Atrocities in the Vietnam War

U .S . Atrocities in Vietnam War

As he opened the Weinstein had given him , Apsey 's eyes were again drawn to the words on the typewritten sheet "The baby 's throat had been cut , and there was a lot of blood on its throat and front " He had investigated atrocities in Vietnam - rapes , murders , assaults . He was well aware of the frustrations of soldiers fighting a war with civilians caught in the middle . But the act of cutting off the head of a baby went beyond anything he had ever encountered . He knew

then he was not just looking for a soldier who had used poor judgment or panicked under fire He was looking for someone completely different - Tiger Force : A True Story of Men and War (Sallah Weiss 220

In an isolated incident of atrocity in 1966 , a young Vietnamese girl was staked to the ground by members of an off-duty support team . It is well-known fact that GIs occasionally used poor farmers for target practice . Vietcong suspects , which was a category that could have comprised a great number of innocent citizens , were routinely tortured in diverse ways and often killed . For instance , there was a practice of forcibly ejecting some of these suspected individuals from helicopters in mid-air . The task of executing the suspects usually fell into the hands of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN ) police who moved together with the U .S . units

From 1967 , Phoenix teams started weakening and crippling the Vietcong infrastructure facilities . These U .S . soldiers were known for their gory decapitations . From time to time , during the Vietnam War , the character of routine operations degraded into brutal massacres . For example , after suffering heavy causalities in a three-day engagement , Marines entered a village called Thuy Bo and shot everyone in sight , in a fit of blind fury (Tucker 29

The March 1968 massacre at My Lai , however , is the worst of all . It could be regarded as emblematic of the worst atrocities committed by U .S soldiers during the Vietnam War . It underscored the brutality and the complete disregard to human life that the American GIs were at times capable of . On March 16 , 1968 , army commanders sent Task Force Barker which comprised of three companies of infantry , backed by an artillery battery , nine transport helicopters , and gunships , on a search-and-destroy mission against the Vietcong 's 48th Battalion . It was learnt by the army that the Viet Cong were deeply entrenched in the South Vietnamese district of Son My , which was a heavily mined area . A number of soldiers belonging to Charlie Company had been severely injured or killed in this area just a few weeks before , under the onslaught of mines , snipers and booby traps

The U .S . Army term for this area was Pinkville , and originally My Lai massacre was known as the Pinkville Massacre . During the Tet Offensive earlier that year , Vietcong 's 48th Battalion carried out many attacks in Quang Ngai province which was close to Pinkville . The...