A Nation of... Victims... with a high moral purpose...
... at the hands of whom tens of millions of innocents have died since Hiroshima...

THE WAR BEHIND ME, by Deborah Nelson
 
About the Book
In February 1968, a month before the infamous massacre at My Lai, a U.S. Army unit in central Vietnam came upon a tiny hamlet where they found nineteen unarmed civilians—women, babies, young children, and an old man. The soldiers’ orders that day were to “kill anything that moves.” They herded the villagers into a clearing and opened fire. Army investigators later collected sworn statements from dozens of soldiers who described the scene in haunting detail. Yet the investigation was buried and no one was charged.
 
Their accounts—and those of hundreds of other Vietnam veterans who witnessed massacres, murders, rapes, and torture—are contained in an extraordinary archive secretly amassed by the army staff’s office in the 1970s and kept under wraps for most of the subsequent thirty years. Now declassified, the little-known collection represents the largest compilation of U.S. war-crime reports from the Vietnam conflict ever to surface. The files include substantiated cases involving more than 300 allegations and implicate members of every major army division that served in the war.
 
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Nelson and military historian Nicholas Turse joined forces in 2005 to learn the truth behind the records. The War Behind Me describes their search for answers from the men accused of committing atrocities, the witnesses who reported them, and the higher-ups who covered them up.
 
Both a shocking exposé and an unsettling looking-glass on America’s current involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, The War Behind Me offers an unflinching look at the darkest secrets of the Vietnam War—perhaps of all wars.

Many My Lais

By TARA MCKELVEY
Published: December 12, 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.
 
After the My Lai story broke, officials acted quickly. They looked into other crimes — for example, studying anonymous letters sent to superiors by “Concerned Sgt.,” which described the deaths of hundreds of civilians, or “a My Lai each month for over a year.” Serious offenses were indeed investigated, and 23 men were found guilty, though most got off easy. The harshest sentence was 20 years’ hard labor, for the rape of a 13-year-old girl by an interrogator in a prisoner-of-war compound. The rapist served seven months and 16 days.
 
Ronald L. Haeberle/Life Magazine — Associated Press

The road from My Lai, March 1968.

THE WAR BEHIND ME

Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes

By Deborah Nelson
296 pp. Basic Books. $26.95

Related

Times Topics:
(thewarbehindme.com)

Past Coverage

• Many My Lais (December 14, 2008)
 
“Get the Army off the front page,” President Richard Nixon reportedly said. Investigations were a good way to do that. A cover-up attracts attention; a crime that is being looked into does not. The military investigations, Nelson argues, were designed not to hold rapists and murderers accountable, but to deflect publicity. When reporters heard about a war crime, they’d call the Army to see if it would provide information. If they suspected a cover-up, they’d pursue the story. If a military spokesman said an investigation was under way, the story was usually dropped.
 
Nelson, who wrote a series on war crimes with a military historian when she was at The Los Angeles Times, is a diligent, passionate reporter. Her zeal, though, sometimes leads to awkward moments. In Vietnam, villagers tell her about killings that took place in a ravine, giving her “hope” that she has discovered a hamlet where a massacre occurred in 1968. It is a different massacre, as it turns out; she seems vaguely disappointed.
 
Still, this is an important book. Nelson demonstrates that cover-ups happen in plain sight and that looking for an exclusive can blind reporters to the real story. She also points out that these crimes are endemic to counterinsurgency operations. When troops fight among a civilian population, in conflicts that extend for years, atrocities are almost bound to happen. “If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we’re doing with Abu Ghraib,” a retired brigadier general tells her, “we’ll never correct the problem. Counterinsurgency operations involving foreign military forces will inevitably result in such acts, and we will pay the costs in terms of moral legitimacy.” Whether it’s Vietnam or Iraq, the truth is disturbing. “After such knowledge,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “what forgiveness?”
 
Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect, is a frequent contributor to the Book Review and the author of “Monstering: Inside America’s Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War.”
 
Praise
 
"In the best tradition of investigative journalism."
– Boston Globe
 
"Nelson, who wrote a series on war crimes with a military historian when she was at The Los Angeles Times, is a diligent, passionate reporter. An important book."
– New York Times Book Review
 
"Remarkable. Nelson is one of the most experienced, talented investigative journalists alive."
– Seattle Times
 
“Alarming stories and important lessons for a country ‘hell-bound to repeat’ the same mistakes.”
–Library Journal
 
“The War Behind Me establishes, sadly, the terrible fear that emerged from the horrors of My Lai—that its easy cover up suggested that deliberate killing of civilians was widespread in heavily contested areas of south Vietnam. Yes, this book says, it did happen, and yes, as at My Lai, many of those GIs who did the killing were as much victims as those they fired upon.”
— Seymour Hersh, author of Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib
 
“Nelson takes readers along with her on an unusually intimate journalistic journey to uncover what the government had hoped to keep secret—war crimes too cold-blooded and routine to fathom. As her riveting book reminds us, war is hell—for everyone involved. A must read for soldiers, scholars, journalists and any one else interested in both courage and cover-up during wartime.”
— Dana Priest, The Washington Post
 
“Young Americans went to Vietnam imbued with a high moral purpose. But the war dehumanized many, as Deborah Nelson vividly illustrates in a book that evokes a shameful chapter in our history.”
— Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: A History
 
“In her well-written and carefully documented report, Deborah Nelson highlights our shocking failure to deal with, and learn lessons from, our extensive commission of war crimes during the Vietnam War. A must read for all who are concerned with restoring the moral credibility of our country. ”
— Lt. General (USA, Ret.) Robert G. Gard, Jr.
 
“Deborah Nelson has done a superb job in summarizing the problem of atrocities in counterinsurgency operations and has performed a patriotic service by bringing this problem to the attention of the public. Perhaps the most important lesson here is that we should not allow our leaders to commit our military forces to such wars unless it is essential to our vital national interests.”
— Brig. General (USA, Ret.) John H. Johns

« IF CERTAIN ACTS AND VIOLATIONS OF TREATIES ARE CRIMES, THEY ARE CRIMES WHETHER THE UNITED STATES DOES THEM OR WHETHER GERMANY DOES THEM. WE ARE NOT PREPARED TO LAY DOWN A RULE OF CRIMINAL CONDUCT AGAINST OTHERS WHICH WE WOULD NOT BE WILLING TO HAVE INVOKED AGAINST US. »
— Justice Robert H. Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials

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