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As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that. And

As the article quotes one soldier there was a mai Lai every month. You make it sound like this was a fact in the article. One unnamed soldier claimed that. And I think the free fire zones were much more centered on artillery and air strikes and not ground infiltrations just walking and shooting whomever they wanted to, but it’s still horrible the disregard for human life. But to state as you do that civilian mass murder was the goal, that’s false. The goal was war of attrition of actual combatants. What they did was not care or let civilian casualties stop them from trying to carry out that goal. Still horrible but come on there is enough bad stuff to point to without exaggeration and misleading.

abalone 8y ago
That is pure unresearched wishful thinking. They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them "combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body counts. Kissinger ordered "anything that flies on everything that moves." Villages were leveled in indiscriminate, massive bombing campaigns that exceeded twice the ordinance dropped in WWII. Millions were killed. If you really want to research what happened in Vietnam start with Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves.[1] It's a polemical title but it's based on a ton of primary research, e.g. the Pentagon's War Crimes Working Group and the National Archives and interviews with over a hundred veterans. And that stuff will make any good soul polemical. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb
- jfk13 8y ago
  > twice the ordinance dropped in WWII Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance".
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- wnkrshm 8y ago
  > The Vietnam population did not see the kind of drop you would get from widespread systematic ethnic cleansing over a 19+ year war. 2.7 Million Americans went to Vietnam and a tiny fraction did some horrific things, but this was far more limited than often portrayed. And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program. The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new hamlets. That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in the field.
  - wahern 8y ago
    The Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted from the British, who used it to quell the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. Basically, round everybody up into a small group of villages for their "protection". Assume everyone who doesn't stay in the village is the enemy. Notwithstanding the abuses in Malaysia (I'll leave it to others to question the necessity and efficacy), it definitely didn't translate to the Vietnam context. For one thing, in Malaysia the Communists mostly came from the ethnic Chinese community, who were a minority and already highly concentrated in the cities.[1] Vietnam had/has a similar ethnic Chinese minority (wealthy, urban, etc), but they were Capitalists, not the Communists. The pool of Communists was everybody else, the largely rural population. [1] Interestingly, to this very day Malaysia still has laws which prevent Chinese from owning certain types of rural property, ostensibly to protect the rights of the rural Malay population. I don't know, but I presume such laws have always been in effect in Malaysia, even before the colonial era. At the time of the insurgency rural Chinese were probably already a suspicious group. In hindsight the insurgency was just an excuse for the powers (British, majority Malays) to reinforce the stable status quo, which is why the program "worked". In Vietnam the status quo was increasingly untenable.

abalone 8y ago

That is pure unresearched wishful thinking. They would fly helicopters up to farmers on a field who would look up at them in confusion and do nothing. Then they'd turn on a siren and when the farmers scattered they shot them all down for taking "evasive action", making them "combatants". There'd be reports of raids with hundreds of "viet cong" killed and a few weapons recovered. The killing machine was about body counts. Kissinger ordered "anything that flies on everything that moves." Villages were leveled in indiscriminate, massive bombing campaigns that exceeded twice the ordinance dropped in WWII. Millions were killed. If you really want to research what happened in Vietnam start with Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves.[1] It's a polemical title but it's based on a ton of primary research, e.g. the Pentagon's War Crimes Working Group and the National Archives and interviews with over a hundred veterans. And that stuff will make any good soul polemical. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250045061/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

jfk13 8y ago
> twice the ordinance dropped in WWII Nit-picking: it's "ordnance", not "ordinance".
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wnkrshm 8y ago
> The Vietnam population did not see the kind of drop you would get from widespread systematic ethnic cleansing over a 19+ year war. 2.7 Million Americans went to Vietnam and a tiny fraction did some horrific things, but this was far more limited than often portrayed. And deleted before I could reply - for anyone else interested and just two quick examples, read up on Free-Fire Zones and the Strategic Hamlet Program. The former is the indiscriminate killing of anyone found in the area and the latter is forced relocation of civilians and forced labor to build said new hamlets. That's top down strategy and can't be put on people losing their composure in the field.
- wahern 8y ago
  The Strategic Hamlet Program was adopted from the British, who used it to quell the Communist insurgency in Malaysia. Basically, round everybody up into a small group of villages for their "protection". Assume everyone who doesn't stay in the village is the enemy. Notwithstanding the abuses in Malaysia (I'll leave it to others to question the necessity and efficacy), it definitely didn't translate to the Vietnam context. For one thing, in Malaysia the Communists mostly came from the ethnic Chinese community, who were a minority and already highly concentrated in the cities.[1] Vietnam had/has a similar ethnic Chinese minority (wealthy, urban, etc), but they were Capitalists, not the Communists. The pool of Communists was everybody else, the largely rural population. [1] Interestingly, to this very day Malaysia still has laws which prevent Chinese from owning certain types of rural property, ostensibly to protect the rights of the rural Malay population. I don't know, but I presume such laws have always been in effect in Malaysia, even before the colonial era. At the time of the insurgency rural Chinese were probably already a suspicious group. In hindsight the insurgency was just an excuse for the powers (British, majority Malays) to reinforce the stable status quo, which is why the program "worked". In Vietnam the status quo was increasingly untenable.