Howard Zinn in 1967: Mass Killing of Civilians Constitutes the War

Howard Zinn published Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal in 1967, writing in the book’s preface: “Even as more and more Americans were becoming aware and ashamed that our government was committing atrocities against the population of a tiny country, there was a reluctance on the part of important people — even those who were against the war — to say simply that the United States should bring its troops and planes home. I decided to write a short book explaining why this was exactly the thing to do, immediately.” Today, Israel’s mass slaughter of Gazans, enabled by U.S. funding, weapons, and ideological support, constitutes the war. The following excerpt is from the chapter “Violence: The Moral Equation.”

World War II was almost over when my squadron of B-17s was sent to bomb a small encampment of German soldiers near Bordeaux. The Allies had retaken France and were across the Rhine; these Germans, left behind, were simply waiting for the war to end. We seemed to be running out of targets and were told at our briefing that this mission was testing a new kind of bomb — jellied gasoline (now called napalm). So we destroyed the German encampment. Our bombs fell also on a little French town nearby, called Royan. It was set afire and many of its inhabitants died in the flames.

I don’t remember having any hesitation about releasing those firebombs. And since that day I have never doubted that all of us are capable of the most atrocious acts — not because our intent is evil, but because it is so good. We set laudable ultimate goals, and these enable us to proceed to the most ruthless acts without scrupulously making sure they lead to those goals.

One of the outstanding falsehoods of the Cold War, repeated endlessly to schoolchildren and the lay public, is that the chief difference between us and the Communists lies in their willingness to “use any means to gain their ends.” Considering that war is as extreme a means as has been devised, and that all great nations engage in it, then the United States must be included as a nation which, like the others, will use any means to gain its ends.

Let us, for example, look at some of the means being used in Vietnam by this liberal nation:

The Washington Post, March 13, 1965, said American pilots “are given a square marked on a map and told to hit every hamlet within the area. The pilots know they sometimes are bombing women and children.”

Stephen Cary of the American Friends Service Committee reported in The Progressive, October 1965, his conversation with a United States official who had been the first to enter a village after an American air strike, and who said: “I could take everything but the dead kids. As a matter of fact I found only two persons alive — a boy of ten and his eight-year-old sister. They were sitting quietly on the ruins of their house, surrounded by the bodies of their mother and father and several other children.”

A dispatch by Jack Langguth in The New York Times, June 5, 1965, from Saigon:

As the Communists withdrew from Quangngai last Monday, United States jet bombers pounded the hills into which they were headed. Many Vietnamese — one estimate is as high as 500 — were killed by the strikes. The American contention is that they were Vietcong soldiers. But three out of four patients seeking treatment in a Vietnamese hospital afterward for burns from napalm, or jellied gasoline, were village women.

Charles Mohr reported from Saigon, Aug. 30, 1965, in The New York Times:

The military command, which has been conscious of criticism of the B-52 raids, has apparently concluded that saturation bombing of suspected Vietcong “safe havens” is a profitable military operation. … A qualified source said he had verified reports that civilians moved out of the area of a raid in Zone D last Thursday because they could not stand the smell of decomposing bodies, indicating that sizable casualties had been inflicted by the bombs.

A UPI dispatch, Aug. 3, 1965, from Chan Son:

“I got me a VC, man. I got at least two of them bastards.” The exultant cry followed a 10-second burst of automatic-weapons fire yesterday, and the dull crump of a grenade exploding underground. The Marines ordered a Vietnamese corporal to go down into the grenade-blasted hole to pull out their victims. The victims were three children between 11 and 14 — two boys and a girl. Their bodies were riddled with bullets. … “Oh, my God,” a young Marine exclaimed. “They’re all kids.”

A story in The New York Times, Aug. 5, 1965, from Saigon:

A United States military spokesman outlined today for the first time some of the combat rules set down for American Marines fighting in South Vietnam. … “Marines do not burn houses or villages unless those houses or villages are fortified,” he said.

When a reporter remarked that a great majority of the villages in Vietnam were fortified to some degree, the spokesman looked up from the text and said, “I know it.”

Charles Mohr in The New York Times, from Saigon, Sept. 5, 1965:

In Bien Hoa province south of Saigon on Aug. 15 United States aircraft accidentally bombed a Buddhist pagoda and a Catholic church … it was the third time their pagoda had been bombed in 1965. A temple of the Cao Dai religious sect in the same area has been bombed twice this year.

In another delta province there is a woman who has both arms burned off by napalm and her eyelids so badly burned that she cannot close them. When it is time for her to sleep her family puts a blanket over her head. The woman had two of her children killed in the air strike that maimed her.

