” I almost feel sorry for him, he didn’t even have a weapon.” ~ A young Corporal to Sergeant Philip Caputo after shooting a running Vietnamese man

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The Vietnam War was a war like no other in terms of brutality, hatred, and utter destruction. Both the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and their countryside guerrilla allies, the National Liberation Front (NLF) more commonly known as the Viet-Cong (VC) as well as the Americans and their South Vietnamese counterparts showed little to no mercy to each other as well as the millions of civilians caught between them.

America would bring to bear the infinite firepower of its arsenals and drop nearly 3.5x more ordnance on the hostile North and friendly South than all explosive ordnance detonated during the Second World War by all nations combined. In the Quang Tri province alone, it was estimated 99% of all infrastructure was completely destroyed by American B-52 raids.

Officially, the rules of engagement of the United States Army do not condone the wanton killing or disregard for human life and this remains their official position.

In many ways, this remains the popular understanding as most content about war crimes and civilian suffering typically focuses on the context of a single incident, the My Lai massacre. In the shadow of this single incident, all other atrocities have essentially vanished from popular memory.

No other atrocity committed by the Americans or their allies would receive such a great level of publicity as the My Lai massacre and most weren’t photographed or documented. Many atrocities were not known outside of the offending unit and many investigations that did attempt to reveal the truth of an incident were closed, crushed or abandoned. Even when serious incidents were investigated by military authorities, the end result was usually the file being classified and buried.

While there are many instances of American units providing genuine aid to the Vietnamese people, the cruelty wrought by the units who went completely off the rails, as well as the sheer number of individual actions, eclipse the good those men tried to do. This work is to bring to light the consequences of when a military adopts the unofficial rule to “Kill anything that moves.”

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Indoctrinated To Hate & Kill

American recruits were indoctrinated into a culture of violence and brutality which emphasized a willingness to kill without mercy. Many men would report that at first when told to shout things like “Kill, kill, kill!” They would just mindlessly call it back without thinking about it, but would later find themselves taken over by the ethos. Men didn’t entirely become robots but would say they came so close it was a terrifying prospect in hindsight. Others would report feeling absolutely brainwashed.

The drill instructors also suffused the training with a heaping dose of racism and dehumanization. Never referring to the Vietnamese as Vietnamese, recruits were told to refer to them as things like Dinks, Gooks, Slopes, and Slants. That they were less than human was clearly the message being drilled into the men. Recruits were told they would be “Face-to-face with the animalistic Charlie” (a name for the Viet-Cong using the phonetic alphabet).

Basic training also reinforced a recruit’s obedience and total submission to authority. From an instructional outline in an army manual, chaplains would put forward quite an Orwellian concept, saying,

” The freest soldier is the soldier who willingly submits to authority. When you follow a lawful command you need not fear or worry.”

Evoking both honour and self-interest, however, no clear definition of an unlawful order was offered. Young recruits pressed into simple-minded obedience were also never given proper training on the responsibilities and moral complexities of fighting in villages full of civilians.

The junior officers trained to lead these men also received shockingly lacklustre instruction in the laws of war. A 1967 study conducted at the Junior Officers Training School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, showed that even at this specialized training centre, nearly half of the students showed a lack of understanding of the Geneva Conventions pertaining to the treatment of prisoners of war.

20% of officer candidates at Fort Benning, Georgia, stated they would kill prisoners as a matter of expediency if their unit was ambushed. Up to 30% of low-ranking officers believed they could legally commit summary executions of civilians in the field for expediency if they were considered enemy agents.

In 1971, an instructor laid out a scenario for 200 second-lieutenants where a Vietnamese machine gunner had just inflicted six American casualties and then came out of his position, unarmed and with his hands raised. When asked by the instructor what they would do, the 200 men replied in unison

“Shoot him! Shoot him!”

Many soldiers would recall being told once they had arrived in country that no matter the official policy, no Vietnamese were to be trusted and that even women and children were to be seen as foes.

A child, G.I.’s believed, could throw a grenade or be strapped with explosives. An old woman can make and place booby traps. Official military publications stressed discrimination between guerillas and civilians, but most men in the field made little distinction in practice.

One veteran officer recalled,

” So a few women and children get killed, teach them a damn good lesson. They’re all VC or at least helping them. You can’t convert them so you can only kill them.”

The soldiers also had problems sorting out who was who. Trained that Viet-Cong fighters wore “black pyjamas” as their uniform. These “black pyjamas” were in reality typical working clothes of farmers and other field workers. At a distance, a female worker holding a hoe could be “easily mistaken” as a male fighter holding an RPG. Many civilians would lose their lives this way.

