http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-vietnam6aug06,0,6350517.story...

Vietnam: The War Crimes Files
By Nick Turse and Deborah Nelson
The Los Angeles Times

Sunday 06 August 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.

Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed and just 23 convicted, the
records show.

Fourteen received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years,
but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to
a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts
on a 13-year-old girl in an interrogation hut in 1967.

He served seven months of a 20-year term, the records show.

Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine
or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

There was little interest in prosecuting Vietnam war crimes, says Steven
Chucala, who in the early 1970s was legal advisor to the commanding officer
of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He says he disagreed with the
attitude but understood it.

"Everyone wanted Vietnam to go away," says Chucala, now a civilian
attorney for the Army at Ft. Belvoir in Virginia.

In many cases, suspects had left the service. The Army did not attempt
to pursue them, despite a written opinion in 1969 by Robert E. Jordan III,
then the Army's general counsel, that ex-soldiers could be prosecuted
through courts-martial, military commissions or tribunals.

"I don't remember why it didn't go anywhere," says Jordan, now a lawyer
in Washington.

Top Army brass should have demanded a tougher response, says retired Lt.
Gen. Robert G. Gard, the highest-ranking member of the Pentagon task force
in the early 1970s.

"We could have court-martialed them but didn't," Gard says of soldiers
accused of war crimes. "The whole thing is terribly disturbing."

Early-Warning System

In March 1968, members of the 23rd Infantry Division slaughtered about
500 Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai. Reporter Seymour Hersh
exposed the massacre the following year.

By then, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces in
Vietnam at the time of My Lai, had become Army chief of staff. A task force
was assembled from members of his staff to monitor war crimes allegations
and serve as an early-warning system.

Over the next few years, members of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group
reviewed Army investigations and wrote reports and summaries for military
brass and the White House.

The records were declassified in 1994, after 20 years as required by
law, and moved to the National Archives in College Park, Md., where they
went largely unnoticed.

The Times examined most of the files and obtained copies of about 3,000
pages - about a third of the total - before government officials removed
them from the public shelves, saying they contained personal information
that was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to the 320 substantiated incidents, the records contain
material related to more than 500 alleged atrocities that Army investigators
could not prove or that they discounted.

Johns says many war crimes did not make it into the archive. Some were
prosecuted without being identified as war crimes, as required by military
regulations. Others were never reported.

In a letter to Westmoreland in 1970, an anonymous sergeant described
widespread, unreported killings of civilians by members of the 9th Infantry
Division in the Mekong Delta - and blamed pressure from superiors to
generate high body counts.

"A batalion [sic] would kill maybe 15 to 20 [civilians] a day. With 4
batalions in the brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500
a month, easy," the unnamed sergeant wrote. "If I am only 10%% right, and
believe me it's lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150
murders, or a My Lay [sic] each month for over a year."

A high-level Army review of the letter cited its "forcefulness,"
"sincerity" and "inescapable logic," and urged then-Secretary of the Army
Stanley R. Resor to make sure the push for verifiable body counts did not
"encourage the human tendency to inflate the count by violating established
rules of engagement."

Investigators tried to find the letter writer and "prevent his
complaints from reaching" then-Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), according
to an August 1971 memo to Westmoreland.

The records do not say whether the writer was located, and there is no
evidence in the files that his complaint was investigated further.

Pvt. Henry

James D. "Jamie" Henry was 19 in March 1967, when the Army shaved his
hippie locks and packed him off to boot camp.

He had been living with his mother in Sonoma County, working as hospital
aide and moonlighting as a flower child in Haight-Ashbury, when he received
a letter from his draft board. As thousands of hippies poured into San
Francisco for the upcoming "Summer of Love," Henry headed for Ft. Polk, La.

Soon he was on his way to Vietnam, part of a 100,000-man influx that
brought U.S. troop strength to 485,000 by the end of 1967. They entered a
conflict growing ever bloodier for Americans - 9,378 U.S. troops would die
in combat in 1967, 87%% more than the year before.

Henry was a medic with B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry,
4th Infantry Division. He described his experiences in a sworn statement to
Army investigators several years later and in recent interviews with The
Times.

In the fall of 1967, he was on his first patrol, marching along the edge
of a rice paddy in Quang Nam province, when the soldiers encountered a
teenage girl.

"The guy in the lead immediately stops her and puts his hand down her
pants," Henry said. "I just thought, 'My God, what's going on?' "

A day or two later, he saw soldiers senselessly stabbing a pig.

"I talked to them about it, and they told me if I wanted to live very
long, I should shut my mouth," he told Army investigators.

Henry may have kept his mouth shut, but he kept his eyes and ears open.

On Oct. 8, 1967, after a firefight near Chu Lai, members of his company
spotted a 12-year-old boy out in a rainstorm. He was unarmed and clad only
in shorts.