Few Americans appreciate what their nation is doing to South Vietnam with airpower … this is strategic bombing in a friendly allied country … innocent civilians are dying every day in South Vietnam.

Neil Sheehan in The New York Times, Nov. 30, 1965:

Duchai is on the central Vietnamese coast, north of Saigon. Last May its complex of five prosperous fishing hamlets, set among fruit groves and palm trees behind a spacious beach, was occupied by Vietcong guerillas.

In mid-August, United States and Vietnamese military officials decided the Communists were using Duchai as a base for the operations in the area and that it should be destroyed.

For the next two months, until the Vietcong finally withdrew in mid-October and Duchai was reoccupied by Government troops, it was periodically and ferociously shelled by Seventh Fleet destroyers and bombed by Vietnamese and American planes.

Vietnamese Government officials are certain that at least 184 civilians died during Duchai’s two months of agony, but … no one really knows how many civilians were killed. Some reasonable estimates run as high as 600. …

“There,” said a fisherman, pointing to a bomb crater beside a ruined house, “a woman and her six children were killed in a bomb shelter when it got a direct hit.”

Duchai’s solid brick and stucco houses, the product of generations of hard-earned savings by its fishermen, were reduced to rubble or blasted into skeletons. … Here and there napalm blackened the ruins. …

At least 10 other hamlets in this heavily populated province of about 700,000 persons … have been destroyed as thoroughly as the five in Duchai.

At least 25 other hamlets have been heavily damaged. …

Each month 600 to 1000 civilians wounded by bombs, shells, bullets and napalm are brought to the provincial hospital. … Officials say that about 30 percent of these cases required major surgery. A recent visitor to the hospital found several children lying on cots under mosquito netting, their bodies horribly burned by napalm.

Members of the U.S. 173rd Airborne Brigade during an assault on Vietnam’s Iron Triangle, Sept. 1, 1965. Photograph by Tim Page/Corbis/Getty Images.

In Tokyo, August 1966, I heard five Americans (Kay Boyle, the novelist; Russell Johnson of the American Friends Service Committee; Sgt. Donald Duncan; Floyd McKissick of CORE; Rabbi Israel Dresner) tell of their visit to a Cambodian border village on Aug. 1, the day after it was strafed by United States helicopters flying very low over the houses. A pregnant woman, running for cover, was machine-gunned to death; the Americans saw her body in one of the huts. Two children were drowned in a ditch trying to escape. The group of Americans left, and the following day, Aug. 2, more United States planes came over and the village was completely destroyed.

These items are not exceptions but examples. They are not isolated events; United States planes fly over a thousand sorties each week, dealing out death to people they cannot identify as friend or foe. This list, then, is only a tiny known part of an enormous pattern of devastation which, if seen in its entirety, would have to be described as one of the most evil acts committed by any nation in modern times.

We have been deceived repeatedly by Johnson, Humphrey, Rusk, McNamara, and the rest on the matter of the killing of civilians. They have continually given comforting assurances that “military” targets are chosen. But we ought to keep in mind that when the bombing of a village is explained apologetically as an “accident,” the accident is not that a village was bombed, but that the wrong village was bombed. The women and children of village A are killed, regretfully, because someone thought shots came out of the village. The women and children of village B are killed, without regrets, because shots did come out of the village.

The Cambodian incidents, where we had five eyewitnesses, is instructive. Even after the administration reversed itself on which country the village was in, it could still not refrain from lying just a little. According to the Asahi Evening News in Japan, Aug. 13, 1966: “Meanwhile, the United States Mission in Saigon today issued a communique expressing deep regret at the machine-gunning of targets near the Cambodian village of Thok Trak on July 31 and on Aug. 2.” A woman in the village was cut down and the village huts were destroyed, but the communique said targets “near” the village were attacked.

More important, however, is that the government’s “deep regret” was because the village was Cambodian. If United States helicopters had flown low over a Vietnamese village a few miles across the border, killed a woman, and set fire to the villagers’ homes, there would have been no cause for regret; that would have been a normal military operation.

Historical perspective is sobering. When the Japanese bombed Shanghai, when the Italians bombed Addis Ababa, when Fascist planes bombed Guernica, when the Nazis bombed Warsaw, Coventry, London — the civilized world reacted with horror. Never in history had the defenseless civilian populations of cities been the object of deliberate bombing attacks. It was not just that the Axis powers’ ends were wrong. It was that the bombing of cities was a barbarous act which by its nature could have no justification. Yet during World War II, we killed 50,000 in Hamburg in one terrible night of firebombs, and 80,000 in Tokyo in another nightmare of terror, and then hundreds of thousands with the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now we are at it again. But with this difference: In World War II it was a terrible mistake in judgment. We could have made a distinction between the violence necessary to defeat Hitler’s armies and that which was inflicted on civilian populations. The bombings were superfluous to the war and could have been eliminated (the Russians defeated the Nazi armies using only tactical aircraft against soldiers and not engaging in strategic bombing against cities). In Vietnam, however, the bombing and shelling of civilians constitutes the war.