A song created by the 1st Air Cav. captures the “anything goes” mentality,

” 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.”

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Lethal Games

In many instances, troops would scare civilians into running as a way to be able to gun them down. In most instances, if a Vietnamese person ran, they were considered hostile under the logic “An innocent villager wouldn’t run from us”.

Helicopter Door Gunner, William Patterson, told army investigators what he was instructed,

” If we came across some unarmed people who looked like civilians, I was ordered to fire as close to them as possible to make them run. If they ran, I had permission to kill them.”

Other helicopter crews would report that they would find a group of farmers in a paddy and if they didn’t immediately run, they would hover their helicopter as close to the farmers as they could and start blaring their sirens and horns to scare them into doing so, the end result was always lethal.

There is also a long list of vehicular incidents committed by American Army and Marine personnel with little to no responsibility taken and some events even committed deliberately as a game.

Larry Heinemann, veteran and novelist would recall,

” We were king of the fucking hill. We ran people off the road, we felt invincible.”

Running down civilians with jeeps, trucks, tanks, and other armoured vehicles was common. On July 7th, 1968, after hitting a parked car with his jeep, John Gambel, of the Army’s 11th supply company, fled the scene and plowed into a Vietnamese man and his two children on a motorcycle, dragging the wrecked bike and the three mangled bodies upwards of 92 feet before coming free.

A navy corpsman would recall one incident that almost seemed deliberate when he witnessed a truck driver run an old Vietnamese woman down. She would die while he tried to help her; he would view her as just another gook who got in the way.

Another medic who saw the carnage of another incident that left two young boys dead commented,

” I found out that they had been hit by an American military truck and I’d heard from a few guys that there was supposedly a game going around, gambling over who could hit a kid. They had some disgusting name for it, something like Gook Hockey. They were driving deuce and a half’s, big-ass army trucks. The NCO who ordered me to clean the bodies could have cared less.”

Even MACV commander Creighton Abrams made a complaint behind closed doors about the G.I.’s who ran civilians off the road.

Another game played by some G.I.’s was to throw metal c-ration cans at children begging on the street, injuring and even killing them.

In one extremely bizarre incident, Sergeant Joel Mackleheny was jokingly told by his subordinate that he had no balls. Mackleheny responded with a laugh and fired four shots from his rifle into a woman walking on the side of the road.

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CIA Involvement in Torture and Interrogation

” You see, they do have some methods and practices we are not accustomed to, that we wouldn’t use if we were doing it. But you have to understand that this is an Asian country and their first impulse is force. Only the fear of force gets results… it’s the Asian mind, it’s completely different from the Western mind and we are trying to educate them up to our level.”

~ Captain Ted Shipmen

Education was certainly on the docket. Going back to the 1950’s the CIA had been working to perfect multiple forms of torture such as electric shock and psychological abuse. This research would culminate in the Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual and the CIA would work through the USAID to teach their Vietnamese counterparts these brutal and inhuman methods. By 1971, 85,000 South Vietnamese agents would be instructed in these methods.

Prisoner abuse was as varied as it was brutal. Some prisoners would be subjected to stress positions that caused both mental and physical agony. Some were locked into sweltering shipping containers and rooms for hours on end and some were tied up and left to dehydrate in the Sun. Some were put inside water-filled drums which were then beaten to cause grievous internal injuries.

Many others were subjected to a method known as “taking the submarine”, now known as waterboarding. Untold numbers were subjected to electrical torture by having live wires of a field telephone attached to their genitals in a method called “dialling Charlie”.

Helicopter crews were well known for taking captured Viet-Cong and NVA prisoners onboard for interrogation via a method known as “The long step”. Bringing the helicopter up several thousand feet, one of the prisoners would be summarily thrown out the door to loosen the tongues of those remaining onboard.


The brutality of the American influence on the Vietnamese police forces would become front page news around the world when South Vietnamese Police Chief and General Nguyen Ngoc Luan was both photographed and recorded on video summarily executing the captured VC guerilla Nguyen Van Lem. This moment would be critical in the momentum of the American anti-war movement. He would make a brief comment to one of the reporters as he walked by after the execution,

” He killed many of my people and yours as well.”

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Destroying Villages by Land & Air

In 1962, the Strategic Hamlet Plan, program, a South Vietnamese Government program aimed at relocating peasants in areas considered to be strategic assets to the Communists to “isolate the guerrillas”. One South Vietnamese agent described the method in the following way,

” If the Viet-Cong are fish and the villagers are water, then by removing the villagers we deprive the fish of their vital water”

Many villages moved willingly, but many peasants had to be relocated by force to these “strategic hamlets”, many leaving the peasants in worse conditions than the villages they had been forced from. Many people would even consider them a form of prison or concentration camp.

