Review: War Without Fronts by Bernd Greiner

On March 16, 1968 Charlie Company, a unit of the Americal Division's 11th Infantry Brigade, entered My Lai - a hamlet of the Son My village.in Vietnam for what was supposed to be routine "mopping up" of residual Viet Cong forces.  The two platoons did not encounter any VC but rather villagers.  The massacre that then took place was one of the most shameful episodes in the dirty "war without fronts".  The soldiers began to systematically murder unarmed men, women, children and babies. Families which huddled together for safety in huts or bunkers were shown no mercy. Those who emerged with hands held high were murdered. Women were gang-raped, and the soldiers carved the signature "Company C" into their bodies with bayonets.  When it was over, the GIs had slaughtered between 350 and 500 Vietnamese non-combatants. 

Most Americans have successfully erased all memories of the My Lai massacre - we don't engage in Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with history).  Thankfully, historian Bernd Greiner of Hamburg University has studied all of the documents pertaining to My Lai and has put the massacre in the context of Americas experience in asymmetric warfare in Krieg ohne Fronten: Die USA in Vietnam. The book has been translated into English by Ann Wyburd and Victoria Fern (War Without Fronts, published by Yale University).  Up to now, the book has received little attention in the US, and I only learned about it after it was recommended by Der Spiegelfechter.  This is unfortunate, since the book should be required reading for any students of recent American history.

Greiner has studied the recently declassified records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and one has to ask why historians have up to now made little use of the archives.  And why was this book written by a German, rather than American historian?  What the documents reveal, and what Greiner has organized in his book, is that My Lai was not an aberration.  There were many atrocities as bad or even worse than the slaughter at My Lai.  It now impossible to know for certain how many Vietnamese noncombatant civilians were killed in the conflict, estimates range from 1 million on the low end to as high as 3 million. 

At the core of Greiner's book is a study of asymmetric warfare - the tactics of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong - which ultimately defeated the strongest military on earth.  It is classic David vs. Goliath, with the "weaker" side (David) using primitive weapons against massive military hardware. But the Viet Cong's most potent weapon was time - they had no interest in ending the conflict quickly:

“On the contrary,o long as it does not lose, it has won ... On the other hand, if the ostensibly strong side is not to lose, it is condemned to winning ... the strong side makes the mistake of using violence to force a decision and thus recoup lost time. In other words, there is a direct connection between asymmetry and unfettered violence.”

As Greiner points out, the atrocities committed by US troops in VIetnam were not the result of a breakdown in discipline but rather the logical outcome of the leadership's policy of measuring success by "body count" and "kill ratio":

"The number of enemy dead became the main yardstick of military success. Gaining territory, establishing strategically important strongholds or inhabited areas, the vaue of materials seized or the number of prisoners taken weer of no interest.  What mattered was the body count."

As the war ground on, it mattered little that children, women, elderly were included by commanders to improve their units' "killing quota".  This policy was abetted by the tendency of the GI's to dehumanize the enemy, something common in all wars but which was especially pronounced in Vietnam, where the indigenous population - friend or foe - were subhuman "Gooks":

Here talk about the 'oriental human beings' comes into its own. Maintaining that the Vietnamese live in filth can seamlessly metamorphose into deciding that these people are filth and not worth the exertions demanded from the GIs.... On of them described the 'orientals' as "funny people.  You can't realize what they are thinking.  They seem to have no understanding of life.  They don't care whether they live or die."

Both the GIs in the jungle and the war architects who sent them there were strongly influenced by the post-Second World War triumphalism.  Greiner writes about the prevailing Victory Culture in the United States, which is informed by a strong belief in America's "exceptional status" which legitimized war and renewed its legitimacy through a long series of victories. To a large extent this Victory Culture lives on in the revisionist studies of the VIetnam War in which the US military was deprived of its Victory through the treachery of the "hippies" and "liberal media".  

Greiner's book is not a definitive history of the Vietnam war, but it is scrupulously researched and includes a helpful index.  It does not cover the atrocities committed in the air war, such as the the carpet-bombing of the North, the destruction by air of Laos and Cambodia, and the bombardment by B-52s of selected areas of the South . During Operation Rolling Thunder, which lasted from 1965 until 1968, the four southern provinces of North Vietnam had more bombs dropped on them than any other area in history.

The shadow of Nuremberg hangs over Greiner's final chapter, which deals with the trial of the perpetrators of My Lai.  Predictably, perhaps, the vast majority of Americans sided with Lt. William Calley, the troop commander, who single handedly murdered 60 women and children.  Many openly celebrated the killing as justifiable "self-defense" in killing the "gooks" and even many on the left viewed Calley as a "victim" who merely carried out the strategies of criminal generals (Befehl ist Befehl).  And so the lessons of Vietnam, one realizes after reading War Without Fronts, were never learned.  As a nation we are fated to repeat My Lais over and over, as, indeed American troops did in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. 

Commenting on the Vietnam War in his great poem Waking Early Sunday Morning Robert Lowell noted this cycle of violence and amnesia which seems to be America's fate:

Pity the planet, all joy gone

from this sweet volcanic cone;

peace to our children when they fall

in small war on the heels of small

war—until the end of time

to police the earth, a ghost

orbiting forever lost

in our monotonous sublime.