This has a huge implication. The only way we can stop the mass killing of civilians — of women and children — is to stop the war itself. We have grown accustomed to the distinction between “ordinary” acts of war and “atrocities,” and so came a whole host of international conventions setting up rules for mass slaughter. It was a gigantic fraud, enabling the normal horror of war to be accepted if unaccompanied by “atrocities.” The Vietnam war, by its nature, does not permit this distinction. In Vietnam, the war itself is an atrocity.

Since the killing of civilians is inevitable in our military actions in Vietnam, it cannot be called an “accident” on the ground that nobody intends to kill civilians. The B-52 crews, the Marines and GIs moving through the villages, don’t plan to kill civilians, but when bombs are dropped on fishing villages and sampans, when grenades are dropped down tunnels, when artillery is poured into a hamlet, when no one can tell the difference between a farmer and a Vietcong and the verdict is guilty until proved innocent, then the mass killing of civilians is inevitable. It is not deliberate. But neither is it an accident. It is not part of the war and so discardable. It is the war.

As correspondents have often said, the Vietcong are indistinguishable from any Vietnamese peasant. Indeed, they are Vietnamese peasants. This is guerrilla warfare, in the countryside, and the guerrillas are part of that countryside. Most of them live there. That is exactly why the United States is bombing villages, inundating whole areas with bombs, destroying rice fields, spreading chemicals and fire over huge sections of South Vietnam — which we claim to be defending.

All this is obscured by the terminology of the war, which plays on the long history of Cold War symbolism in the United States. Somehow, when the headlines read “400 Communists Slain” we do not get the feeling that these are Vietnamese farmers who have been killed, but rather objects which deserve to be destroyed. When the news stories tell of the bodies of “Vietcong” littering the field after an attack, few Americans feel compassion; the Vietcong is the “enemy” — a word which has no human content. When The New York Times reports (as it did Feb. 14, 1966) that in one action 986 “guerrillas” were killed and 161 weapons found in the vicinity, then one wonders about those 825 “guerrillas” who were unarmed.

Many people are aghast at the mass killing of innocents, even angrily comparing the United States to Nazi Germany. Indeed, the West Germans have referred to American troops in Vietnam as Bandenkampf-verbande (Bandit Fighting Units), which was the name given during World War II to the Waffen-SS groups which specialized in killing guerrillas and their families.

Liberal Americans, even those critical of the war, are often offended by this analogy. Johnson is not Hitler; the United States is not Germany; there is no act we have committed which is comparable to the calm, organized annihilation of six million Jews. And yet, would it not be an enormous disservice to the memory of those six million if their fate should henceforth become a device for excusing every lesser act of mass murder? Hitler so extended the boundaries of the possible that any actions less extreme than his — no matter how horrible — can be tolerated.

It cannot lessen our guilt in Vietnam to speak of violence on the other side. Even if the Vietcong killed their fellow countrymen as massively, as indiscriminately as does the United States, that would create no moral justification for our doing the same. They have, indeed, committed certain indefensible acts: placing land mines, throwing grenades, planting bombs, in places where noncombatants become the victims. But does our large-scale bombing of the countryside prevent such behavior — or does it rather intensify the righteous anger of a revolutionary group, raise the level of warfare, and thus escalate irrational acts on both sides?

The fact is, however, that the Vietcong are not killing in as large numbers or as indiscriminately as we are. Our own statistics prove this. We have reported consistently that their casualties are far greater than ours. If they were twice ours, and if only half of these were civilians, it would mean we have been killing more civilians than the total number of people killed by the other side. To use the figures given by our military and our press, their casualties are four times ours, and at least 80 percent of these are civilians; so we are killing three times as many civilians as they are killing in all. This is to be expected. They use small arms and field pieces; we use heavy artillery and huge bombers.

People carrying a body in the wake of an American “search and destroy” operation during the Vietnam War, July 1968. Photography by Christian Simonpiétri/Sygma/Getty Images.

