The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes

by Deborah Nelson

In 2005, Deborah Nelson joined forces with military historian Nick Turse to investigate an extraordinary archive: the largest compilation of records on Vietnam-era war crimes ever to surface. The declassified Army papers were erroneously released and have since been pulled from public circulation. Few civilians have seen the documents.The files contain reports of more than 300 confirmed atrocities, and 500 other cases the Army either couldn’t prove or didn’t investigate. The archive has letters of complaint to generals and congressmen, as well as reports of Army interviews with hundreds of men who served. Far from being limited to a few bad actors or rogue units, atrocities occurred in every Army division that saw combat in Vietnam. Torture of detainees was routine; so was the random killing of farmers in fields and women and children in villages. Punishment for these acts was either nonexistent or absurdly light. In most cases, no one was prosecuted at all.

In The War Behind Me Deborah Nelson goes beyond the documents and talks with many of those who were involved, both accusers and accused, to uncover their stories and learn how they deal with one of the most awful secrets of the Vietnam War.

Genres: History, War, Nonfiction, Politics, Military History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published October 27, 2008

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Deborah Nelson is the co-winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Nelson earned a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law and a B.S. in Journalism from Northern Illinois University.

She worked for several newspapers, including the Daily Chronicle, the Daily Herald, the Washington Post,
the Seattle Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Los Angeles Times. In 2006 she left the Angeles Times to take a faculty position as Associate Professor of Investigative Journalism at the Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland. Since 2012 she also is a free-lance investigative reporter for Reuters.

Reviews

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written by Deborah Nelson, an independent journalist who did research about American war crimes during the Vietnam conflict together with Nick Turse, the author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, which is, for me, the most comprehensive and informative account of American soldiers' atrocities in Vietnam. It is interesting that two researchers who had access to the same materiel have written two completely different works about the same topic.

Turse's account is insightful and thought-provoking. He not only chronicled a lot of war crimes, most of which are unknown to the general public, but he also discussed how the atrocities impacted the people of Vietnam, what motivated American soldiers to commit them, and the implications of the government's and the media's attempts to sweep those war crimes under the rug. He addressed Agent Orange and aerial strikes, underscoring that they took away way more lives than unit-level cruelties. In three hundred pages, he has covered almost everything regarding this topic. 

Nelson's approach was different, and the result is not nearly as impressive as her research partner's. To me, her work seemed not like an account of war crimes but like a personal diary that she had been writing while Turse and she interviewed veterans and browsed through archive collections. While her partner managed to organize all those statements by veterans into a coherent narrative that included only the useful information, she has dedicated too many pages to unnecessary particulars. 

In every chapter, she has presented one of her interviews with a veteran of the Vietnam conflict. Those interviews should show how the veterans confronted and processed what had happened in Vietnam, but she mostly told the stories of their lives. There is too much biographical information about their families, their childhood, how they look, and so on, and too little information about the atrocities. If a person who has no background knowledge about American war crimes in Vietnam picks up her account, they will probably not understand them any better after finishing it. 

The author failed to convey the seriousness of what had happened in Vietnam. Although she did know that the atrocities committed by American soldiers were not cases of individual brutality but a policy, she did not organize her knowledge into a complete narrative about the suffering of the people of Vietnam and what it meant for them.

Most importantly, unlike Turse, she has not drawn any conclusions from what the veterans told her. She has just written about her experiences interviewing them. Her conversations with the veterans could have deepened her knowledge of the war, and their personal stories could have helped her understand military records. For instance, her interview with Jamie Henry, a former army medic who reported the war crimes that he had witnessed, could have been so much more interesting because he was a brave man who was trying to bring the public's attention to the atrocities despite the army's attempts to silence him. However, she seemed to have asked him wrong questions because the record of his interview was dull. Since she has presented her work as a kind of investigation, I expected her to address in more detail the government's attempts to hide the facts from the people. 

I appreciated that she included the case summaries of army staff war crime investigations, though. These are well-organized, and long, tables that show who, where, and when committed what atrocity. 

THE WAR BEHIND ME is a subpar account of American war crimes in Vietnam. Turse's work proved that Nelson could have done a much better job with the sources that she had. This book did not meet my expectations. 

[Phillip · Rating 1 out of 5]

Serious crap, April 9, 2009


The subject is an important one as the U.S. seems to be finding itself in a series of wars where the population is 'neutral' and the fighting is frustrating and tedious to the point of rage.

