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Conversations with Americans: Testimony from 32 Vietnam Veterans
Cloth Hardcover and jacket. First Edition 1970, 1st printing. Simon and Schuster.. New York. 240 pages. The jacket show some light soiled out and inside, otherwise the book is in very good condition, clean, tight, straight. (Please see the pictures) Quick and safe shipping. M-31.
- GenresAsia
Hardcover
First published November 16, 1970
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About the author
Mark Lane
54 books24 followersMark Lane was an American attorney, New York state legislator, civil rights activist, and Vietnam war-crimes investigator. Sometimes referred to as a gadfly, Lane is best known as a leading researcher, author, and conspiracy theorist on the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 9, 2023
This book is a collection of interviews with veterans of the Vietnam conflict that Mark Lane conducted in the sixties with the purpose of finding out how American soldiers really treated the people of Vietnam. Lane, author of one of the first books that questioned the official version of President John F. Kennedy's assassination, tried to bring attention to war crimes in 1970, when the Vietnam conflict was still not over and the military wanted Americans to think that My Lai was the only atrocity that had happened.
Although I am familiar with the topic of atrocities in Vietnam, some of the stories that Lane records still shocked me. For instance, one Marine told him that the Marines were trained to torture, as much as the American people did not want to believe it, and that they were taught how to torture women too. I would not depict the particular method because it is not suitable to be shared here, but, essentially, the soldiers were allowed to rape the women, brutally. Prisoners of war could be threatened into revealing information by pushing one of them out of the helicopter. The interviewed soldier heard a story from a sergeant, his instructor, that once a prisoner was tied to two different helicopters and torn apart.
Illegal orders were, obviously, common in Vietnam, and the soldiers usually did not know how to react to them. They did receive a brief instruction about the laws of war, but these short lessons were overshadowed by the weeks of training that taught them completely different things, underscoring that obeying commanders was most important. The freest soldier, according to the army's manual, was the one who willingly submitted to authority – when one obeyed a lawful command, one did not need to worry. However, the soldiers were told neither how to distinguish between a lawful and an unlawful order nor how to deal with the responsibility of fighting a guerrilla war in villages, among civilians, where it was not clear who was the enemy.
Furthermore, in many cases, one could not both blindly obey commands and follow the laws of war because many of the commanders also had a vague, if any, knowledge of those laws. In 1965, Bernard Fall surveyed small-unit American commanders in Vietnam and found out that most of them had only a superficial understanding of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Some even believed that since the Viet Cong were all "traitors", the laws of war did not apply to them. Fall's findings were confirmed by the army intelligence school at Fort Holabird in 1967. The situation allegedly improved after the news of the My Lai massacre provoked public outrage, but in 1971, when the students of the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, were asked what they would do if an enemy machine gunner disarmed and surrendered after shooting six American soldiers, they replied in unison that they would shoot him, although the laws of war do not allow violence against unarmed combatants.
These stories prove that the American soldiers who committed atrocities in Vietnam were not crazy, but had been taught, and encouraged, to act cruelly and unlawfully. According to the interview of Terry Whitmore, a black Marine who deserted and wrote a memoir about his time in Vietnam, told Lane that boot camp, which the recruits had to attend before being sent to Vietnam, was "hell two or three times over." All he heard every day was the word "kill". The drill instructors pounded that word into his and the other recruits' minds. Before bed, they literally had to pray for war – a printed prayer for war was hung on the wall. The drill instructors taught them that the Marines were killing machines and that they were the ones who got the army out of trouble. Whitmore was not sure if those instructors actually believed that there would be no America without the Marines, but they made the recruits believe so, and by the end of the boot camp, that idea was "fixed" in their heads. During bayonet training, when they stuck the bayonet into the dummy, they had to scream "kill" and call the dummy "a dirty mother-fucking gook" and beat it with the bayonet.
