With the present global turmoil ensuing from America's endless foreign policy machinations, it's timely to ransack history in anticipation of a two upcoming anniversaries -- neither of which is likely to be loudly celebrated, at least outside the Pentagon or the neo-con network. In this the first of a two-part series, Australian Greg Maybury reflects on Uncle Sam's foray into Vietnam, and the implications for the here and now.

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

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A Noble Cause for Celebration

Most everyone loves a celebration of course -- especially a victory celebration, and it seems the Pentagon and the U.S. military is no different. In a recent article on the Truth Out website, Marjorie Cohn reveals the Pentagon brass have earmarked $30m of the American taxpayers' 'hard-earned' to celebrate -- wait for it -- the 50^th anniversary of the "victory" in Vietnam.

This money will underwrite in Cohn's words "a program to rewrite and sanitize" the history of America's involvement in this sad and sorry episode in the history of the Cold War and U.S. foreign policy. The Pentagon have already spent a 'motza' on its all-frills website, a portal that appears designed to facilitate a 're-education' of sorts of Americans about the ugly truth of this unholy war, and the rationale and justification for it. After poignantly noting what information was left out or played down by the website's content managers, Cohn notes grimly:

"We cannot forget the millions of victims of the war, both military and civilian, who died in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, nor those who perished or were hurt in its aftermath by land mines, unexploded ordnance, Agent Orange and refugee flight."

In a recent article on the Global Research website, Jack Smith observes that the two-fold purpose of this commemorative event is firstly to "legitimize and intensify" a renewed militaristic spirit within America, and secondly to "dilute the memory" of historic public opposition to the Vietnam war. In this updated 2012 piece Smith, like Cohn, attempts a reality check for those in Washington and the military establishment who like to pick and choose elements of the 'Nam narrative that best fit their own retrospective views.

One of Smith's most remarkable and poignant observations -- one that, quantitatively at least, says as much about the Vietnamese as it does about the Americans who invaded their country and turned it into a living, breathing, revolving-door nightmare -- is the following:

"What strikes visitors to Vietnam in recent years is that the country appears to have come to terms with what it calls the American War far better than America has come to terms with [it]. Despite the hardships inflicted upon Vietnam, the government and people appear to hold no grudges against the United States."

As for highlighting the qualitative difference in the respective attitudes of selected people on both sides of the conflict, Smith notes that many, in Congress, the White House, and the Pentagon in particular, are looking to prosecute the war all over again by "organizing a massive propaganda effort to distort the history of Washington's aggression and unspeakable brutality in Vietnam".

With the Pentagon's Vietnam celebratory plans in mind, and taking a lead from Cohn and Smith, it seems timely to consider some alternative context and perspective, even if for some folks such an exercise may cause a measure of cognitive dissonance of the patriotic kind.

Hey, hey LBJ, How many boys did you kill today?

As it turns out 2015 marks two 'Nam related anniversaries, indeed Cold War signposts. These are the 50th anniversary of America's official 1965 'boots on the ground' entry into the country, along with the 40th anniversary of its ignominious withdrawal a decade later. At this point a stroll down memory lane is appropriate.

It was in August 1964 [then] US president Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) signed off on the Gulf of Tonkin (GoT) Resolution signalling America's official escalation of its previously below the radar military involvement there. Thus was handed LBJ carte blanche approval for aggressive intervention in 'Nam, with the Gulf of Tonkin incident -- much like Iraq's WMDs served to do almost four decades later -- providing the president the pretext for deploying combat troops in large numbers, all purportedly to 'stop the dominoes falling' to communism in South-east Asia and beyond.

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

Appropriately codenamed 'Operation Rolling Thunder', this relentless aerial bombing campaign lasted three years, and eventually spilled over into neighbouring, neutral Cambodia. Although in various forms since 1950 America's presence in Indochina -- Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam -- was well established if not generally well understood at the time, it was 1965 that ushered in its 'boots-on-the-ground' entry into what became the miasmic quagmire of the Vietnam War. This was followed by an even more rapid escalation topping out at around 200,000 by year's end.

At its peak in 1968, there would be over 535,000 troops serving in Vietnam, which by some accounts ran close to a million individual deployments on rotation throughout. Estimates of the cost in 2012 dollars of the Vietnam adventure run anywhere between $US700 billion to $US1 trillion.

(For additional perspective, readers may wish to note that the cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation is conservatively estimated to be around $3-4 trillion. Those curious to know what an actual 'trill' looks like can click here.)

