Vietnam War – Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Atrocities

Millions of Americans are familiar with the graphic photos of the era depicting the horrors of war that I featured in my recent blogs – Iconic Photos and More Images. If you are not aware of these photos, take a moment to review a selected few that captured the terror and pathos of war on film. The photos in my blogs demonstrate why “One picture is worth a thousand words.” Words fail to evoke that level of emotion.

Many photographs won Pulitzer prizes and achieved iconic status, but, unfortunately, few viewers knew the backstory behind the compelling images. That’s a shame, because if they had, the outcome in public opinion may have been different.

Taken by courageous war correspondents in the field of action, not in the safety of Saigon salons, the images had an unintended consequence. The images influenced the antiwar effort of protestors who did not understand the complexity of the Vietnam war, or comprehend the difference between collateral damage and atrocities. Atrocities involves intention, total disregard of Geneva conventions, while collateral damage is coincidental and common in all wars. War is indeed Hell.

The black and white photos impacted public opinion in America, as they should have. Vietnam offered powerful lessons. Many went unlearned back then and have gone unlearned since, regrettably. If you missed these blogs, I encourage you to read them and contemplate their meaning. There was a serious explanation behind these photographs. Perception is not reality in many cases. Get the facts. My recent historical narrative, RECALL, is full of factual data, much derived from declassified CIA Intelligence Estimates from that era. We need to understand our errors or be condemned to repeat them. When discussing atrocities, the subject becomes particularly sensitive. Let me offer a perspective as dispassionately as possible.

During the Vietnam War only two American atrocities were prosecuted. While many are familiar with the history of the My Lai Massacre, few are knowledgeable about VC and North Vietnamese terror attacks and atrocities. Max Hastings recently chronicled their violent activity in his new book, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975. I recommend reading it to enlighten your outlook of the other side of the war story.

Terror was a big part of the N.V. war effort, and the VC’s. But, records are largely unavailable. The North Vietnamese enforced “denied areas” to reporters. Photography was permitted only to scripted ideological sympathizers.

Therefore, no visual images chronicled the history of the brutal murders of 15,000 “class enemies” in North Vietnam during the mid-1950’s. General Vo Nguyen Giap acknowledged in a 1956 speech that landowners were “enemies”, subject to “strong measures”, i.e. tortured confessions. Catholic were persecuted, and over 650,000 fled to South Vietnam. After defeating the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Ho Chi Minh concentrated on converting the South to Communism by force, in alliance with the Viet Cong. Terror became a tactic in their aggression.

Hastings documents many of these atrocities in his new book- Using peasant women as shields in firefights, killing of non-combatant nurses, non-compliant villagers, murdering captives and anti-malarial sprayer personnel. As the war dragged on, it got worse.

During Tet’68, they focused on the battle of Hue. The atrocity level escalated with targeting of every government official, intellectual, or “enemy of the people” the NV and VC could identify. They killed anyone they perceived as sympathizers of the South Vietnamese government and buried them in mass graves. Did you ever hear or read about that?

That N.V. atrocity received very little coverage by the American media during 1968, the height of the antiwar protests in the States. I covered this topic in my blog entitled, Fake News. This blog depicts one of the most disgraceful aspects of reporting, or “non-reporting,” during the war. Please read it and see if it reminds you of some of the poor reporting of news we see today. I’d like your comments, if civil. Vietnam still stirs up a lot of passion, I understand. Keep it respectful.