"Somebody caught him up on a hill, and they brought him down and the
lieutenant asked who wanted to kill him," Henry told investigators.

Two volunteers stepped forward. One kicked the boy in the stomach. The
other took him behind a rock and shot him, according to Henry's statement.
They tossed his body in a river and reported him as an enemy combatant
killed in action.

Three days later, B Company detained and beat an elderly man suspected
of supporting the enemy. He had trouble keeping pace as the soldiers marched
him up a steep hill.

"When I turned around, two men had him, one guy had his arms, one guy
had his legs and they threw him off the hill onto a bunch of rocks," Henry's
statement said.

On Oct. 15, some of the men took a break during a large-scale
"search-and-destroy" operation. Henry said he overheard a lieutenant on the
radio requesting permission to test-fire his weapon, and went to see what
was happening.

He found two soldiers using a Vietnamese man for target practice, Henry
said. They had discovered the victim sleeping in a hut and decided to kill
him for sport.

"Everybody was taking pot shots at him, seeing how accurate they were,"
Henry said in his statement.

Back at base camp on Oct. 23, he said, members of the 1st Platoon told
him they had ambushed five unarmed women and reported them as enemies killed
in action. Later, members of another platoon told him they had seen the
bodies.

Tet Offensive

Capt. Donald C. Reh, a 1964 graduate of West Point, took command of B
Company in November 1967. Two months later, enemy forces launched a major
offensive during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year.

In the midst of the fighting, on Feb. 7, the commander of the 1st
Battalion, Lt. Col. William W. Taylor Jr., ordered an assault on snipers
hidden in a line of trees in a rural area of Quang Nam province. Five U.S.
soldiers were killed. The troops complained bitterly about the order and the
deaths, Henry said.

The next morning, the men packed up their gear and continued their sweep
of the countryside. Soldiers discovered an unarmed man hiding in a hole and
suspected that he had supported the enemy the previous day. A soldier pushed
the man in front of an armored personnel carrier, Henry said in his
statement.

"They drove over him forward which didn't kill him because he was
squirming around, so the APC backed over him again," Henry's statement said.

Then B Company entered a hamlet to question residents and search for
weapons. That's where Henry set down his weapon and lighted a cigarette in
the shelter of a hut.

A radio operator sat down next to him, and Henry was listening to the
chatter. He heard the leader of the 3rd Platoon ask Reh for instructions on
what to do with 19 civilians.

"The lieutenant asked the captain what should be done with them. The
captain asked the lieutenant if he remembered the op order (operation order)
that came down that morning and he repeated the order which was 'kill
anything that moves,' " Henry said in his statement. "I was a little shook
... because I thought the lieutenant might do it."

Henry said he left the hut and walked toward Reh. He saw the captain
pick up the phone again, and thought he might rescind the order.

Then soldiers pulled a naked woman of about 19 from a dwelling and
brought her to where the other civilians were huddled, Henry said.

"She was thrown to the ground," he said in his statement. "The men
around the civilians opened fire and all on automatic or at least it seemed
all on automatic. It was over in a few seconds. There was a lot of blood and
flesh and stuff flying around....

"I looked around at some of my friends and they all just had blank looks
on their faces.... The captain made an announcement to all the company, I
forget exactly what it was, but it didn't concern the people who had just
been killed. We picked up our stuff and moved on."

Henry didn't forget, however. "Thirty seconds after the shooting
stopped," he said, "I knew that I was going to do something about it."

Homecoming

For his combat service, Henry earned a Bronze Star with a V for valor,
and a Combat Medical Badge, among other awards. A fellow member of his unit
said in a sworn statement that Henry regularly disregarded his own safety to
save soldiers' lives, and showed "compassion and decency" toward enemy
prisoners.

When Henry finished his tour and arrived at Ft. Hood, Texas, in
September 1968, he went to see an Army legal officer to report the
atrocities he'd witnessed.

The officer advised him to keep quiet until he got out of the Army,
"because of the million and one charges you can be brought up on for
blinking your eye," Henry says. Still, the legal officer sent him to see a
Criminal Investigation Division agent.

The agent was not receptive, Henry recalls.

"He wanted to know what I was trying to pull, what I was trying to put
over on people, and so I was just quiet. I told him I wouldn't tell him
anything and I wouldn't say anything until I got out of the Army, and I
left," Henry says.

Honorably discharged in March 1969, Henry moved to Canoga Park, enrolled
in community college and helped organize a campus chapter of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War.

Then he ended his silence: He published his account of the massacre in
the debut issue of Scanlan's Monthly, a short-lived muckraking magazine,
which hit the newsstands on Feb. 27, 1970. Henry held a news conference the
same day at the Los Angeles Press Club.

Records show that an Army operative attended incognito, took notes and
reported back to the Pentagon.