President Johnson and his aides have often responded to criticism of large-scale American bombardment by referring to the Vietcong’s killing of government officials. Several thousand officials (no one knows exactly how many) on the provincial, district, and village levels have been assassinated by the guerrillas. It hardly seems necessary to argue that the destruction of a village’s population cannot be justified by the fact that the other side kills a village’s officials. Foreign correspondent Max Clos, writing in Le Figaro Literaire, March 3, 1965 (quoted in Marvin Gettleman’s excellent collection of documents, Vietnam), writes of the Vietcong assassinations:

… The chief of the province appointed by the Saigon Government lives in a big house, drives a Mercedes, and loads his wife with jewelry. The Governor is a man of importance who is approached with deference, protected by police, soldiers, and assistants. His Vietcong opposite number can be seen every day. He is out among the people. He is dressed like a peasant, in black calico and with sandals cut from an old tire. He makes his rounds in his district on foot, walking along the public roads. You can be sure of one thing: He is not getting rich on the back of the people.

When the Vietcong began their revolution in 1959 and 1960, it was opened with a wave of terrorism. In isolated places, in hamlets, then in villages and cities, officials and private persons loyal to Saigon were assassinated. Government propaganda strove mightily to exploit these facts to arouse popular indignation. This backfired. It was understood too late that in most cases the peasants had fearlessly helped in the brutal liquidation of the men on whose death the Saigon Government was basing its case. Instead of murderers the terrorists were considered dispensers of justice.

Early in 1966, Senator Robert Kennedy made a speech to the International Police Academy. One of the passages in the prepared text was never delivered. It read: “Air attacks by a government on its own villages are likely to be far more dangerous and costly to the people than is the individual and selective terrorism of an insurgent movement.”

The Vietcong’s acts of terrorism will need some powerful reason to justify them. But the discussion would have to begin by noting that their violence is focused far more accurately on those they blame for the plight of the country than is ours on the people we hold responsible.

Violence as a means of achieving social change is a very complex problem. An absolute position of nonviolence is logically hard to defend, it seems to me. If people are ruled by a powerful and unrelenting oppressor, nonviolence might compel them to forgo social change. They would thus be condemned to a permanent cruelty that might be ended by a violent but brief rebellion.

There is, in other words, always the theoretical possibility that a small violence may be required to prevent a larger one. I would cite three kinds of examples: the removal of a malignant tumor by surgery; the possible assassination of Hitler to shorten World War II; the action of a Negro mother, alone with her children, whose home in Georgia was about to be invaded by a mob of armed white men, and who fired her shotgun through the door, killing one and dispersing the rest.

Yet the rationalization of violence is so easy and so frequent that once we give up a position of absolute nonviolence, the door is open to the most shocking abuses. Therefore, our starting point should always be the premise that violence is to be avoided and other methods of achieving change should be sought.

If violence is ever to be justified, the evidence must be overwhelming and clear; the greater the proposed violence the greater must be both the magnitude of the social goal and the certainty that it will be achieved. Certain other principles are also essential: that the more closely the violence is focused on the social malignancy — as in precision surgery — the greater likelihood that it can be justified; that the persons who pay the price (since cost must be measured against gain) are the ones who decide whether violence will be used. Self-defense, involving direct action by the persons attacked and against the attacker, meets both these principles.

Modern warfare has certain fundamental characteristics which make it the least defensible use of violence in achieving any social goals: It is massive, indiscriminate, not focused on the evildoers; its human cost is gigantic; it violates the principle of free choice on two counts, because it is fought by conscripts, and against people who did not decide to be involved (civilians).

Revolution within a country, on the other hand, is by its nature focused against the regime presumed to be oppressive. It involves self-determination, because revolutionaries, not having total state power, cannot create conscript armies; they depend on the consent of the oppressed. Guerrilla warfare especially is both focused and voluntaristic.

The United States, not engaged in a war where it is defending itself against direct attack, claims it is helping another people defend themselves. This claim will be discussed later. At this point, however, simply because of the scale and nature of the violence in Vietnam, certain conclusions are possible, whether or not the United States is fighting “against aggression,” whether or not the cause of the Vietcong is that of a just revolutionary upheaval:

(1) Our morality is not the inverse of theirs. Even if our claim were true that we are defending the South Vietnamese against aggression from “the outside,” there can be no justification in carrying on a military action which kills most of the people we claim to be defending.

(2) If, however, the claim of “defense” is not true, and the Vietcong are conducting a genuine struggle for independence and social change, then the United States has crossed the Pacific to put down a revolutionary movement. And in so doing it is indiscriminately destroying not only the insurgents themselves, but the population as a whole: their homes, their land, their roads, their boats, their forests, their cities.

In either case, therefore, the continuation of the present American violence in Vietnam is one of the cruelest acts of an age which is marked by its cruelty. The daily toll in Vietnam of innocent people is so terrible that the cessation of our military activity — the bombings, the burning and shelling of villages, the search-and-destroy operations — has become no longer debatable or negotiable, but a matter of urgent and unilateral action.

From Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal by Howard Zinn. Copyright ©️ 1967 Howard Zinn. Published by Haymarket Books.