The Fromson File

Another My Lai? To read the story this past Sunday of how an elite unit of American paratroopers carried out wholesale killings of civilians during the Vietnam War prompted me to think I was having a bad dream, that I was re-living My Lai. I was wrong. This was yet another atrocity that was kept under wraps by the Pentagon for nearly 37 years until a GI unburdened himself and set an investigative team of reporters of the Toledo Blade on the trail of this shocking story. Their interviews with Vietnamese survivors and members of the 101st Airborne Division who are still living, their examination of countless records in the U.S. National Archives and of radio logs took them more than eight months. The results of the investigations by reporters Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss and a mid-sized newspaper's commitment to solid journalism can be seen in full on the newspaper's website. The series is entitled "Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths." It deserves national recognition next year when journalism prizes are awarded for oustanding reporting. The two reporters described the events as "the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War-and commanders who looked the other way," they wrote. "What is far more disturbing is that for 41/2 years, the Army investigated the platoon, finding numerous eyewitnesses amd substantiating war crimes. But in the end, no one was prosecuted, the case buried in the archives for three decades." I am tempted to believe that had the actions of Tiger Force, a highly trained platoon of the 101st Airborne Division, surfaced in 1967 when they occurred, the tragedy of My Lai the following year might have been avoided. The My Lai massacre was first reported in 1969. Most Americans were either shocked, embarrassed and numbed by the initial revelations of American atrocities in Vietnam. No one wanted to believe that our soldiers could possibly be guility of such unspeakable crimes. They included wholesale shootings of unarmed men, women and children, rape and even in one case, a GI killing a woman by putting the muzzle of his M-16 rifle in her vagina before pulling the trigger. As far as we knew, nothing like it had never occurred before. To awaken one morning and read the gory details of My Lai in our newspapers and then see it reinforced on Sixty Minutes and other television broadcasts was almost more than most Americans could bare after having witnessed the so-called Living Room War for more than three years. But we read and watched descriptions of how a company of American GIs led by Second Lieutenant William Calley methodically went about the slaughter of nearly 500 innocent men, women and children in a matter of hours. I had returned from Asia only a few months before and memories of Vietnam were ingrained in my mind. According to the Toldeo newspaper, the rampaging airborne platoon in the Central Highlands had one grisly fetish. Its paratroopers routinely cut off the ears of the Vietnamese and even strung them together to make necklaces they wore around their own necks. Eerily, the slaughter in the Song Ve Valley of the Central Highlands seems to have mirrored My Lai, except that it occurred in 1967, a year earlier than the 1968 massacre in one small hamlet of Quangnai province. It also was carried out over a longer period of time and in a larger swath of land. The truth about My Lai only began to surface because one soldier decided to unburden himself and reveal the story. Clearly, the U.S. Army or the Pentagon had no intention of going public with My Lai. It was clear that they would have covered up the story had it not been for the reporting of a then little known journalist named Seymour Hersh. Having just been transferred from Asia. I was working out of the CBS News bureau in Chicago at the time and had been asked to attend a Toastmasters International Convention in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where I was to be roasted along with Congressman Morris Udall (D-Arizona), a then relatively unknown newscaster, Sam Donaldson, and a young senator, Robert Packwood (D-Oregon). Because he was familiar with my reporting from Vietnam, Udall asked if I could come to his room after the dinner program to talk about the war. I did and over several drinks he got around to what was on his mind. He wanted to know about how American soldiers treated the Vietnamese. One of my last stories in the war up to that point was about an atrocity committed by a squad of U.S. Marines and I explained its background to Udall. The incident involving a squad of eight or ten Marines in 1968 near the old imperial capital of Hue. Only a half dozen farmers were involved, but 27 children were left without fathers. The guilty men were convicted in court martials and sent to prison. The Marines never offered the destitute widows and families a dime of compensation nor did they bother to even notify these families of the punishment meted out to the guilty men. They learned that from me when I returned to Xuan Hoa hamlet in 1994. The ringleader was given a sentence of 20 years to life, but he was released after 2 1/2 years. After the verdicts were handed down, I proposed to CBS News for whom I was a correspondent at the time that I be freed from regular duties and be allowed to travel the country to determine if the Marine case was an isolated one or not. Clearly my hunch was right, but my request was rejected. When I finished telling Udall my story I asked why he was so interested. "Just curiosity," he replied. It turned out to be more than that. One of his constituents, an ex-GI named Ron Ridenhour who either was an eyewitness to the massacre at My Lai or had access to the information, had written Udall a letter, describing what he knew. Unfortunately for me, Udall did not tell me about the Ridenhour letter at that time. Many years later, when the congressman was quite ill, I met him at a reception in Washington and asked if he had that letter in his possession at the time of our meeting and he said that he did. We will have to see whether this latest chapter of savagery by U.S. soldiers killing, raping and mutilating hundreds of innocent Vietnamese men, women and children arouses a reaction similar to that of My Lai. I doubt that it will. So many Americans have been born since that time, so many were children when those crimes were exposed, so many think of the Vietnam War as ancient history and so many more want to put it behind them, that my guess is the story of Tiger Force will be greeted by indifference. This, in spite of the fact that reporters Sallah and Weiss have been deluged by inquiries from major newspapers around the world since publication of their stories. The tragedy is that Americans have been spoonfed romantacized tales of war for so long in movies and on television that they truly believe the sanitized versions they see as the real thing. It is not. War, as those who know it can testify, is a rotten, violent, filthy business. Not all of those who served in Vietnam descended into the heart of darkness the way the men of Tiger Force and My Lai did, not by any means. But these episodes demonstrate how fine a line separates good from evil. My instinct tells me that the need to avenge the deaths of fellow soldiers at the hands of the Vietcong or North Vietnamese was coupled with and matters of race, class and language aggravated the collision between well-armed GIs and unarmed peasant farmers who were dirt poor, spoke no English and so stubbornly clung to the land they tilled and refused to move or cooperate with the foreigners in their midst. Americans fighting men and women need to understand the collision of cultures wherever they serve and the people at home need to confront the truth if they are going to send their sons or daughters, husbands or other blood relatives into harm's way. We need more, not less reality and we especially need the truth at a time when we have to rely on the Pentagon for so much of the information coming out of Iraq.