Uncle Sam be damned in 'Nam

Uncle Sam be Damned in 'Nam – No Country for Noble Causes
We shoot the sick, the young, the lame, We do our best to kill and maim,
Because the kills count all the same….Napalm sticks to kids….
Ox cart rolling down the road, Peasants with a heavy load,
They're all VC when the bombs explode….Napalm sticks to kids.

Song composed and sung by soldiers of the US Army's 1st Cavalry Division, the first full US Army Division deployed on September 11, 1965 to Vietnam. (Source: Jan Barry, ed., Peace Is Our Profession).

In order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the reality of history itself and contemporary geopolitical affairs, it seems sensible to bring to the exercise both context and perspective, even if for some folks such an "exercise" may cause a measure of pain. This "pain" of course will be commensurate with the degree and type of context and perspective one is prepped to take on, which itself doubtless will be informed by one's political persuasions.

Regardless of such "persuasions", 2015 provides a timely, unique opportunity to engage in such a reflective exercise. The year marks two important anniversaries signposting pivotal points in the history of United States' military adventurism undertaken in the pursuit of the noble cause that is the national interest. These are the 50^th anniversary of America's actual, official 'boots on the ground' moment in Vietnam, along with the 40^th anniversary of its eventual departure a decade later.

A brief stroll down memory lane is appropriate here. It was in August 1964 then US president Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) signed the Gulf of Tonkin (GoT) Resolution that unambiguously signalled America's escalation of its hitherto hesitant military involvement there. Thus was handed LBJ the carte blanche approval for aggressive intervention in 'Nam, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident providing the president the pretext for deploying troops in large numbers allegedly to 'stop the dominoes falling'to communism in South East Asia.

In response to the perceived'provocations' by the North Vietnamese of the GoT incident – now all but officially recognised as a false-flag ploy for the escalation – Johnson immediately ordered 'retaliatory' air strikes against North Vietnam, which depending on which piece of ideological real estate you occupied, was either nationalist or communist.

Although in various forms since 1950 America's presence in Indochina – Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – was already well established if not generally well known at the time, it was 1965 that ushered in its no-holds barred entry into what became the quagmire of the Vietnam War. This was followed by an even more rapid escalation topping out at around 200,000 by end of the year. At its peak, there would be over half a million troops serving in Vietnam.

That this decision proved to be one of American history's most significant Pandora's Box moments is now generally accepted by all but the most ideologically myopic and patriotically unrepentant. Ten years, fifty-eight thousand American lives, with around 150,000 wounded later, in 1975 it was all over bar the humbling rush to the exits and subsequent port-mortems as to how it could have gone so horribly pear shaped. The "rush" was best epitomised by the iconic, scenes atop the US Embassy in the South Vietnamese capital Saigon with hundreds of Americans and South Vietnamese alike scrambling to get on one of the few seats left on the last chopper out of town. The Vietnam War (or as referred to by the Vietnamese then and now, the "American War"), was no more.

For the majority of Americans it had come not a nanosecond too soon. The nascent American empire had endured a most humiliating, "never-again" defeat. Yet from 1965-1975, the Vietnam experience would dominate US foreign and national security policy; it would also dictate the course of the Cold War politics, virtually defining the notion of the proxy war that characterised the decades long standoff with its Cold War opponent the United Soviet Socialists' Republic (USSR).Moreover, Vietnam would change the social and political fabric of the country for generations to come, and for those looking still has implications for America's role in the world today.

That these 'bookend' milestones should prompt some serious, genuine reflection both inside and outside of America on the country's 'groundhog day' foreign policy machinations is a given. This should especially be the case given the US's more recent failed foreign policy escapades in Iraq and Afghanistan, without even considering the prospects of future military involvement in and around Syria and (again), Iraq, and possibly even in the Ukraine against nuclear-'powered' Russia.

