War Crimes?

by Bruce Patterson

I remember Cockburn's September 1st article entitled, "John Kerry, War Criminal-in-Chief," and I too thought it was in bad taste. I mean, the right wing was already doing a pretty fair hatchet job on the poor guy. But I'm not contradicting Cockburn because the man's a walking encyclopedia and he'd chew up a self-educated hillbilly like me and spit me out like a grapeseed. Still, those who consider the execution of wounded or helpless enemy soldiers to be a "war crime" are being sort of — well, rather fastidious.

If you are a foot solder and you survive enough battles, you might see a close friend who's been shot into so many pieces that, watching his exposed lung struggling to heave up and down inside of his exploded popcorn chest might make you want to raise your rifle and blow him away. Blow him away just to get him out of your sight if nothing else. Now, if you did, would that be a war crime?

When it comes to finishing off severely wounded enemy soldiers, that's always been a routine part of cleaning up a battlefield. I was lucky in that I served with a hunter-killer outfit and we spent nearly all of our time out in the jungle playing cat and mouse with the North Vietnamese Army. My war was mostly soldier-to-soldier, in other words, and you can't really commit atrocities on soldiers. Soldiers are fair game.

For example, say you are on a recon patrol, you clear a rise, raise your binoculars and, in rice paddies 2,000 meters away, you see four platoons of enemy infantry spread out and marching your way. You get on your radio, call in the coordinates and within a couple of minutes a battery of .155mm Howitzer cannons has spun around and the first salvo is arcing overhead. The shells land on target and in their impact domes you see bits and pieces of human beings flying like confetti. Does this mean that you immediately cease firing because you know that lying in those paddies are wounded and helpless soldiers who are more than ready and willing to surrender? Are you crazy? If I remember right (you didn't want to melt their barrels) our 155s fired four rounds per minute. So you'd order a 60 second barrage and that would bring in about 48 more shells (each with about a 50 meter "kill radius"). Next you'd begin "walking" your artillery away in ever expanding rings, trying to pick off any survivors who were running away. You'd search the nearby terrain and, if you saw anyplace that looked like a decent place for the enemy stragglers to re-group, then you'd pin point the locations on your map and schedule them for some future "Harassment and Interdiction" artillery strikes. Meanwhile, American fighter bombers, fresh on the scene, would start mopping up. Any of the enemy soldiers who had managed to make it into a tree line and to burrow into the roots would now be BBQed by napalm. After the fighter bombers had done their fiery thing, large splotches of green jungle would be left charred into black and white. Walk through the burnt spots later on and here and there in the ashes you'd see the lumps that we liked calling "crispy critters."

To summarize, as a Forward Observer you'd do all in your power to kill each and every last one of the enemy soldiers. If they were helpless, then that only made the job a whole lot easier and a whole lot less dangerous and so a whole lot more fun. But was it a "war crime"? Was it an atrocity, a massacre? Call it what you like, but such a use of American artillery was nothing other than Standard Operating Procedure and, if the body count in this case turned out to be half as good as you hoped, then you'd be put in for a medal, rewarded with a three day pass in town (payable the next time you got near a safe town) and given a battlefield promotion.

Another note on the uses of artillery: when in 1975 in the Central Highlands the NVA/VC captured batteries of 155s during their final drive toward Saigon, the first thing they did was turn the big guns on the roads jammed with columns of fleeing civilian refugees. Using tactics identical to those used by the Nazis during their "Blitzkrieg" in Poland, the NVA/VC clogged the roads with flaming civilian wrecks, the dead and the dying. By doing so they prevented the South Vietnamese Army, which had broken and was running for its life, from escaping to the coast and reaching reinforcements. Nobody knows how many hundreds, or thousands, of civilians were slaughtered, but the ARVN soldiers did not escape the trap and that had been the objective. The NVA/VC didn't want their enemies to live to fight another day and, besides, they had some unfinished business with these particular individuals.

I can't see how it can be a war crime to mutilate bodies. The whole notion seems crazy to me. You mean to tell me that I can tear a kid in half with a burst from a machine gun, or use artillery to grind him into hamburger, or flame broil him with napalm, or bore sizzling holes into his flesh with white hot pellets of flaming white phosphorus and yet I can't slice off his ears? I can't take a trophy from my dead enemy even though "his blood on my hands" has been an integral part of warfare for 10,000 years? When I was in Vietnam, did I slice ears? No, I did not. Did I watch it being done? Yes, I watched. Did I know GIs who wore necklaces of human ears — yes I did. The point is — so what? Who cares? I mean, if we gave a shit about them we never would have killed them in the first place. Understand?