Once the Americans became involved actively in the conflict, the scale of violence began to escalate. Often to force villagers from their homes, American G.I.’s would enter a village, shoot the livestock and begin lighting the people’s thatch roof homes on fire. As the war escalated, the dangers of being considered Viet-Cong sympathizers only increased along with the risk of being sent to a Strategic Hamlet or worse, killed.

A 75-year-old farmer would speak out about what had happened after being relocated to a strategic hamlet outside of the town of Hội An in 1967,

” The Americans burned down everything I had. My house, my haystack, my garden, my 46 coconut trees. I miss my home very much, especially because I am a farmer and there is no land to farm around here.”

Villages would also be destroyed by ground forces and air power if they were believed to be enemy outposts of strongholds. Anything from finding too much rice to enemy supplies could have the village torched by the soldiers and the villagers ran the risk of being detained or killed as enemy agents.

” The first time you enter a village you’d sort of just look around, go through a few things and leave. The second time you go to the village you might throw some stuff around and rough up an old man. The third time you go, you’ll probably just shoot the old man.”

In many cases, an American patrol would approach a village with the orders to level it if they received even a single round of fire. Even when chasing retreating guerrillas, a village may get caught in the crossfire as the innocent villagers are shot in a case of high-stress mistaken identity with the retreating Viet-Cong fighters.

One of the most dangerous and indiscriminate tools of war the Americans brought to the table during the entire conflict was the B-52 Stratofortress. A high-level strategic bomber, it is capable of carrying 60,000lbs of bombs (variant dependent) and can level an area half a mile wide by three miles long. Both Vietnamese and Americans would say that when the B-52s struck, it reduced an area to a moonscape. They destroyed everything.

If ground forces encountered particularly stubborn resistance from a village under enemy control and artillery was unable to destroy or dislodge them, a favoured tactic was to call in air power to drop the hellish substance known as napalm. A petroleum-jelly-like substance designed to burn at incredibly high temperatures with incredible intensity, it would incinerate anything it touched while also absorbing all the oxygen in the area causing anyone in bunkers or nearby tunnels to suffocate.

Outside of the village of Tràn Bàng after it had been overrun by the North Vietnamese Army, a South Vietnamese aircraft mistook a group of fleeing civilians and ARVN soldiers for the enemy and dropped a napalm canister on them. The photograph of the horribly burned, 9-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc taken by AP reporter Nick Ut would become one of the most striking photos of the entire war and showed the brutality firsthand that weapons like napalm wrought.

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Free-Fire Zones

A free fire zone is an area designated by the U.S. Military to be an area where all weapons platforms can be discharged from ground to air without being required to contact higher authorities to do so. Officially, the laws of war and target identification still needed to be followed, but this was seldom done. The official Vietnam War era definition can be found in Army Field Manual FM-6-20:

” A specific designated area into which any weapon system may fire without additional coordination with the establishing headquarters.”

Not all, but most American soldiers took the definition of “free-fire zone” to be quite literal with extremely lethal consequences for Vietnamese civilians.

Living inside a free-fire zone was living life on the absolute edge. At any moment, you could be shot by a G.I. you’d never even seen coming. A helicopter could come over and gun you down. A jet could fly by and drop napalm on you and your single farming hut.

In October 1967 in Quảng Nam province, members of Company B, 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry found a young boy up on a hill after a firefight and captured him as an enemy trail watcher. When brought before their lieutenant, he asked who wanted to shoot the child.

Medic Jamey Henry would tell army investigators,

” A radioman and another medic volunteered for the job. The radioman kicked the boy in the stomach and the medic took the boy behind a rock and I heard one complete magazine go off on full automatic. The boy was called in as an enemy KIA.”

A few days after, members of the same unit beat and tortured an elderly man until he passed out before throwing him off a cliff without checking if he was dead or alive. A few more days after that incident, the same unit would use an unarmed man as target practice.

In a sworn statement to army investigators, unit member Andrew Acres would state,

” Frank Powler put his weapon (M16) to his side like John Wayne and let it go at the man. John Perry was also firing his .45 calibre weapon at the man.

Less than two weeks later, members of Company B would be responsible for the deaths of 5 women who General Glen Eisenhower would personally report as five dead enemy guerrillas. After the war, many more unit members would be questioned and reveal a litany of crimes against civilians committed by members of their unit.

Medic of Company A, Nolan Jones, would give his own damning report to army investigators about the crimes he saw his unit commit. His report would be echoed by similar statements throughout the entirety of the conflict.