That this decision proved to be one of America's most portentous Pandora's Box moments is now generally accepted by all but the most ideologically myopic. Ten years, 58,000 American lives, and 150,000 wounded later, in 1975 it was all over bar the humbling rush to the exits and subsequent post-mortems as to how it could have gone so horribly pear shaped. These figures do not include those casualties of other occupying nations with roughly around 6,000 KIAs, of which around 450 were Australian, with South Korean KIAs around 5,000.

Along with the 'deep-sixing' of dozens of US Army Huey choppers off of aircraft carriers into the South China Sea, this "rush" was best epitomised by the iconic scenes atop the US Embassy in the South Vietnamese capital Saigon, with hundreds of Americans and 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, the "American War"), was no more.

For the majority of Americans it had come not a nanosecond too soon. The empire had endured a slow motion, humiliating, 'never-again' defeat. Yet from 1965-1975, the Vietnam engagement would dominate American foreign 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 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

Moreover, Vietnam would change the face of American society, culture and politics for generations to come. For those paying attention it still has implications for America's role in the world today not least in Iraq. As evidenced by the Pentagon's planned 'Viet-fest', its fallout continues to inform the collective political and military mindset, although many would argue in ways that reveal few lessons have been learned.

That these 'bookend' milestones might prompt some serious, genuine reflection on the country's 'groundhog day' foreign policy machinations should be a given. This is especially the case considering the US's more recent, imperially inspired 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 Iran, not to mention in the Ukraine against nuclear 'powered' Russia.

It is not overstating the case to say that America's decision to wage war in this "piddling, piss-ant little country" -- with the resultant spill-over conflagration that raged in varying degrees in neighbouring Cambodia; more on this in Part Two -- unleashed nothing less than a holocaust. It culminated in the deaths of millions of people (conservative 'gook' body count estimates come in at 3-4 million.) And this does not even take into account that other 'forgotten war in Laos, a story for another time.

The only good 'Gook' is a dead 'Gook'

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. This was a lengthy interview with one of the War's chief architects Robert McNamara, LBJ's Secretary of Defense throughout much of the early stages, and a man who later all but acknowledged the pretext for war was bogus. And there was the iconic Hearts and Minds by director Peter Davis, released in 1975.

There have been several iconic films that showcased diverse perspectives of the conflict from Apocalypse Now, The Deerhunter, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, and Platoon, to name a few. Few of these films portray it as anything resembling -- to use Ronald Reagan's memorable descriptor -- a noble cause, and most still provide a harrowing insight into the war's reality.

Much also has been written about Vietnam to be sure; James Gibson's The Perfect War and Gabriel Kolko's Anatomy of a War are excellent starting points.

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 wholly gripping narratives provide each in their own way gut-wrenching corroboration of the decidedly unofficial, behind the scenes barbarity, depravity, suffering and needless tragedy that characterised the War from go to woe, the latter word being operative.

For those who don't normally associate terms such as 'war crimes', 'mass murder', 'rape', 'atrocities', 'crimes against humanity', 'chemical warfare', 'terrorism', 'massacres', 'kidnapping', 'assassination' -- and even 'genocide' -- with the conduct of war by the US military and its agents/allies, these books will prove a viscerally disturbing 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, even less to suggest how folks might personally frame either response.

After noting that the U.S. from the beginning to the end, "relentlessly pounded South Vietnam with nearly every lethal technology in their arsenal short of nuclear weapons, indiscriminately spreading death across vast swaths of territory", he said:

"Such supercharged killing -- so often carried out from the relative safety of a jet flying thousands of feet above the ground, a helicopter gunship hovering over thatch-roofed huts, an artillery battery miles from the target zone, a ship lobbing shells from offshore -- undoubtedly saved the lives of some American soldiers. But the logic of overkill exacted an immense, almost unimaginable toll on Vietnamese civilians. U.S. commanders wasted ammunition like millionaires, hoarded American lives like misers -- and often treated Vietnamese lives as if they were worth nothing at all."

Almost four decades after America's final withdrawal from Vietnam, it is The Phoenix Program, and Kill Anything that Moves that uniquely catalogue -- albeit within different contexts and from different perspectives -- the depth and scope of a wholly new, mind numbingly horrific reality of war in general and this one in particular. They further reveal that a considerable amount of this carnage was carried out by US ground troops and special forces alike with the knowledge, approval and active encouragement of their superiors, who themselves exhibited an utterly amoral sense of detachment in the pursuit of the high body count and what eventually amounted to an elusive victory.

