WALL STREET JOURNAL
4-10-18

The Hidden Atrocities of the Vietnam War

The communist regime prevented journalists from documenting its war crimes, leaving an unbalanced historical record that continues to distort our memory of the conflict

By Max Hastings

As a young BBC correspondent visiting Saigon in 1971, I avidly devoured a bootleg copy of Frances FitzGerald’s book “Fire In the Lake,” which was officially banned. Ms. FitzGerald ended her powerful account of America’s failure in Vietnam with an impassioned expression of yearning for communist victory, when “‘individualism’ and its attendant corruption [will] give way to the discipline of the revolutionary community.” Many observers back then assumed that nothing could be worse than the bloody, shambolic, corrupt mess that had prevailed in Vietnam since the abdication of the French colonial regime in 1954.

Today, however, there seems reason to modify the verdict of such writers as Ms. FitzGerald and Jack Langguth, another reporter covering the war, who wrote: “North Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders…deserved to lose.” This is not because what either journalist recorded about America’s record in Vietnam has proved to be untrue. It is because we can now see that those who delivered tales of woe from Saigon—to which I contributed something myself—told only half the story.

Most history-conscious people in America and across the world know, for instance, the story of the My Lai Massacre of March 1968, when U.S. troops murdered at least 504 Vietnamese people of all ages and both sexes. Modern tourists in Vietnam hear plenty about My Lai and other American deeds of the same kind. But they are less likely to hear about the much larger-scale killings carried out by the communists around the same time.

The root of the problem is that modern society is extraordinarily susceptible to visual images, or a lack of them. Few people question the evil of Hitler, because almost everyone has seen images of his death camps. Yet many find it hard to view Stalin and Mao Zedong through the same lens, because those mass murderers and their successors have made sure that few photos of their killings are available.

Like other communist regimes, the North Vietnamese created what the intelligence community calls “denied areas,” where access for reporting and photography was available only to a few ideological sympathizers. It is dismaying how successful this policy was, and in considerable measure remains, in influencing both journalism and the writing of history.

Thus, countless millions of people are familiar with the photos of a Viet Cong prisoner being shot by Saigon’s police chief in February 1968 and of a naked, screaming child fleeing an American napalm strike in 1972. But no visual records are available of the thousands of landlords and “class enemies” executed in North Vietnam in the 1950s, often publicly and with conspicuous brutality. This policy was acknowledged by General Vo Nguyen Giap in a speech in October 1956: “We indiscriminately viewed all landowners as enemies.... In suppressing enemies we adopted strong measures...and used unauthorized methods [a communist euphemism for torture] to force confessions....The outcome was that many innocent people were...arrested, punished, imprisoned.” Up to 15,000 people were executed in this fashion.

Communist terrorism was a continuous feature of the later war in South Vietnam. In the country’s central highlands in 1965, for example, two Vietnamese antimalaria workers spraying DDT were seized, convicted of “spying for the Americans and the puppet government,” and executed with machetes. In another case, two Vietnamese nurses working on a cholera inoculation program, one of them pregnant, were found guilty of “acting in the name of the American imperialists and as a propaganda tool.” The woman’s life was spared, but her male colleague was hacked to death before her eyes.

The families of South Vietnamese soldiers suffered as well. Giong Dinh, an outpost south of Saigon, was attacked by Viet Cong on an October night in 1965. In the initial shootout, two South Vietnamese guards were killed and two bunkers destroyed. Lieut. Nguyen Van Thi, the post commander, continued to hold out with 15 men. The attackers seized members of the soldiers’ families—two men, four women and four children—and forced the wives to call on their husbands to surrender, on pain of the hostages’ lives. Lieut. Thi refused. At dawn, when a relief column reached Giong Dinh, it was found that the Viet Cong had indeed murdered their captives before withdrawing.

During the communists’ occupation of Hue in the 1968 Tet offensive, their cadres systematically murdered every government official, intellectual, bourgeois and “enemy of the people” whom they could identify, along with their families. Among the victims was Nguyen Tat Thong, the government’s national director of social services, together with six of his relatives, including two teenage brothers. Hundreds were killed whose only offense was to be fingered as alleged government sympathizers.

None of this is meant to suggest that the U.S. and its South Vietnamese clients should be viewed as the heroes of the war. Beyond My Lai, it is dismaying to discover from U.S. Army and Marine court-martial records how many atrocities were perpetrated against civilians and how inadequately they were punished. But the communist record of oppression and murder merits matching attention, not least from modern tourists in Vietnam, who are exposed to so many propaganda exhibits about American war crimes.

The mistake made by antiwar protesters half a century ago, and by some journalists and historians both then and since, was to conclude that, if America’s cause was a bad one, the other side’s must be a good one. As is often the case with historical events, neither belligerent had much claim to the moral high ground. Since the communist victory in 1975, many Vietnamese have found reason to reach that conclusion, and it may be time for Americans to do likewise.

—This essay is adapted from Mr. Hastings’s new book, “Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975,” to be published on Oct. 16 by HarperCollins (which, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp)