But a very substantial body of evidence shows otherwise. The U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, had indeed adopted a policy of treating civilians like armed combatants if they were living in areas under long-term control by the Viet Cong (as the Communist-led Vietnamese combatants were called). That policy was embodied in the establishment of "free fire zones" -- a term that was frequently used during the War and is discussed prominently in the literature on the War but is strangely absent from The Vietnam War. "Free fire zones" -- later renamed "specified strike zones" -- were large areas of the countryside in which bombing and shelling could be carried out without obtaining permission from higher echelons of the U.S. military or the Vietnamese government, on the official assumption that any population remaining was the enemy.
The Peers Commission sought to clear Westmoreland himself of culpability for My Lai, referring in its report to directives from his Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) that required U.S. soldiers to "minimize noncombatant casualties and civilian property damage." But General Peers was deliberately misleading the public to protect his superior officer. The full text of MACV Directive 525-3 of September 1965 makes it clear that such protections for civilians applied only to populated areas where the Communist forces had either temporary control or no control at all. But areas under long-term Viet Cong control represented more than 40 percent of the rural Vietnamese population, according to McNamara's estimate before the major U.S. troop commitment began.
In fact, Westmoreland himself stated his policy quite explicitly in his own memoirs. Once a free fire zone was established, he wrote, "anybody who remained had to be considered enemy combatants," and operations in those areas "could be conducted without fear of civilian casualties." Those were precisely the instructions given to troops sent into My Lai.
In 1968, journalist Jonathan Schell published a detailed account of the systematic destruction of most of the populated districts of Quang Ngai, the province in which My Lai was located, primarily through systematic attacks on villages by U.S. fighter-bombers. The destroyed villages were in Viet Cong base areas that had been declared free fire zones after dropping leaflets warning the population that they would be destroyed for having harbored or aided the Viet Cong. Schell's account is not mentioned by Ward.
Indiscriminate targeting of civilian areas and "collective punishment" of the civilian population for support for or assistance to combatants are clear violations of the laws of war. But Ward doesn't even focus on the use of U.S. air power in South Vietnam apart from close air support in ground battles, much less acknowledge that the U.S. military bears responsibility for war crimes.
The author's desire to avoid ultimate judgments on the War won't heal the rift between the two views of Vietnam held by the Vietnam War generations. And especially in light of unending and unpopular U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the greater Middle East, both Ward's book and the Ken Burns series that it reflects have missed an opportunity to help Americans understand why such wars are a recurring theme in recent American history.
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