Regarding the question of whether or not we took prisoners...

As any foot soldier knows, the single most dangerous military maneuver is the act of surrender. For instance, during WW2 something like a quarter of a million German and Axis troops surrendered to the Russians in the steppes west of Stalingrad. The people living in those parts were not about to allow those POWs to return home to their families, and only a handful of them ever did. Now was the "disappearance" of a quarter of a million POWs a war crime? Or was it just another instance of traditional peasant justice? Peasant justice as in, "If you invade my country, destroy my property and kill my people, then make damn sure that you never allow me to get my hands on you."

In a modern firefight so much lead is flying that only a fool would try to surrender. If anybody ever tried to surrender to me, I didn't notice and, even if I had, it wouldn't have done him any good because I'd already have shot him.

So far as the possibilitity of us getting captured by the VC or NVA, we didn't think we'd allow that to happen. I was on a machine gun crew, I carried an M-16, a .45 pistol, four grenades, a machete and a bayonet, and nobody was taking me alive. Our enemies were not sweethearts, and the American foot soldiers that did get captured usually got tortured and then executed (the fate of most of the foot soldiers now officially listed as Missing in Action). Anyway, we all promised each other that we'd fight to the death.

We Americans must have taken hundreds of thousands of NVA and VC prisoners. Keeping in mind that the life expectancy of any POW in any war has always been not very long (witness the sadistic treatment of both Union and Confederate POWs during the American Civil War), it's not an exaggeration to say that most of our prisoners were treated not too severely. Still, war being war, by taking your surrendered enemy prisoner, as opposed to just executing him on the spot, you were not necessarily doing him a favor. There are, indeed, things worse than death and a lot of them are inflicted in POW camps.

The only large group of VC prisoners that I saw was while I was switching choppers at an air base outside Tuy Hoa. All peasants, all boys about my age, they looked scared shitless and I couldn't blame them.

Fast forward to American GIs now fighting the Iraqis in Iraq. Given the worldwide media attention given to the White House sponsored American torture chambers at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib Prison and elsewhere (it's only Americans who refuse to look and see what the American government is up to), do you think there are many GIs in Iraq who'd allow themselves to get captured? Put the shoe on the other foot: you are an Iraqi teenager armed with an AK-47 and you're out to help drive the invaders from your land. Now what are the chances of you surrendering to the sadistic, sacrilegious, sexually perverted Americans?

The Rules of War were designed to make war easier on its victims, and I suppose they are well intended. But how about drawing up some rules for gang rape? While we're at it, how about establishing some rules for child molestation? How about drawing up a list of do's and don'ts for us to follow while we're putting innocents to the slaughter?

When you let loose the hounds of war, you shouldn't be surprised when they rip at human flesh and devour their masters' souls. To speak of evil and the lesser evil and the greater evil and the worst evil of all — what does it matter to the murdered? Do the dead hear your high-minded debates? You come home from work, your house has been bombed, your first born son and his kid sister are decorating your walls — what lives and breathes and stalks the godless earth but the monster's cry for vengeance?

Most Americans glorify war and that's understandable because we have been brought up in a commercial culture that glorifies violence and war and "winning" and Strong Men. People around the world are born trusting and that makes us gullible, and America's sons and daughters now being butchered in Iraq are not the first ones to have fallen for the lies of their fathers. War is the war crime. America's war against Indochina was hideous and obscene. World War Two, the American Civil War, the Peloponnesian Wars — all were hideous and obscene.

You can blame soldiers for war if you want to. We Americans have always believed fervently in Individual Responsibility just so long as it belongs to somebody else. But, as Cicero wrote over 2,000 years ago, "the sinew of war is infinite money." When it comes to buying guns and ammunition, bombers and battleships, is it the soldiers who own the deep pockets?

If I buy you a gun and I know you are going to use it to kill somebody else, under the laws of this country I am guilty of murder. Since neither God nor the Constitution has placed any American above the law, the same goes for taxpayers.

When the advocates of war, instead of its opponents, are treated as outcasts, when chest-pounding, death-dealing preachers and politicians are judged to be worse than plague, worse than famine — when all of war's cheerleaders are scorned as tiny, blind, blood sucking bats — that's when children will sleep safe from vampires.