The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes, Deborah Nelson, 2008. Review by Tara McKelvey, “Many My Lais.” The New York Times, 12 December 2008.
Villagers, acting as human minesweepers, walked ahead of troops in dangerous areas to keep Americans from being blown up. Prisoners were subjected to a variation on waterboarding and jolted with electricity. Teenage boys fishing on a lake, as well as children tending flocks of ducks, were killed. “There are hundreds of such reports in the war-crime archive, each one dutifully recorded, sometimes with no more than a passing sentence or two, as if the killing were as routine as the activity it interrupted,” Deborah Nelson writes in “The War Behind Me.”
The archive in question, a set of Army documents at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Md., reveals widespread killing and abuse by American troops in Vietnam. Most of these actions are not known to the public, even though the military investigated them. The crimes are similar to those committed at My Lai in 1968. Yet, as Nelson contends, most Americans still think the violence was the work of “a few rogue units,” when in fact “every major division that served in Vietnam was represented.” Precisely how many soldiers were involved, and to what extent, is not known, but she shows that the abuse was far more common than is generally believed. Her book helps explain how this misunderstanding came about….
Ken Silverstein, Six Questions for Deborah Nelson on Vietnam War Crimes, and Why They Matter Now. Harper’s, 2 February 2009.