Vietnam War

IN THE VIETNAM WAR of the 1960s and early 1970s, both the Americans and the North Vietnamese were the protagonists of brutal war crimes, though the more advanced American arsenal took by far the greatest toll. The main aerial strategy adopted by the Americans to win the war, which Congress never officially declared, was an infringement of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. From the very start of the conflict, the American aerial campaigns took the form of the so-called carpet or area bombing, a practice which contravenes all the norms about civilian protection in the 1949 convention. Particularly infamous examples were the Christmas bombing of 1972 against Hanoi and Haiphong, cities in North Vietnam.

These area bombers were incapable of precision and they had never been employed in attacks against cities before. In addition to indiscriminate bombings, the American government was responsible for the practice of declaring whole villages and populated areas as “free fire zones,” thus destroying them altogether and killing their residents. In the eyes of military officers, this practice was justified by the conviction that many South Vietnamese villages provided a safe shelter for Vietcong.

In fact, investigations carried out after the destruction had already taken place revealed that many of these zones had been peaceful and should not have been targeted. In the confusion of the Vietnam War, it was virtually impossible for the American troops to establish with certainty whether a village was siding with the North or the South Vietnamese. The most gruesome example of these military assaults was the My Lai Massacre in 1968, when the military unit led by Lieutenant William Calley entered the hamlet of My Lai and for hours savagely destroyed it and killed its inhabitants. Although Calley was court-martialed in 1971, President Richard Nixon ordered him released from jail.

The American military-industrial complex (first warned of by President Dwight Eisenhower) was fundamental to the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Dow Chemical, for example, became a notorious symbol of the brutality and ruthlessness of the American military assaults. The company perfected napalm, the jellied gasoline first developed by American chemists during World War II, at its laboratory in Midland, Michigan, and became the sole supplier of this destructive chemical during the war. Napalm inflicts particularly horrible injuries, burning its victims and melting their skin so that the substance remains in their bodies leading to a slow death.

Huge quantities were dropped over Vietnam on suspected enemy targets such as villages or hamlets rumored to be sympathetic to the North's cause.[Page 848] The savagery of this weapon was captured in the famous photograph of a young, naked Vietnamese girl screaming in pain as she fled a U.S. air strike which dropped napalm on her village. (The girl has since become a physician.) Dow's role in the manufacture of napalm brought it worldwide notoriety, and made it a target of the antiwar movement.

Dow's other contribution to the Vietnam War arsenal, Agent Orange, is famous as much for its effects on American soldiers as for the toll of death and suffering among the Vietnamese. Agent Orange was a defoliant sprayed from 1965 to 1975 over millions of acres of Vietnamese jungle to deny cover to the North's infiltration. These were called “area denial missions” (ADM) and resulted in the complete destruction of the vegetation of entire areas of the country. Agent Orange is made of dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever devised by American industry. This lethal weapon was sadly effective on people, too. Tens of the thousands of American soldiers and airmen who were exposed to Agent Orange were subsequently diagnosed with diseases resulting from chemical poisoning such as cancers, brain and nerve damage, and damage to reproductive organs. From 1975 onward, it became apparent that an unusual number of Vietnam veterans were affected with non-Hogdkins lymphoma and skin sarcoma. Vietnamese citizens were obviously exposed to the chemical in vast numbers and experienced similar consequences in terms of disease, death and birth defects, but there has never been an official and comprehensive study of the Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange.

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