ar 3 7 ( THE DELIBERATE WAR AGAINST CIVILIANS

By Neil Sheehan N.Y. Times Service I remember asking one of from 'wasnuigton know wnat th m6s-f.-1-enior Atherican was happening in Vietnam? Washington genelialrin the late summer As early as the fall of How could they have avoided of 1966 if he was not worried knowing? T h e newspapers, 1965, the American Em- by all the civilian casualties bassy in Saigon distributed magazine articles like that the bombing and shell- Schell's and the reports of a Rand Corporation study ing were causing. "Yes, it is on the air and artillery the Kennedy subcommittee a problem," he said, "but it indicated the extent of bombardments. The study does deprive the enemy of what was being done in their concluded that the peas- the population, doesn't it?" name. ants blamed the Viet Cong A survey of refugees com- when their hamlets were missioned later that yeir by The statistics alone are blasted and their relatives the Pentagon indicated that enough to tell the tale: five killed; in eff e c t, ;that 54 per cent of those in Dinh million refugees, nearly a shrapnel, white phospho- Tuong province in the Me- third of South Vietnam's pop- rus and napalm were good kong Delta were fleeing their ulation of 16 million people: political medicine. hamlets in. fear of bombing These peasant hamlets, The. study was dismissed and shelling. one must bear in mind, were by reporters as macabre Game not being •plowed under be- proof that the So this was the game. The cause. American or South Vi- government firepower that only Ameri- etnamese ground troops were could, always can technology can muster attempting toseizethern find a think- News was to defeat the Vietnamese from the enemy in pitched tank to tell it battles. The hamlets were Analysis communists by outright mili what it want- tary attrition, the body being bombarded in the ab- ed to think. count, and by obliterating sence of ground combat. In the summer of 1966, their strategic base, ilie ru- Crime however, a lengthy secret ral population. study of the pacification pro- People Ope might argue that gram was done for the em- and their homes though regrettable, though bassy and military headquar- diexe-slehurnanized into grid even immoral, the air and ters in Saigon by some of the 76rainates on a targeting artillery bombardments o f most experienced Americans map. Those other formali- civilians in Vietnam were not in the country. Otte of the ties, like obtaining clearance a war crime. from the Vietnamese prov- study 's recommendations The Allies engaged in ter- was that this practice 'of un- ince chief before you bombed a hamlet, were stratagemslo ror bombing of Japanese and restricted bombing and shell- German cities in ing should be re-examined. avoid responsibility, . because ' World War's he almost never refused per- II. Look at the incendiary According to the, study raids there was evidence that the mission. (Such legal fictions, on Dresden and Tokyo by the way, are expressly and the nuclear holocausts of practice was driving Hiroshima and Nagasak hundreds of thousands of ref- forbidden by the laws of i. war.) None of the defendants at the ugees into urban slums and Nuremberg and Tokyo trials squalid ,c _ampis, causing un- By 1967, this policy of unre- were convicted of war necessary7aZath and suffer- stricted air and artillery , crimes involving the bomb- ing, and angering the bombardments had been or- ing of civilian populations, peasantry. The proposal for chestrated with search and because the prosecutors had a reexamination was vetoed. destroy operations by ground done the same thing. Similar- Policy troops, B-52 strikes, and crop ly, in the Korean war, the destruction with chemical By deciding not tvrecon- United States Air Force skier. the American leader- herbicides into a strategy , bombed Korean towns and that was progressively laying cities. ship in Saigon was deciding waste much of the country- to ordain the practice, to es- side. But is Vietnam the same tablish a de facto policy. kind of war? There is good During those earlier years at Society reason to think that it is not. least, the policy was not ac- That year Jonathan Schell In World War II opposing in- knowledged in writing, as far went to Quang Nai to docu- dustrialized societies were as I know, but neither can ment the creeping destruc- fighting a war of survival. In there be any doubt that this tion of the rural society M a was the way things were-to two-part article that first ap- be done and that those Amer- this context of total war, the peared in the New Yorker cities inevitably became tar- ican milt r y and civilian magazine. It was later pub- leaders directing the war gets to be destroyed. They lished with a title of under- contained the industries that knew the grim cost of their stated irony, "The Military decision not to look. Half." Schell estimated that fueled their opponent's war. Why did they establish the by this time about 70 per machine and the, workers policy? Because devastation cent of the 450 hamlets in the who manned their factories. had become a fundamental province had been destroyed. The worker wasties much a element in their strategy to win the war. Did the military and civil- ian leaders directing the war ,....••■■•••■■■■•■.WWWW.,,...\.W.,\MW.••■••••rn,W."?

Neil Sheehan is a correspondent in the combatant as the- uniformed Washington Bureau of the New Ybrk soldier. Re previously spent three years in VieVeani, In Vietnam, however, the and in 1964 received the Neiman Fellows most advanced technological Louis M. Lyons award for "conscience and ti nation in the world inter- integrity in journalism" for his coverage of vened in a civil war in prim- the war during the previous two years. This itive, agricultural country. is part of a special report 'on a study hemade The Vietnamese communists on Whether the United States should have war possess negligible industry. crime trials. no air force of any size, and no intercontinental missiles military advantages to be that pose a threat to the sur- vival of the United States. gained rrom a particular able publicity that would re- Moreover. as the literature • air-strike. . sult from severe civilian eas- I amply documents, the use of The ultimate objective of ualtdeS in the:north. the air weanon underwent a :subtle and important change the air campaign agaiinst the in South Vietnam from the north was, to be' stire;Politi- Next: The clear- law sr-off cal 'rather than military: It war; 7_ el 4,v-E I previous two wars. Air pow- sought to i n ti m id a tee__ , e er, and artillery as a corol- North Vietnamese into with- lary weapon, were directed drawing their forces froi by an occupying power; the the south and taking the Viet United States, at the civilian Cong. guerrillas along with) population in the rural areas them. And undoubtedly the of the country under occupa- restrictions were also de- tion. I signed 'to escape the unfavor- The targets of the bombs and shells were the noncom- batants themselves, because it was believed that their ex- istence was important to the enemy. Air power became a distinct weapon of terror to empty the countryside. One key to understanding this use of airpower in South Vietnam is to compare the I unrestricted bombing in the south with the elaborate re strictions that surrounded the air campaign against North Vietnam. , Although the North Viet- namese may not believe it, in the north a Conscious effort) was made to bomb only mili- tary, and what limited in- dustrial targets were availa- ble, and to weigh probable ci- vilian. casualties against the