But there are three things one should consider when reading TWBM, by Ms. Nelson. One, she is hardly a decent investigative reporter. I've read high school "what I did last summer" reports that are more interesting and informative. Her questions to the participants were more Barbara Walters than anything else. "How do you feel about atrocities?" "Did you see anyone else commit atrocities?"

Two, she begins her book with the case of a 19year old self-described hippie who was arrested for dodging the draft board, jailed for a time and then sent to Vietnam as a Conscientious Objector/medic. Is there ANY reason to believe this guy would be a credible source of information about the military folks he evidently didn't like or respect?

Three, Ms Nelson seems to think that repeating the sheer volume of incidents should make us believe that our troops were just a step above the Gestapo. Here are a couple of 'charges': "Antiwar activist reported he had seen a photo of a mutilated body of a girl." Wow, let's get some investigators on that one.
Or this one: "POW reported he was forced to shave off mustache." I can just see Brando sitting in the dark rubbing his bare head-The horror. The horror.
Or a more maddening one: "Deliberate bombing of a Cambodian hospital." Pure drivel. Never happened.
Listed in Ms Nelson's book are 56 incidents/charges/investigations having to do with killing civilians. All serious. All should be investigated. (Is that about one every two months? In a country that suffered hundreds of thousands dead including maybe a million ARVN by the North Vietnamese who were just passing through a sovereign nation)But "every day occurance?" Give me a break.

Were there atrocities? Every rape, every beating, every death, diminishes us all. We, the veterans, were ashamed of them and incredibly angry at the perpetrators. But in my three years in theater, I heard of maybe five or six. I've spent years and years writing about the war and studying it. Battle-field atrocities were not a significant issue in the war. Yes, yes, I know. One is too many. What about the innocent civilians who died? Horrible.

Look, if someone of you think you know a way you can send 18 and 19 yearold kids to a foreign land with guns and absolute power over the natives and not have any trouble in ten years, you better get yourself down to boot camp and start the training. AND think about it before you launch the next few hundred thousand into combat!

The book stinks because it is so poorly constructed that there is nothing to refute. She makes no real claims. She raises no new issues. I assume she just wanted to strike her little blow against the Vietnam Vets and those nasty American troops in general.

We need to drill and drill our troops about the angst and frustration of operating with civilians in the middle of combat. Books like this won't help. They just make people (people like vets and people who have a lick of common sense) angry and feed the garbled mind of someone on this page who thought every student should read this book. Lord help us.

The "thiness" of the book and the lack of any interpretation or contextualization of the incidents, comments on combat in general, the Vietnam War in particular, leave this book in the propaganda pile.

A last thought. Take out the phrase "body count" and this book is about fifty pages shorter. That issue as a cause of atrocities, and in fact as a cause of anything, has been written about and discredited a long time ago. Ms. Nelson had ample reason to research the issue if it was to be such a prominent part of her book.

VVAW? Kerry? It is to laugh.I personally know one of that fraudulent group.He is still lying to everyone he meets.Do NOT take any bets that those boys can back up any of their charges.

Okay, can't resist one more. I have never heard of a live Vietnamese being thrown from an aircraft of any kind. And I know a hell of a lot of pilots. Just one more 'catch phrase' that the antiwar crowd fell for.

[James · Rating 1 out of 5]

Yet another book about low life Vietnam veterans.

Even the guys who blew the whistle and reported events come across poorly.

The author is careful to document every grammatical error in their speech so they sound like a bunch of ignorant hillbillys,

And what of the crimes committed by the Viet cong & NVA?

Not a word about the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians they
killed and or tortured because they were thought to be helping Americans.

Cutting the genitals off American boys and stuffing them in their mouths while still alive?
Or cutting their skin off an inch at a time?

The poor Viet cong are so innocent.

The tone of the author is somewhat irritating also,

The author expresses such glee whenever she finds something negative about an 18 year old draftee who didn't want to go in the army,
let alone a war zone.

And such disappointment when efforts to find more dirt don't pay out,
like her trip to Vietnam and going around the countryside asking villagers if they can add additional crimes against American soldiers.

It's too bad she never had a military obligation to her country.

She's gotten a free ride every time this country wanted soldiers
to fight and die for the freedoms she takes for granted.

During the war she was able to live a fat and easy life,
and then later profit by pointing fingers at others.