It is not overstating the case to say that America's decision to wage war in this 'piss-ant' country - with the resultant spill-over conflagration that raged in varying degrees in neighbouring Cambodia - unleashed nothing less than a holocaust. It culminated in the deaths of millions of people (conservative estimates come in at 3-4 million, and don't include Pol Pot's Cambodian genocide of between 1.5-2.5 million), and the disablement and displacement of millions more. That much of this unleashed hell was deliberate, cold, calculating and premeditated is something that neither America nor the rest of the world has fully contemplated much less come to terms with.

For those wanting to get some idea of the truly catastrophic nature of this conflict and be able to put it all into some kind of historical perspective, it is only relatively recently we have been able to do this. Of course we have had Errol Morris' 2003 documentary Fog of War, which featured a lengthy interview with one of the War's chief architects Robert McNamara,LBJ's Secretary of Defense throughout much of the early stages.

Much also has been written about Vietnam to be sure. But for this writer's money, no understanding of the American 'Nam era comes complete without reference to Douglas Valentine's The Phoenix Program:America's Use of Terror in Vietnam, and Nick Turse's Kill Anything that Moves: The Real Story of America in Vietnam.These two relatively unknown, gripping narratives provide each in their own way an excruciating corroboration of the decidedly unofficial, behind the scenes barbarity, depravity, and needless suffering and avoidable tragedy that characterised the War from go to woe, the last word being operative.

For those who don't normally associate terms such as 'war crimes', 'mass murder', 'rape', 'atrocities', 'crimes against humanity', 'terrorism', 'abduction', 'assassination', and even, to all intents and purposes - 'genocide' - with the conduct of war by the US military and its agents, these books will be an unsettling eye-opener. For those looking for "context" and "perspective", you have come to the right place, although one hesitates to suggest the experience will be a satisfying, or indeed, comforting one.

Anyone - American or non-American - who still views the Vietnam War as something of a worthy, noble cause, should be locked in a room and forced to read both of these books in short order before they are allowed out to face the world again. I defy any right thinking, empathetic individual to walk out of this 'room' with the same view of that world. For those who might be inclined to see America as the global good guy, if these books do not at least make you question such blind assumptions in the current geopolitical climate, then arguably there is little hope for you.

Anyone looking for collateral damage or unintended consequences in either of these books will be disappointed, although there was plenty of that! To be sure the most recognised and officially acknowledged of the "collateral damage" was the aerial bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, where in the latter country alone - one that America was not even at war with - more ordnance was dropped on it than by all the Allies in World War Two. As historians Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan reveal in their excellent 2006 article "Bombs over Cambodia", the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs throughout the whole of WWII. The US Air Force dropped around 2,756,941 tons of bombs on Cambodia throughout the 'Nam era; in their summation, Cambodia may be "the most heavily bombed country in history".

So whether in the air or on the ground, the American military created mayhem and misery on a scale that was as unprecedented as it was indiscriminate as it was reprehensible, with the civilian populations of three countries generally suffering the most. That much of this carnage took place in secret at the time is now of course no secret, thanks to revelations by intrepid investigative journalists such as Seymour Hersh and courageous leakers like Daniel Ellsberg, the Edward Snowden of his day. Both of these are still active chroniclers of the enactment and consequences of their country's foreign and national security policies. We now know that much of the horror and terror that was part and parcel of the lives of millions of folk for whom war and internecine conflict - and the misery and devastation that goes with the territory - was and had been a way of life for generations of Indochinese people. The two books in question underscore this in spades.

On a micro level, it was the infamous My Lai Massacre revealed by Hersh in 1969 that attracted the most attention to the way American troops conducted the war, if not how they were expected to conduct operations by their commanders. And of course Ellsberg's leaking of the Pentagon Papers blew the lid off any notion that the war was winnable and that it was the noble cause the conflict's architects and champions were portraying. Both these revelations provided enormous impetus to the anti-war movement, and it's easy to see how the war might have dragged on even longer without them.