A faded copy of Henry's brief statement, retrieved from the Army's
files, begins:

"On February 8, 1968, nineteen (19) women and children were murdered in
Viet-Nam by members of 3rd Platoon, 'B' Company, 1st Battalion, 35th
Infantry....

"Incidents similar to those I have described occur on a daily basis and
differ one from the other only in terms of numbers killed," he told
reporters. A brief article about his remarks appeared inside the Los Angeles
Times the next day.

Army investigators interviewed Henry the day after the news conference.
His sworn statement filled 10 single-spaced typed pages. Henry did not
expect anything to come of it: "I never got the impression they were ever
doing anything."

In 1971, Henry joined more than 100 other veterans at the Winter Soldier
Investigation, a forum on war crimes sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against
the War.

The FBI put the three-day gathering at a Detroit hotel under
surveillance, records show, and Nixon administration officials worked behind
the scenes to discredit the speakers as impostors and fabricators.

Although the administration never publicly identified any fakers, one of
the organization's leaders admitted exaggerating his rank and role during
the war, and a cloud descended on the entire gathering.

"We tried to get as much publicity as we could, and it just never went
anywhere," Henry says. "Nothing ever happened."

After years of dwelling on the war, he says, he "finally put it in a
closet and shut the door".

The Investigation

Unknown to Henry, Army investigators pursued his allegations, tracking
down members of his old unit over the next 3 1/2 years.

Witnesses described the killing of the young boy, the old man tossed
over the cliff, the man used for target practice, the five unarmed women,
the man thrown beneath the armored personnel carrier and other atrocities.

Their statements also provided vivid corroboration of the Feb. 8, 1968,
massacre from men who had observed the day's events from various vantage
points.

Staff Sgt. Wilson Bullock told an investigator at Ft. Carson, Colo.,
that his platoon had captured 19 "women, children, babies and two or three
very old men" during the Tet offensive.

"All of these people were lined up and killed," he said in a sworn
statement. "When it, the shooting, stopped, I began to return to the site
when I observed a naked Vietnamese female run from the house to the huddle
of people, saw that her baby had been shot. She picked the baby up and was
then shot and the baby shot again."

Gregory Newman, another veteran of B Company, told an investigator at
Ft. Myer, Va., that Capt. Reh had issued an order "to search and destroy and
kill anything in the village that moved."

Newman said he was carrying out orders to kill the villagers' livestock
when he saw a naked girl head toward a group of civilians.

"I saw them begging before they were shot," he recalled in a sworn
statement.

Donald R. Richardson said he was at a command post outside the hamlet
when he heard a platoon leader on the radio ask what to do with 19
civilians.

"The cpt said something about kill anything that moves and the lt on the
other end said 'Their [sic] moving,' " according to Richardson's sworn
account. "Just then the gunfire was heard."

William J. Nieset, a rifle squad leader, told investigators that he was
standing next to a radio operator and heard Reh say: "My instructions from
higher are to kill everything that moves."

Robert D. Miller said he was the radio operator for Lt. Johnny Mack
Carter, commander of the 3rd Platoon. Miller said that when Carter asked Reh
what to do with the 19 civilians, the captain instructed him to follow the
"operation order."

Carter immediately sought two volunteers to shoot the civilians, Miller
said under oath.

"I believe everyone knew what was going to happen," he said, "so no one
volunteered except one guy known only to me as 'Crazy.' "

"A few minutes later, while the Vietnamese were huddled around in a
circle Lt Carter and 'Crazy' started shooting them with their M-16's on
automatic," Miller's statement says.

Carter had just left active duty when an investigator questioned him
under oath in Palmetto, Fla., in March 1970.

"I do not recall any civilians being picked up and categorically stated
that I did not order the killing of any civilians, nor do I know of any
being killed," his statement said.

An Army investigator called Reh at Ft. Myer. Reh's attorney called back.
The investigator made notes of their conversation: "If the interview of Reh
concerns atrocities in Vietnam ... then he had already advised Reh not to
make any statement."

As for Lt. Col. Taylor, two soldiers described his actions that day.

Myran Ambeau, a rifleman, said he was standing five feet from the
captain and heard him contact the battalion commander, who was in a
helicopter overhead. (Ambeau did not identify Reh or Taylor by name.)

"The battalion commander told the captain, 'If they move, shoot them,' "
according to a sworn statement that Ambeau gave an investigator in Little
Rock, Ark. "The captain verified that he had heard the command, he then
transmitted the instruction to Lt Carter.

"Approximately three minutes later, there was automatic weapons fire
from the direction where the prisoners were being held."

Gary A. Bennett, one of Reh's radio operators, offered a somewhat
different account. He said the captain asked what he should do with the
detainees, and the battalion commander replied that it was a "search and
destroy mission," according to an investigator's summary of an interview
with Bennett.

