Trans. Anne Wyburd and Victoria Fern. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009. Pp. 518. ISBN 978-0-300-16804-4.
America's involvement in the Vietnam War has been marked by various
controversies too numerous to mention. In War without Fronts,[1]
historian Bernd Greiner (Hamburg) addresses war crimes and atrocities committed
by American forces against both Vietnamese communists and innocent civilians. He
contends that the extent of such atrocities has been grossly—and
purposely—underestimated: they were not tragic, isolated incidents but utterly
pervasive acts that "can be neither described nor comprehended with the
customary rhetoric about brutality common to all wars" (12). The spectacular
scale of atrocities in Vietnam resulted from many factors, including weak
presidential leadership, a lack of accountability among the American military
elite, and poor field grade and junior officers, who tolerated their soldiers'
"overstepping the limits ... [as] a means to calm their rage and need for
revenge" (19-20).
Indeed, according to Greiner, US military and political leaders encouraged
both implicitly and explicitly the attitude necessary to commit barbaric acts in
Vietnam. Unable to formulate an effective strategy to counter the enemy's
guerrilla warfare, American military planners and the "masters of war in the
White House" (13) fought a conventional war by default—a futile struggle of
attrition and body counts certain to radicalize American troops in Southeast
Asian jungles and rice paddies. The United States engaged in classic
asymmetrical warfare "because they [did] not accept any front lines, they
regularly, if not systematically, extend[ed] the area of operations to the
civilian population and [shrank] as little from attacks on individuals as from
group massacres.... A strategy with ground rules like this included murder and
massacre and when necessary would be translated into action which literally had
no bounds, and excluded no object in the natural or social environment.... The
American conduct of the war in Vietnam seamlessly carried on this succession"
(13, 34-35). Thus, the massacres at My Lai and Son Thang, to name but two, were
direct corollaries of faulty American strategy in Vietnam. Greiner asks: "Why
did the political leadership itself see no exit options?" He cryptically
responds that "the oft-quoted references to ignorance, self-deception and
wishful thinking are inadequate explanations" (18), leaving readers to imagine
other, more sinister reasons.
Since the atrocities occurred where the war was actually fought, incompetent
and stubborn leadership in the Pentagon and White House only partially explains
such actions. Greiner cites careerist and "disinterested" officers (19) whose
sole motivation was promotion in the Cold War American military. Because enemy
body counts were their only gauge of success or failure, these officers or
"kings in the field" received "wide discretionary powers and [had a]
corresponding tendency toward autonomous, if not autocratic, decisions" (19),
openly encouraging their men to disregard established rules of engagement and
kill wantonly. Other officers, including noncommissioned officers, were
"unqualified" and often overmatched by the communist enemy, their own
disgruntled and often hostile troops, and the chaotic conditions of jungle
warfare. Thus, American troops in the field, essentially leaderless during their
bizarre odyssey of combat, often protected and empowered themselves through
indiscriminate killing, rape, and torture. Rules of engagement "were open to
opposite interpretations" and seen "more as recommendations than obligations,"
effectively giving soldiers "an operational carte blanche" (96-97).
As shocking as the atrocities themselves were the military's efforts to
ignore and cover them up. The selectivity of official military records indicts
those involved. "Any attempt to search military reports for evidence would be
completely pointless" since after-action reports "were without exception drawn
up in the certainty that striking contradictions and inconsistencies would not
come to light—not even subsequent deliberate falsifications" (14). Vietnamese
records, too, prove problematic because of Vietnam's deference to its "trading
partner," the United States. Even on those exceedingly rare occasions when
American personnel were investigated for crimes or brought before
courts-martial, the systemic weaknesses of the military judicial system all but
guaranteed their crimes would go unpunished. Greiner cites significant examples,
devoting considerable space to the massacre at My Lai and the subsequent trials
of Lt. William Calley and Capt. Ernest Medina, as well as the crimes committed
during Operation Speedy Express and the controversial Phoenix Program.
How soldiers are trained and conditioned to behave reflects directly upon the
society they are drawn from. The American public responds to crimes committed in
wartime with disappointment, anger, disbelief, and even disillusionment. It
wants know why such terrible events occurred and how to keep them from happening
again. Any scholarly work on this topic should be founded on broad, unbiased
research and present its findings in a measured, non-sensationalist manner,
taking due account of differing arguments. Emotionally charged and politically
driven rhetoric can have no place in sound analytical history.
Greiner fails to meet these standards. In trying to frame unassailable
arguments, he simply dismisses the legitimacy of views contrary to his own. When
he states that war crimes in Vietnam cannot be understood by comparing them to
those committed in other conflicts, he robs the reader of the proper context in
which to make sound judgments. War and combat are so extremely divergent from
the experiences of peace and security as to constitute their own distinct
environment. It is misguided to think we can fairly and rationally analyze human
behavior without considering its moral setting.
Historical evidence adduced in War without Fronts is another matter.