What happens in 'Nam, Stays in 'Nam

In fact, according to Turse, the more morally challenged GIs and their commanders were materially and otherwise rewarded for high 'enemy' body counts! And again, 40-50 years on, with the notable exception of William Calley of My Lai infamy, relatively few GIs or mid- to senior level serving military personnel were ever held to account for any of these atrocities, and even less were found guilty or for that matter imprisoned.

And insofar as we can gather, not one US war planner or politician was even considered for prosecution for war crimes of any sort, whether in the US or in any international court. Arguably the biggest criminal of the Vietnam War and noted Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the estimable Henry Kissinger -- Nixon's then Secretary of State and National Security Adviser -- is still as we speak going 'Johnny Walker', for which we can only assume he is eternally grateful. All this not to mention those still living with the trauma he helped create, as well as the leftover unexploded ordnance that riddles the countryside and still kills and cripples young and old alike 40 years after the war ended for the Americans and their allies.

After noting that ""the army, like the marines, left a devastating trail of civilian casualties in its wake -- thousands upon thousands of non-combatants [were] beaten, wounded, raped, tortured, or killed in the years that followed (the escalation)", Turse adds:

""between the massacres carried out by members of the army and those perpetrated by marines, [they] make it abundantly clear individual soldiers and their immediate commanders were not the only ones to blame. There is, of course 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 unmistakable consequence of deliberate decisions made long before, at the highest levels of the military." [My Emphasis]

Suffice it to say, as showcased in Valentine's and Turse's books the rules of engagement such as they applied in 'Nam were not aberrations; they were a normal, routine part of operations, albeit unofficially. To say Vietnam was a numbers game is very much on the money. As the opening epigraph illustrates, whether combatants or non-combatants, it was the Vietnamese body count -- and only that one -- that counted for the troops, their respective commanders and the war planners and politicians back in Washington.

There is grim irony in this in that it was the body count of the American troops that helped turned the tide against the war, much like one supposes, the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts decades later. And we can easily imagine how many Vietnamese might have been left wondering if they might not have been better off having the hated French who had, as their former colonial masters, dominated the region and exploited its people for almost a hundred years prior. Better the devil you know!

None of this is to suggest that those who fought the 'good fight' thinking it was a noble cause are not deserving of our respect. At the time the mainstream media shilled the "principled" purpose of the war, much like they were to do time and time again. For this reason alone the escalation of the war received broad public acceptance both in the US and here in Australia, one of the few countries that followed America into the quagmire. Nor do revelations of the atrocities documented in these books indicate that a majority of combat troops willingly participated in such activities. In reality many GIs and their commanders were extremely disturbed by what they witnessed with some lodging formal complaints, and others suffering posttraumatic stress disorder.

But for the most part such complaints fell on deaf ears. Some were ostracised and vilified for doing so by fellow soldiers and higher ups. Abiding by the 'accepted' rules of war wasn't how the game was played in 'Nam, and the brass didn't want know about those that insisted on doing so.

Whether American or non-American, 'Nam veteran or not, anyone who still views the War as something of a worthy, noble cause, should be locked in a room and forced -- looking down the 'business end' of a locked and loaded M-16 carbine if necessary -- to read both of these books in short order before they are allowed out to face the world again. Once done, I defy any right thinking individual to walk out of this 'room' without feeling emotionally brutalised and with the same view of that world and for that matter, of war itself.

For those who might still be inclined to see America as the go-to global good guy, if these books do not at least make you question such assumptions in the current geopolitical milieu, then I'm at a loss as to what might do the trick. Moreover, anyone looking in either of these books for implicit 'business as usual' justifications for the sheer horror and tragedy based on notions of 'war is hell' collateral damage or unintended consequences will be disappointed, although there are plenty of examples of both!

The sad thing will be that next year, when the brass asses at the Pentagon and their belligerent, blood drenched brethren in the neo-con fraternity come to commemorate this regrettable, avoidable episode in American history, such considerations will be the last thing on their deranged, deluded and delusional minds.

End Part One

Authors Bio:

Greg Maybury is a Perth (Australia) based freelance writer. His main areas of interest are American history and politics in general, with a special focus on economic, national security, military and geopolitical affairs, and both US domestic and foreign policy issues.