That was then of course. But some four plus decades later, it is Valentine's and Turse's books that uniquely catalogue - albeit within different contexts and from different perspectives - the depth and scope of a wholly new, mind numbingly horrific reality of this war. They further reveal that a considerable amount of this genocidal carnage was carried out by US ground troops with the knowledge, approval and active encouragement of their superiors, who themselves manifested a dehumanised callousness and an utterly amoral sense of detachment in the pursuit of victory. And again, 40-50 years on, with the exception of William Calley of My Lai infamy, almost no-one has ever done time for any of these crimes.

Although a decidedly unsavoury one, the following extract from the introduction to Turse's book provides a taster of what follows:

The army, like the marines, left a devastating trail of civilian casualties in its wake - thousands upon thousands of non-combatants beaten, wounded, raped, tortured, or killed in the years that followed (the escalation)……There is no excusing the acts carried out by the troops on the ground, but these actions did not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they were the consequence of deliberate decisions made long before, at the highest levels of the military.

Suffice it to say, the rules of engagement that were followed in 'Nam were not aberrations; they were a normal, routine part of operations. To say Vietnam was a numbers game is very much on the money. It was the body count - and only the body count - that counted for both the respective theatre commanders and the war planners back in Washington. We can easily imagine how many Vietnamese might have been left wondering if they weren't better off having the hated French –– who'd dominated the region for almost a hundred years prior –– as their colonial masters. Better the devil you know.

Valentine's book catalogues an altogether different face of the Vietnam reality – although no less merciless, brutal and shocking than the one Turse showcases. Said to be the brainchild of William Colby, a high level officer at the CIA station in Saigon during the late sixties and early seventies who later became the CIA director in 1973, Phoenix was nothing short of a systematic assassination, terrorism, kidnapping and torture program.

Between 1965 and 1972, an estimated eighty thousand civilians were "pacified" or "neutralized" under Phoenix. On the flimsiest of pretexts, men and women alike were subjected by CIA operatives and their specially trained South Vietnamese cadres to indefinite incarceration without trial, gruesome torture, vicious rape, and in countless cases, summary execution. As relentlessly brutal as the grunts portrayed in Turse's book were, in Valentine's narrative the Company's operatives and their cohort were no less so. The book was unavailable for quite some time and was recently republished as part of Open Road Media's Forbidden Bookshelf program; after reading it, it becomes clear why successive US Governments and the CIA especially did not want this story ever to see the light of day.

There will be another reason for why neither the CIA or the USG would want a book like this in wide circulation – it will give too many people a real insight into what they are capable of and what may be happening behind the scenes now in various hotspots of the world where America has a stake. Much in the same way that anyone familiar with the CIA's Operation Gladio in Europe would I suspect appreciate, for those who do read Valentine's book, the next time you hear any official from the USG or the CIA talking about "terrorism" or "terrorist groups", you will find it hard to take them seriously or understand how they can do so and keep a straight face. In short, it is difficult to see how what happened with Phoenix as being anything different from what ISIS is apparently perpetrating in Syria and Iraq. Here's a sampler:

"[Phoenix] was….an instrument of counter-terror – the psychological warfare tactic in which members of the VCI were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the entire population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy."

Put simply it is difficult to walk away from either of these books and not reflect on America's place in the world, both in the context of what was happening then, and with what is happening now. In the process of ostensibly defending and preserving freedom, democracy, liberty, equality and the rule of law, and upholding the principles of its fabled Constitution and the Bill of Rights and all the fruit that notionally comes on the platter, America had to – in the paraphrased words of Vietnam era journalist Peter Arnett – destroy the 'village' in order to save it.

Although there is still some controversy as to whether in fact Arnett misrepresented the source for this infamous quote for the purposes of journalistic propagandising, there can be no doubt that hundreds of villages and towns were destroyed in 'Nam. Given that America still seems hell bent in a larger context and over the longer term on destroying its own 'village' in order to save it, the reference is still apposite regardless of the veracity of Arnett's indelible line. Interestingly, Arnett was accused by the first Bush administration of propagandising during the First Gulf War in Iraq, a war we all know that president George HW Bush manipulatively sold to the world using propaganda of the most devious kind. So a little context and perspective is appropriate here as well. Which is to say, sound like a familiar scenario?

Context and perspective! What's not to like?