” I saw guys just shoot people for nothing. They’d see an old person walking down the trail and just shoot. The people in my company abused (the Vietnamese) people, shot people, burned their villages and shot their animals. They threw their food away and I mean this happened regularly. This didn’t just happen one or two times.”

Political science professor and author, Guenter Lewy, would estimate around 1/3 of all Vietnamese killed and counted as enemy KIA in free-fire zones were civilians. The total number of civilian casualties he estimated was around 220,000.

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The Mỹ Lai massacre

The most well-documented massacre of the entire war, though certainly not the only mass killing of its scale, the Mỹ Lai massacre was one of the most abhorrent events to willingly take place throughout the conflict that cost the lives of more than 500 people. To know and understand the Mỹ Lai massacre is a macabre window into the types of violence carried out deep in the jungles and highlands where no one but the perpetrators and victims could hear or see the gruesome spectacle.

Before the operation, Captain Ernst Medina would tell his men after being asked who the enemy was,

"Anybody that was running from us, hiding from us, or appeared to be the enemy. If a man was running, shoot him, sometimes even if a woman with a rifle was running, shoot her."

On 16 March 1968, soldiers of Company C, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment and members of Company B of the famous “Americal” Division would descend on the twin hamlets of Mỹ Lai 4 and Mỹ Khe 4 in their helicopters at 7:30 a.m. after an artillery and helicopter gunship barrage.

Told there should be no civilians and that they can expect enemy contact, the teams moved into both hamlets and found nothing but women, children and old men making breakfast and getting ready for their day’s work.

Without hesitation, the men began rounding the civilians up as “enemy agents” and gathered them in village common areas. The killing began without warning as multiple men began opening fire on the groups of civilians, the ice had broken. In an irrigation ditch, between 70-80 civilians were massacred as they pleaded with the G.I.‘s by shouting “No VC!”.

A group of twenty women and children were executed outside of their Buddhist temple as they cried and prayed, each one being shot in the back of the head methodically. A group of 40-50 civilians was led down a dirt path to the south of the hamlets and massacred along the side of the road. Many civilians were shot and killed while hiding inside their homes and those who hid in the bunkers most homes had as air raid shelters were killed when American soldiers lobbed grenades and satchel charges into them.

Sgt. Ronald Haeberle's eyewitness account of the massacre is startling,

” There were some South Vietnamese people, maybe fifteen of them, women and children included, walking on a dirt road maybe 100 yards [90 m] away. All of a sudden the GIs just opened up with M16s. Beside the M16 fire, they were shooting at the people with M79 grenade launchers ... I couldn't believe what I was seeing".

One of the most shocking events was when the Americans seemingly called a “time-out” to have a break to eat lunch before resuming the killings.

Over the remaining day, both companies were involved in the further burning and destruction of dwellings, as well as the continued mistreatment of Vietnamese prisoners. Helicopter pilot, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson Jr. would compare the actions of American soldiers to those of the Nazis who ran the death camps. Upon return to his base at LZ Dottie, he would report to his superior, Captain Barry Lloyd, what he saw.

"It's mass murder out there. They're rounding them up and herding them in ditches and then just shooting them."

Many more crimes and murders too graphic to detail here took place throughout the massacre as American troops ran wild. It would be found after the war that some members of Company C did not actively participate in the killings, some even actively assisted civilians in fleeing the scene. But virtually all voiced no displeasure or even protest to their superiors over the incident.

By the time the massacre was over and the Americans had moved on, they had captured three enemy weapons and suffered a single casualty, a man who shot himself in the foot to avoid participating in the killings.

In the most cruel twist of fate, the commander of the task force that commit the atrocities would report that the assault on the hamlets had been a complete success and that they had destroyed 128 Viet-Cong guerrillas of the 48th Local Force Battalion. General William C. Westmorland, head of MAC-V himself would congratulate Charlie company for an outstanding performance at dealing a crushing blow to the enemy.

The massacre would be viewed as a victory over the enemy until late 1969 when America was finally forced to admit what had happened as too many people, most importantly a man named Ronald L. Ridenhour, a former door gunner on a helicopter, began to go public with the truth while pressing American Congress to admit what had happened.

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The sheer volume of death and destruction has ensured that some scattered pieces of evidence of the overwhelming violence and civilian suffering have survived to make it into the historical record. No one could bear to read the entire list of every village burning, bombing, cold-blooded massacre and other atrocities that have been revealed in memoires, press accounts and interviews.

The accounts in the above work are just a snapshot of the mass album of horrors. These accounts, just a tiny fraction of everything that happened, still paint a vivid picture of the day-to-day life in the countryside of Vietnam.

Year after year, in attacks carried out by unit after unit, the crimes were of the same type. The horrors of the same magnitude and the misery of the same degree.