time and had likely died. But Em Son, a former Khmer Rouge commander, later stated
that Hargrove had been captured, questioned, and shot. Son further alleged that his men
beat Hall and Marshall to death. The U.S., however, continued counting them as, quote,
"unaccounted for."
In 1970 the U.S. invaded Cambodia under the Nixon administration. The now-disgraced President
managed to keep everyone in the dark for as long as possible. He didn't even warn Cambodia's
head of state, who was a U.S. ally at the time.
Two days after launching the invasion, Nixon announced it on television, leaving out the
lethal aerial assaults that accompanied it. Students hammered him for perpetuating a conflict
that he promised to end. At Kent State University in Ohio, students and activists protested
for days and set an ROTC building ablaze. The National Guard arrived to establish order,
but were unsuccessful.
On May 4, protesters hurled rocks at wary guardsmen who responded with tear gas and
gunfire. Four students died, and nine sustained injuries. The guardsmen defended the shooting
as self-defense, while others saw unnecessary force amid an unnecessary war. Nixon's chief
of staff said,
"The carnage was the beginning of [Nixon's] downhill slide toward Watergate."
Between 1961 and 1971 America showered Vietnam with 45 million liters of the herbicide Agent
Orange. The rationale sounded straightforward: drown the country's jungles in plant poison
to prevent Vietcong from hiding. This meant poisoning everyone in the vicinity, but the
U.S. government assured everyone that Agent Orange wouldn't hurt anyone.
"How did all the children die?"
"Poison."
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lists 14 different diseases, including Parkinson's
and seven kinds of cancer, linked to Agent Orange exposure. That doesn't include the
life-shortening disorders and severe disabilities suffered by the children of those exposed.
In 1990 the VA revealed that the military realized Agent Orange was dangerous but used
it anyway. In fact, as the Guardian detailed, the military sprayed Agent Orange that was
25 times more potent than its own guidelines suggested.