Such stories are difficult to accept, but once you have accepted them, it becomes a lot easier to understand why so many war crimes were committed during the Vietnam conflict – and many other wars. My mom told me about her cousin, who graduated from military school in the Soviet Union, or was in the army. He told her that the soldiers were brainwashed to obey commands to the point that they would kill their own mothers if they were ordered to. He did not continue to serve.
CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS is worth a read no matter how familiar the reader is with the topic. Lane has done a great job presenting the interviews in a way that feels like the interviewed veteran is telling the story directly to you. This book is interesting and well-written.
Although I am familiar with the topic of atrocities in Vietnam, some of the stories that Lane records still shocked me. For instance, one Marine told him that the Marines were trained to torture, as much as the American people did not want to believe it, and that they were taught how to torture women too. I would not depict the particular method because it is not suitable to be shared here, but, essentially, the soldiers were allowed to rape the women, brutally. Prisoners of war could be threatened into revealing information by pushing one of them out of the helicopter. The interviewed soldier heard a story from a sergeant, his instructor, that once a prisoner was tied to two different helicopters and torn apart.
Illegal orders were, obviously, common in Vietnam, and the soldiers usually did not know how to react to them. They did receive a brief instruction about the laws of war, but these short lessons were overshadowed by the weeks of training that taught them completely different things, underscoring that obeying commanders was most important. The freest soldier, according to the army's manual, was the one who willingly submitted to authority – when one obeyed a lawful command, one did not need to worry. However, the soldiers were told neither how to distinguish between a lawful and an unlawful order nor how to deal with the responsibility of fighting a guerrilla war in villages, among civilians, where it was not clear who was the enemy.
Furthermore, in many cases, one could not both blindly obey commands and follow the laws of war because many of the commanders also had a vague, if any, knowledge of those laws. In 1965, Bernard Fall surveyed small-unit American commanders in Vietnam and found out that most of them had only a superficial understanding of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Some even believed that since the Viet Cong were all "traitors", the laws of war did not apply to them. Fall's findings were confirmed by the army intelligence school at Fort Holabird in 1967. The situation allegedly improved after the news of the My Lai massacre provoked public outrage, but in 1971, when the students of the Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, were asked what they would do if an enemy machine gunner disarmed and surrendered after shooting six American soldiers, they replied in unison that they would shoot him, although the laws of war do not allow violence against unarmed combatants.
These stories prove that the American soldiers who committed atrocities in Vietnam were not crazy, but had been taught, and encouraged, to act cruelly and unlawfully. According to the interview of Terry Whitmore, a black Marine who deserted and wrote a memoir about his time in Vietnam, told Lane that boot camp, which the recruits had to attend before being sent to Vietnam, was "hell two or three times over." All he heard every day was the word "kill". The drill instructors pounded that word into his and the other recruits' minds. Before bed, they literally had to pray for war – a printed prayer for war was hung on the wall. The drill instructors taught them that the Marines were killing machines and that they were the ones who got the army out of trouble. Whitmore was not sure if those instructors actually believed that there would be no America without the Marines, but they made the recruits believe so, and by the end of the boot camp, that idea was "fixed" in their heads. During bayonet training, when they stuck the bayonet into the dummy, they had to scream "kill" and call the dummy "a dirty mother-fucking gook" and beat it with the bayonet.
Such stories are difficult to accept, but once you have accepted them, it becomes a lot easier to understand why so many war crimes were committed during the Vietnam conflict – and many other wars. My mom told me about her cousin, who graduated from military school in the Soviet Union, or was in the army. He told her that the soldiers were brainwashed to obey commands to the point that they would kill their own mothers if they were ordered to. He did not continue to serve.
CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICANS is worth a read no matter how familiar the reader is with the topic. Lane has done a great job presenting the interviews in a way that feels like the interviewed veteran is telling the story directly to you. This book is interesting and well-written.
January 16, 2023
A must-read for Americans. No matter how many stories you hear or movies you see about the Vietnam War, nothing prepares you for these candid accounts.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews