The Fromson File

ATROCITIES AND WAR The neo-cons in Washington keep peddling the phony notion that the experiences of Vietnam bare no relationship to Iraq. Consider this, if you are too young to remember the past and are shocked by the revelations of atrocities apparently committed by U.S. forces in the Abu Ghraib prison. In the military tradition, cover-up goes with the territory. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is a natural instinct, both of Army and Marine brass whenever they are confronted with embarrassing disclosures of atrocities by their troops. It may be impossible to predict when and under what circumstance soldiers will cross the line of civility in wartime. Exposure to intense combat may be one cause. But most of the guards and interrogators in the Iraqi prison had no such immediate experience. They had come from a reserve military police company headquartered in Virginia. The disgusting behavior of the guards captured in the recent photographs that were made public, first by CBS News and then other news organizations, prompts inevitable questions. What complicates these particular atrocities is that some of the interrogators were so-called private contractors who apparently are answerable only to their employers. Why in the world the Pentagon would tolerate such an absurd system over which it has so little control truly boggles the mind. Moreover, there is this question: to what extent has modern-day training in the armed forces emphasized the proper treatment of prisoners or civilians in wartime? If not, why not? The Pentagon, after all, is not without memories of past transgressions. In 1967, an elite platoon of the 101st Airborne Division, known as Tiger Force was operating in the Central Highlands of Vietnam when it massacred several hundred peasants in the belief that they were Communist collaborators. The brutality was unspeakable and indescribable. The U.S. troops cut off the ears of their victims and strung them like necklaces around their own necks. The Pentagon ordered an investigation that lasted 4 ½ years. But for more than 37 years the results were covered up, buried in the National Archives. None of the GIs involved were arrested, tried or punished. Whatever their crimes may have been, the statue of limitations had lapsed, thereby making it impossible to bring the suspects to justice. The story surfaced only because a guilt-ridden former member of Tiger Force recently unburdened himself to reporters of the Toledo Blade. In March of this year, the reporters for the Ohio newspaper were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their investigative reporting. A year after Operation Tiger Force, in the hamlet of My Lai on March 16, 1968, a company of American infantrymen massacred more than 360 unarmed Vietnamese civilians. The GIs went on a rampage, killing women, children and older men. Every aspect of military discipline seemed to evaporate. Some GIs went so far as to place their high-powered rifles in the vaginas of Vietnamese women before firing. My Lai was covered up by the Pentagon for a year and a half before an intrepid young journalist named Seymour Hersh first broke the story for a hitherto obscure media organization, the Dispatch News Service. Second Lieutenant William Calley, who led the operation, was sentenced to a lengthy prison term. But he served little more than two years before being pardoned by President Nixon. His superior officer, Captain Harold Medina, served no time, was discharged from the army and went into business in Wisconsin. Several months later, a squad of Marines marched into the hamlet of Xuan Hoa outside of Hue and in cold blood murdered six Vietnamese peasants, two of them by execution. Another had his heart cut open and his throat slashed by the squad leader, a 22-year-old rifleman who was being recommended for a Navy Cross for his courageous actions under fire the night before. The bodies of the victims were dumped in a river. Hand grenades were thrown on top of them in an attempt to sink them. The story was covered up until one of the guilt-ridden Marines turned himself in months later. I covered their court martial. The ringleader was dishonorably discharged and given a sentence of 20 years to life imprisonment. But he served less than three years because the Navy prison where he had been incarcerated was overcrowded. He was released prematurely without any formal explanation ever made public. Twentysix years later, during a re-visit to Vietnam, I returned to the site of the massacre. Two of the widows of the slain Vietnamese told me I was the first American ever to inform them of the courts martials and the punishment meted out to the killers of their husbands. Nor was any gesture ever made by the Marines to compensate the families for their losses. Twenty-seven children were left without fathers for the remainder of their lives.