Bennett said he did not believe the order authorized killing civilians
and that, although he heard shooting, he knew nothing about a massacre, the
summary says. Bennett refused to provide a sworn statement.

An Army investigator sat down with Taylor at the Army War College in
Carlisle, Pa. Taylor said he had never issued an order to kill civilians and
had heard nothing about a massacre on the date in question. But the
investigator had asked Taylor about events occurring on Feb. 9, 1968 - a day
after the incident.

Three and a half years later, an agent tracked Taylor down at Ft. Myer
and asked him about Feb. 8. Taylor said he had no memory of the day and did
not have time to provide a sworn statement. He said he had a "pressing
engagement" with "an unidentified general officer," the agent wrote.

Investigators wrote they could not find Pvt. Frank Bonilla, the man
known as "Crazy." The Times reached him at his home on Oahu in March.

Bonilla, now 58 and a hotel worker, says he recalls an order to kill the
civilians, but says he does not remember who issued it. "Somebody had a
radio, handed it to someone, maybe a lieutenant, said the man don't want to
see nobody standing," he said.

Bonilla says he answered a call for volunteers but never pulled the
trigger.

"I couldn't do it. There were women and kids," he says. "A lot of guys
thought that I had something to do with it because they saw me going up
there.... Nope ... I just turned the other way. It was like, 'This ain't
happening.' "

Afterward, he says, "I remember sitting down with my head between my
knees. Is that for real? Someone said, 'Keep your mouth shut or you're not
going home.' "

He says he does not know who did the shooting.

The Outcome

The Criminal Investigation Division assigned Warrant Officer Jonathan P.
Coulson in Los Angeles to complete the investigation and write a final
report on the "Henry Allegation." He sent his findings to headquarters in
Washington in January 1974.

Evidence showed that the massacre did occur, the report said. The
investigation also confirmed all but one of the other killings that Henry
had described. The one exception was the elderly man thrown off a cliff.
Coulson said it could not be determined whether the victim was alive when
soldiers tossed him.

The evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine
"subjects," including Carter and Bonilla, Coulson wrote. Those two carried
out the Feb. 8 massacre, along with "other unidentified members of their
element," the report said.

Investigators determined that there was not enough evidence to charge
Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts "as to the actual language"
he used.

But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to
investigate the killings, the report said.

Coulson conferred with an Army legal advisor, Capt. Robert S. Briney,
about whether the evidence supported charges against Taylor.

They decided it did not. Even if Taylor gave an order to kill the
Vietnamese if they moved, the two concluded, "it does not constitute an
order to kill the prisoners in the manner in which they were executed."

The War Crimes Working Group records give no indication that action was
taken against any of the men named in the report.

Briney, now an attorney in Phoenix, says he has forgotten details of the
case but recalls a reluctance within the Army to pursue such charges.

"They thought the war, if not over, was pretty much over. Why bring this
stuff up again?" he says.

Years Later

Taylor retired in 1977 with the rank of colonel. In a recent interview
outside his home in northern Virginia, he said, "I would not have given an
order to kill civilians. It's not in my makeup. I've been in enough wars to
know that it's not the right thing to do."

Reh, who left active duty in 1978 and now lives in Northern California,
declined to be interviewed by The Times.

Carter, a retired postal worker living in Florida, says he has no memory
of his combat experiences. "I guess I've wiped Vietnam and all that out of
my mind. I don't remember shooting anyone or ordering anyone to shoot," he
says.

He says he does not dispute that a massacre took place. "I don't doubt
it, but I don't remember.... Sometimes people just snap."

Henry was re-interviewed by an Army investigator in 1972, and was never
contacted again. He drifted away from the antiwar movement, moved north and
became a logger in California's Sierra Nevada foothills. He says he had no
idea he had been vindicated - until The Times contacted him in 2005.

Last fall, he read the case file over a pot of coffee at his dining room
table in a comfortably worn house, where he lives with his wife, Patty.

"I was a wreck for a couple days," Henry, now 59, wrote later in an
e-mail. "It was like a time warp that put me right back in the middle of
that mess. Some things long forgotten came back to life. Some of them were
good and some were not.

"Now that whole stinking war is back. After you left, I just sat in my
chair and shook for a couple hours. A slight emotional stress fracture??
Don't know, but it soon passed and I decided to just keep going with this
business. If it was right then, then it still is."

Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this report.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

--
+

"It is even probable that the supremacy of nations
may be determined by the possession of available
petroleum and its products." - President Coolidge,
We Fight for Oil, Ludwell Denny - Alfred A Knopf, 1928

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president
represents, more and more closely, the inner soul
of the people. On some great and glorious day the
plain folks of the land will reach their heart's
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by a downright moron." --- H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

"Ignorance is an evil weed, which dictators may cultivate among their
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- William H. Beveridge, 1944

"The power of accurate observation is called cynicism
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