Uncle Sam be damned in 'Nam

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.