I recently watched the documentary "Winter Soldier" about the soldiers who returned from Vietnam and their horror stories of the atrocities they committed. One of the lines that stuck with me was common among the soldiers. Body count was used as a gauge of success. When soldiers would come back from the filed and report deaths or over the radio report enemy casualties a strange line was used. For example soldier comes back and reports "3 NVA killed, sir". "How do you know they were NVA?" "Sir, because they were dead."
This has stuck with me every time I hear about a U.S. strike in Iraq or Afghanistan "23 Taliban fighters killed in the bombing" or "15 insurgents killed in heavy fighting in the city". I think to myself how do they know these are Taliban? Oh that's right; "Because they're dead."
Check out this article:
Death from above
By Tom Engelhardt
The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked up the morning after from a US Army publicity release. These proved fairly typical for the war. On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville", as it was known to US forces in the area) a significant success.
"American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory", and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hideout tunnels. Six and a half hours later, 'Pink Village' had become 'Red, White and Blue Village'."
All these 1968 dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former Associated Press reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service virtually no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village - the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. More than 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies were slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Barker Jr, in a nearly day-long rampage.
Things move somewhat faster these days - after all, Vietnamese villagers and local officials didn't have access to mobile telephones to tell their side of the slaughter - but from the military point of view, the stories these past years have all still seemed to start the same way.
Read the rest here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IG12Ak01.html
This has stuck with me every time I hear about a U.S. strike in Iraq or Afghanistan "23 Taliban fighters killed in the bombing" or "15 insurgents killed in heavy fighting in the city". I think to myself how do they know these are Taliban? Oh that's right; "Because they're dead."
Check out this article:
Death from above
By Tom Engelhardt
The first news stories about the most notorious massacre of the Vietnam War were picked up the morning after from a US Army publicity release. These proved fairly typical for the war. On its front page, the New York Times labeled the operation in and around a village called My Lai 4 (or "Pinkville", as it was known to US forces in the area) a significant success.
"American troops caught a North Vietnamese force in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting." United Press International termed what happened there an "impressive victory", and added a bit of patriotic color: "The Vietcong broke and ran for their hideout tunnels. Six and a half hours later, 'Pink Village' had become 'Red, White and Blue Village'."
All these 1968 dispatches from the "front" were, of course, military fairy tales. (There were no reporters in the vicinity.) It took over a year for a former GI named Ronald Ridenhour, who had heard about the bloody massacre from participants, and a young former Associated Press reporter named Seymour Hersh working in Washington for a news service virtually no one had ever heard of, to break the story, revealing that "red, white, and blue village" had just been red village - the red of Vietnamese peasant blood. More than 400 elderly men, women, children, and babies were slaughtered there by Charlie Company of Task Force Barker, an ad hoc unit commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Barker Jr, in a nearly day-long rampage.
Things move somewhat faster these days - after all, Vietnamese villagers and local officials didn't have access to mobile telephones to tell their side of the slaughter - but from the military point of view, the stories these past years have all still seemed to start the same way.
Read the rest here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IG12Ak01.html