Part I

War means death. You go to war, it's kill or be killed. You are trained to kill, and so when people die, they are dehumanized because the armed forces regards them as the enemy. So does the President, your Commander in Chief. Their world is not our world. Our world is turning on the TV to watch idiotic television and SUV commercials and men's magazines and beer and football. Their world is uncivilized and they are animals and, hey, it's war. Who's going to ask questions?

In Vietnam, the U.S. invasion killed hundreds of thousands, over a million people. That war ended in 1975, so millions of Americans know Vietnam as a piece of history, not something they lived through. Maybe they know about the war from a uncle who fought there, or from a cartoon history of the conflict which glosses over what really happened.

Current anti-war protesters are always compared with Vietnam protesters. Fair enough. What made Vietnam different is that young men stood a good chance of being drafted and their friends were coming home in boxes, sometimes hundreds per week. Nearly 60,000 in all. They also protested because a new consciousness arose during the 1960's. It wasn't cool to kill parents and children in foreign lands anymore. The below article appeared in the New York Times a few weeks ago. It explains why people protested. In Part II I will link this to current events.

Civilian Killings Went Unpunished Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai. By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson, Special to The Times August 6, 2006

The men of B Company were in a dangerous state of mind. They had lost five men in a firefight the day before. The morning of Feb. 8, 1968, brought unwelcome orders to resume their sweep of the countryside, a green patchwork of rice paddies along Vietnam's central coast.

They met no resistance as they entered a nondescript settlement in Quang Nam province. So Jamie Henry, a 20-year-old medic, set his rifle down in a hut, unfastened his bandoliers and lighted a cigarette.

Just then, the voice of a lieutenant crackled across the radio. He reported that he had rounded up 19 civilians, and wanted to know what to do with them. Henry later recalled the company commander's response:

Kill anything that moves.

Henry stepped outside the hut and saw a small crowd of women and children. Then the shooting began.

Moments later, the 19 villagers lay dead or dying.

Back home in California, Henry published an account of the slaughter and held a news conference to air his allegations. Yet he and other Vietnam veterans who spoke out about war crimes were branded traitors and fabricators. No one was ever prosecuted for the massacre.

Now, nearly 40 years later, declassified Army files show that Henry was telling the truth — about the Feb. 8 killings and a series of other atrocities by the men of B Company.

The files are part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.

The documents detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre.

Though not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, the archive is the largest such collection to surface to date. About 9,000 pages, it includes investigative files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for top military brass.

The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of soldiers, in interviews with investigators and letters to commanders, described a violent minority who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.

Abuses were not confined to a few rogue units, a Times review of the files found. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.

Retired Brig. Gen. John H. Johns, a Vietnam veteran who served on the task force, says he once supported keeping the records secret but now believes they deserve wide attention in light of alleged attacks on civilians and abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," says Johns, 78.

Among the substantiated cases in the archive:

• Seven massacres from 1967 through 1971 in which at least 137 civilians died.

• Seventy-eight other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded and 15 sexually assaulted.

• One hundred forty-one instances in which U.S. soldiers tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war with fists, sticks, bats, water or electric shock.

Investigators determined that evidence against 203 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant formal charges. These "founded" cases were referred to the soldiers' superiors for action.

Part II

Part I looked at Vietnam protests and linked to an article that showed how U.S. soldiers massacred the Vietnamese during that war and got away with it. Things were different in the 1960's. Back then, people asked more questions about the war but the overriding mentality was still that the U.S. would never start a war that did not deserve to be won, and that our leaders would only send young men to fight for a good cause.

The assumption that our wars are always good wars came into question during the 1960's and early 1970's, and people protested in the streets. Some of the protests arose from self-preservation: I don't want to be drafted and come home without a leg. But a new intellectual consciousness arose during that time when Americans began to wonder what right we had to intervene in foreign lands and to impose our will by force.

Vietnam taught us not to fight wars without a clear objective, and to make sure we know what we're doing. Those lessons have been forgotten.

Soldiers and Marines and other members of the armed forces are ambassadors to the world. They screw up, that means that we screw up. Why do they hate us? Read on:

Marine didn't suspect Haditha wrongdoing
Sat Aug 19, 9:15 AM ET

The Marine officer in charge of troops suspected of killing 24 Iraqi men, women and children told investigators he did not initiate an inquiry into the carnage because he did not consider the deaths unusual, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

In a sworn statement given to military investigators in March, Lt. Col. Jeffrey R. Chessani said: "I thought it was very sad, very unfortunate, but at the time, I did not suspect any wrongdoing from my Marines." Chessani was commander of the 3rd Battalion of the 1st Marines.

"I did not have any reason to believe that this was anything other than combat action," he added.

The Post said it obtained a copy of Chessani's statement.

Reached by telephone late Friday, Marine Lt. Col. Sean Gibson, a spokesman on the Haditha case, said he had not seen the report and could not comment.

The Marine Corps has been investigating whether its troops deliberately killed the Iraqis in Haditha. The Marines also are looking into whether efforts were made to cover up the incident. Initially, the Marine Corps reported that 15 Iraqis had died in a roadside bombing or were caught in crossfire between Marines and insurgents. Survivors of the encounter and human rights groups, however, claimed that 24 Iraqi civilians had been deliberately shot to death by Marines.

The New York Times reported Thursday that military investigators have concluded that the Marines destroyed or withheld evidence.

. . .

Because attacks were so common, Chessani told investigators he saw the incident as part of a "complex attack" staged by the enemy, according to the newspaper. "I did not see any cause for alarm," he said.

The Haditha case is among recent cases of alleged atrocities against Iraqi civilians. Five soldiers and a former solider have been charged with raping and killing a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her relatives in Mahmoudiya. Seven Marines and one Navy corpsman have been charged with premeditated murder in connection with the killing of an Iraqi man in Hamdania on April 26.