Steven wrote:
>
> Let's hope this is not true (2nd to last paragraph in iraqwar.ru's
> article)...
>
> "An event that had happened 5 days before also received publicity at the
> coalition HQ. During a night "cleanup" in one of suburban houses near
> An-Nasiriya three marines shot a man and afterwards raped and shot his
> wife. The command got information about this accident from one of its
> informers. After interrogation the marines were sent to Qatar for
> additional investigations."
>
Testimony at Winter Soldier. This is from the testimony from the Third Marine Division. For complete text of this testimony see
For Home Page of Winter Soldier, see
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html
******
MODERATOR. Jamie Henry, could you go into the testimony you have of the murdering of nineteen women and children?
HENRY. Okay, what I have to say is a direct result of the policy by the United States Army in Vietnam and what I'm going to detail was reported to the United States Army CID. I made a full statement to them. I gave names, dates, grid coordinates, etc., etc., etc. We have my signing of the statement on film with the two CID agents, who are really--but we have it on film so they can't deny it and it's witnessed, etc., etc., etc. So there's no way that they can deny this. This statement was given to the CID over a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, and I'm sure they'll come out with something to say about it--why they haven't done anything about it. They'll probably say it's a lie, but it has been corroborated. I just want to give a brief account of what happened. On August 8th our company executed a ten year old boy. We shot him in the back with a full magazine M-16. Approximately August 16th to August 20th, I'm not sure of the date, a man was taken out of his hootch sleeping, was put into a cave, and he was used for target practice by a lieutenant, the same lieutenant who had ordered the boy killed. Now they used him for target practice with an M-60, an M-16, and a .45. After they had pretty well shot him up with the 60, they backed off aways to see how good a shot they were with a .45 because it's such a lousy pistol. By this time, he was dead. On February 8th, this was after a fire fight and we had lost eight men, on February 8th, we found a man in a spider hole. He was of military age. He spoke no English, of course. We did not have an interrogator, which was one of the problems in the fields. He was asked if he were VC and, of course, he kept denying it, "No VC, No VC." He was held down under an APC and he was run over twice--the first time didn't kill him. About an hour later we moved into a small hamlet, this was in I Corps, it was in a Marine AO, we moved into a small hamlet, 19 women and children were rounded up as VCS--Viet Cong Suspects--and the lieutenant that rounded them up called the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them.
The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning. The order that came down from the colonel that morning was to kill anything that moves, which you can take anyway you want to take it. When the captain told the lieutenant this, the lieutenant rang off. I got up and I started walking over to the captain thinking that the lieutenant just might do it because I had served in his platoon for a long time. As I started over there, I think the captain panicked, he thought the lieutenant might do it too, and this was a little more atrocious than the other executions that our company had participated in, only because of the numbers. But the captain tried to call him up, tried to get him back on the horn, and he couldn't get ahold of him. As I was walking over to him, I turned, and I looked in the area. I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately 19 years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP, and she was thrown onto the pile of the 19 women and children, and five men, around the circle, opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that. Now there was a lieutenant who heard this over the radio in our company--he had stayed back with some mortars--he, when we got back to our night location, he was going half way out of his mind because he had just gotten there, relatively. He was one of these--I don't know, I guess he was naive or something, believed in the old American ideal. He was going nuts. He was going to report it to everybody. After that day he calmed down and the next day he didn't say anything about it. We got in a wretched fire fight the next day and the whole thing was just sort of lost in the intensity of the war. Now when I got out of the Army an article was written about this and we got in contact with the lt. who was mad and he denied even remembering the company commander's name, which is a bunch of _____ because he's a lifer and he doesn't want to jeopardize his chances for getting promoted, etc., etc. I don't want to go into the details of these executions because the executions are the direct result of a policy. It's the policy that is important.
The executions are secondary because the executions are created by the policy that is, I believe, a conscious policy within the military. Number one, the racism in the military is so rampant. Now you have all heard of the military racism. It's institutionalized; it is policy; it is SOP; you are trained to be a racist. When you go into basic training, you are taught they are gooks and all you hear is, "gook, gook, gook, gook." And once you take the Vietnamese people or any of the Asian people, because the Asian serviceman in Vietnam is the brunt of the same racism, because the GIs over there do not distinguish one Asian from another. They are trained so thoroughly that all Asians become the brunt of this racism. You are trained, "gook, gook, gook," and once the military has got the idea implanted in your mind that these people are not humans, they are subhuman, it makes it a little bit easier to kill 'em. One barrier is removed and this is intentional, because obviously, the purpose of the military is to kill people. And if you're not an effective killer, they don't want you. The military doesn't distinguish between North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, Viet Cong, civilians --all of them are gooks, all of them are considered to be subhuman. None of them are any good, etc. And all of them can be killed and all of them are killed. Now the second reason for atrocities that occur is because it doesn't take very long for an infantryman in the field to realize that he is fighting for nobody'