There were a lot of times when we were given the order to shoot anything that moved in a particular area, or village. In other words, we were supposed to shoot the people that were there, and their animals, and "anything that moved". The inhabitants were supposed to be thoroughly warned to stay out of the area. We usually just searched each hooch, checked for signs of the enemy, and interrogated leaders of the villages. When we found large barrels of rice we assumed that this was kept for the enemy. We would then pressure the people in the villages to tell us where the VC were.
One of our companies that had previously received a lot of casualties from booby traps and snipers, followed the order and killed at least three hundred innocent civilians. This was later called the MY Lai massacre. The only ones doing the shooting were Americans. All of the ones killed were innocent civilians, mostly women and children who were lined up and gunned down in cold blood. The ones who gave the orders got off Scott-free. The ones who carried them out took the rap.
People who haven't fought in a war, or in combat, really don't know what it's like to experience the emotional turmoil that goes on within a person in a combat situation. I don't think anybody wants to kill anybody until they see their best friend get killed next to them. Watching other men as well, especially in the same platoon, or company, get torn apart by bullets and bombs over the course of months, day after day, severely affects ones' thinking and actions. Conditioning to win a war and to shoot at the enemy eventually wears on the mind after you've been in it long enough. There's little comparison between civilian life as we know it and military combat life where we are actually ordered to shoot someone. Therefore, I think it's quite irrational to apply the same standards of living to both ways of life. In this case, however, it's obvious that a very severe crime was committed and that someone needed to be punished. Why were those who gave the order for us to kill everything in a specific area not prosecuted??
The "conflict", or war, in Vietnam, in my opinion, was a very strangely fought war. We had strange orders from the beginning, "Don't shoot until you've been shot at." Quite often our orders were to walk through areas where we were intentionally vulnerable to hostile fire. When we got shot at we were supposed to call it in to headquarters and ask for permission to shoot back. A common phrase was, "One of our hands were tied behind our backs", in trying to fight this war. This eventually broke down our willingness to do much.
Meanwhile, our families had no idea of what we were going through in Vietnam. The television News usually just reported American casualties. Letters from home told us that our families didn't have a clue as to how we really had to fight this war. Not only did the cultural differences tell us that we were a long way from home, but also the alienation we felt from the lack of information being communicated to everyone back home. We were mentally and physically pushed to our limits, obeying orders that only we ourselves knew about.
Fortunately, our company commander was not as villainous or as complacent in the killing of innocent civilians as the commander of company C was. Even though we had trained together in Hawaii for at least eight months prior to going to Vietnam, our leadership was not of the same killing mind set as that of the captain of company C. In my book the captain who gave the orders that day at My Lai 4 allowed things to happen that he never should have gotten away with!!
In Vietnam, a lot of things that happened were carefully misinterpreted by the military. "KIA's" or enemy killed in action, were actually, in many cases, innocent civilians. The accounts of enemy dead, or any other specific information relating to units in the battle field, were usually competitively presented in the Stars And Stripes military news paper. Needless to say, these false representations of enemy killed also enhanced officers promotions....
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