To his credit, Greiner carefully consulted the records of the US Army's Vietnam
War Crimes Working Group as well as of Lt. Gen. William R. Peers's investigation
of the My Lai massacre and trial.[2] But he applies an uneven standard to his
sources, virtually disallowing most official US military records while accepting
other sources of doubtful veracity. For example, he repeatedly cites testimony
given during the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation with little indication of the
highly-questionable motives or proven falsehoods of many of those who testified.[3]
In general, Greiner simply rejects American military records that might cast
doubt on his thesis, while endorsing those that support his position. He devotes
three pages to a list of anti-communist forces' atrocities compiled by the
Provisional Revolutionary Government Information Bureau—the propaganda arm of
the National Liberation Front, or Viet Cong—asserting that "It cannot be proven
from the divisional files that in this phase of the war [1968-71] American units
were carrying out massacres in I Corps Tactical Zone but it would be premature,
if not negligent, to dismiss out of hand the reports published by the NLF
[National Liberation Front] or the North Vietnamese Communist Party about
atrocities and war crimes as enemy propaganda and deliberately misleading"
(249). He exhibits little compunction in accepting at face value communist
reports filled with unsubstantiated, purely propagandistic statements. This is
not to deny that some American units deliberately misreported the number of
civilian deaths—they almost certainly did—but one should apply the same
standard of skepticism to all sources.
Unsupported sweeping generalizations abound. For example, Greiner states that
in Vietnam there was an "unspoken rule of thumb ... [that] troops without a
permanent commitment to norms of warfare tend to be dominated by violent
ringleaders" (87), who encouraged violent acts against civilians or injured
enemy soldiers. A number of questions arise: who exactly followed such an
"unspoken rule of thumb?" Just what "norms of warfare" are meant? How did
"violent ringleaders" dominate some soldiers? There can be no answers to these
questions without looking at each individual case, which Greiner blithely fails
to do. Referring to the motivation of American service personnel in Vietnam, he
writes that many had volunteered for military service only to avoid the draft
and certain deployment to Vietnam (114), while the thousands of others who
joined out of a sense of duty, patriotism, or other reasons were "gullible young
men … treading in their fathers' footsteps and wanting to emulate or even
surpass them" (123).
Greiner repeatedly uses charged words and unnecessarily provocative,
emotional language. American soldiers were "zombies" (135), "terrorists" (144),
"cannon fodder" (112), and "cowardly marauders" (13), willing to talk about
their participation in war crimes because they were "returning home as losers, wanting
to rid themselves of the stigma of defeat" (21). Soldiers suffered from a "rage
at their own army" (131). "Violating women was regarded as an unofficial
Standard Operating Procedure among jungle warriors" (159). In the wake of the
Tet Offensive of 1968, "The unprepared US Armed Forces had disgraced themselves
and could only retake [cities and towns] at the cost of civilian casualties"
(182). In a final indictment of American society, he adds: "[Vietnam veterans]
were to be sure of returning to a society which did not punish, but rewarded,
them for their service to the community" (349). Many Vietnam veterans would
disagree.
Finally, Greiner is simply wrong about very many aspects of the Vietnam War,
both large and small. Of IV Corps Tactical Zone, he writes, "in the provinces
near the capital Saigon the fighting was over a symbolic presence and a claim of
both sides to be in control" (15). But Saigon was in III Corps Tactical Zone and
the fighting in both zones was immensely more than "symbolic." In writing of the
capacities of B-52 bombers, Greiner pointedly mentions—purely for the shock
value—that they were capable of carrying atomic warheads. He misunderstands the
concept of "soft targets" in warfare, noting that their existence "implies a
brutalized military strategy" (35) and wrongly states that the Americans'
"superior weapons were useless in the jungle" (36). American commanders saw no
value in capturing prisoners of war, according to Greiner, because "what
mattered was the body count" (56). He writes of "search and destroy" missions as
a "strategy," and makes the outrageous claim that the American "objective was to
lure as many North Vietnamese soldiers as possible to the South to annihilate
them there" (56). The sheer volume of such errors of fact is most distressing in
a purportedly scholarly work.
Greiner provides a touch of unintended irony when discussing pacification in
Vietnam: "A factual basis was not important to the critics of pacification and
accordingly there was no question of discussion, but rather a barrage of
emotionally charged verdicts" (59). One may reach the same conclusion about his
efforts in writing this book. It is true that American service personnel
committed atrocities in Vietnam. Some were prosecuted and punished for their
actions. Without question, many brutal crimes were purposely downplayed at all
levels and many more never even came to the attention of military authorities
and the American public. Dedicated, dispassionate researchers will uncover more
information about this terrible, but very real, side of warfare.
Sensationalistic and contentious works like War without Fronts obscure
vital truths but sometimes offer a point of departure for serious historians
seeking a better understanding of the Vietnam War and of the human condition in
general. Only in that light can I recommend this book.