University of Virginia Library

Whose Atrocities?

For months now, we have been hearing,
from President Nixon and other hawkish
sources, that a United States withdrawal from
Vietnam would lead to a "bloodbath" of
Communist terrorism and atrocities. Thus,
says the Administration, United States presence
in Vietnam is necessary for humanitarian
reasons if for nothing else.

Tell it to "Pinkville," a village in South
Vietnam where an American Army unit
apparently massacred hundreds of unarmed
civilians, women and children included, in the
spring of 1968. Details of the Pinkville
Massacre are just coming to light and will
probably never be fully known; the Army will
see to that, as it made certain that details of
the Green Beret murder case were consigned
to oblivion. It seems clear, however, that a
company of American infantrymen, frustrated
by combat losses and Vietcong guerrilla tactics,
lost control of themselves in an isolated
hamlet called Tucong and murdered between
100 and 600 civilians - a war atrocity that
parallels many notorious Nazi war crimes.

It is conceivable that the Army will bring
some soldiers to trial for this incident, trying
to rationalize it as the product of freak
coincidence - unstable men caught up in
circumstance that will never occur again. This
would be an obfuscation of the truth.

"War," as General Sherman observed, "is
hell." It matters not whether you fight for the
"good guys" (us) or the "bad guys" (the dirty
Commies); it's still hell, and it still necessitates
that the men who fight it adopt a peculiar
logic that makes killing a moral and
courageous act. Are the men who killed
civilians in "Pinkville" any more culpable than
the ones who drop napalm from 30,000 feet?
Not really. It's just that the Pinkville massacre
was a graphic and personal demonstration of
the atrocities that war engenders; a bomber is,
by comparison, a clean and impersonal
instrument.

So any trial that attempts to place the
blame on the men who did the actual shooting
will serve only to obscure the truth. The men
in government and the Armed Forces
responsible for placing C company in the
position where such a massacre became a
rational act are the ones responsible for it.
And perhaps someday they will be called to
account for the lives of the people of Tucong.

There are South Vietnamese who will be in
danger if United States forces pull out of
Vietnam. They are the quislings who supported
the French and who now form the
constituency of the Thieu-Ky government; the
pimps and black marketeers who have
profited immensely at the expense of their
people through the presence of American
troops; the parasites whose power and
influence grows from the barrels of American
guns. They have reason to fear reprisals when
the troops are withdrawn.

But the people of South Vietnam - the
villagers whose homes were destroyed in order
to be saved, the ones who have borne the
brunt of more bombs than were dropped on
Europe in World War II, the dead citizens of
places like Tucong and the millions of
refugees - can't worry about a potential
bloodbath at the hand of the Vietcong.
They're in one now. And they will be as long
as the war continues.