If she thinks American men are so bad,
why doesn't she go live in Vietnam?

As other reviewers have pointed out, her writing skills are poor,
and much of the book is about how clever SHE thinks she is in doing this and that.

[Cương Hoàng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sách viết hơi khô khan và khó theo dõi. Chủ yếu là các câu chuyện ngoài lề, ko được tập chung vào góc nhìn lắm. Nói chung một cuốn sách viết ra vấn đề nhưng ko giải quyết được gì.

[Brianna · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main focus of the book, or at least the beginning of the journey, is a veteran's allegation (that he witnessed the massacre of 19 unarmed civilians by two soldiers) and the paper trail showing that this was investigated twice with corroborating testimony uncovered, but no action taken.

This book isn't an attack on the average soldier. In fact, it becomes distressingly clear that not only were there the direct victims of the war crimes [murder, rape, assault] but indirect victims -- conscientious soldiers who witnessed these events were carrying it around with them the rest of their lives, often compounded by the fact that when they tried to bring those responsible to justice by reporting or later publicizing it, they were discredited or ignored by an administration desperate to get Vietnam out of the public spotlight.

The book is as much about the author's journey to find sources for the story than it is about the story itself, which I guess is to be expected from an investigative journalist. The good news is that the author lets the interviewees speak for themselves on the pages, and there is a lot to be learned from their words. Even those officials who are obviously antagonistic towards the investigative probe offer insight into the administration's train of thought.

We hear from individuals involved in, or witness to, the crime and the investigation in the order the author tracks them down. Several independently recount the incident, although there is disagreement or confusion about whether a "shoot everything that moves" order came from higher up the chain.

We hear from some veterans about the emotional impact of being war (particularly guerrilla warfare) and the lack of purpose felt in Vietnam. We hear from retired Army generals, former Staff or investigators about the focus that was placed on high body counts, what it takes to be trained to kill. One official blames the lack of purpose individuals soldiers may have felt on the media, leading public opinion against U.S. having any justification for being in Vietnam and making the soldiers aware of this public sentiment. Overall, this isn't a particularly well written book but its reliance on lengthy direct quotes allows the reader to benefit from several different viewpoints (thought not all viewpoints) on an important topic.

I made myself read this to keep from glorifying the past, but what I took away from it was more about the present. What it takes to go to war, what may drive some to violence towards unarmed civilians, what it takes to be a whistleblower against The System, the difficulty (perhaps doomed nature) of U.S.-led counterinsurgency actions, and the Us-vs-Them mentality (not in combat, but which Army administration seems to feel towards civilians criticizing the military) .... all these things unfortunately have many modern-day applications.


// Quotes //

HENRY: "Most of the time we were getting our butts kicked," Henry says. B Company suffered heavy casualties with few clear gains. The orders to search hamlets gave way to orders to burn them to the ground. "Search and destroy" became the mantra. The malevolence caught like their cigarette lighters to grass hooches. Several men stabbed a pig to death for sport. When Henry objected, they told him to shut his mouth if he wanted to live long... By October, some of the men turned their sights on civilians...

LEE: "I had a lot of stress. Everybody was under a lot of stress. We were just trying to stay alive. This was the same period of time when we lost a lot of the company. So a lot of things were going on." [Lee] searches for the right words to describe their state of mind. "We were out of control," he says. "We were all very trigger-happy and everything else. Shoot anything that moves or don't move or anything that's in our way. You have to be in that kind of -- you've got to be in that environment to really understand what goes through the soldiers' minds at the time."

AMBEAU: "The firefighting you could handle. It's all that other stuff that plays on your mind," he says. "We just basically search and destroy with no rhyme or reason...How in the hell do you go in there, completely destroy everything they have, beat up their family members, rape their wives, and burn down their houses?" The search and destroy missions drove Vietnamese to the enemy and robbed U.S. soldiers of any sense of purpose .... "I got a feeling this situation in Iraq is going to end up the same way...I told [my son and son-in-law, shipping out to Iraq] just do the right thing and listen to your conscience."

WILKERSON: "[No] question, you had to be on your guard all the time -- especially when you just had a colleague wounded or killed, or you just had a group of colleagues wounded or killed, or your platoon or your company had or wherever, those are the critical times. It was also very critical when you had a situation that I think happens almost every day in Iraq now...where you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. You don't, you know, you're just killing. That's it. There's no objective to it. Year after year, week after week, month after month, whatever. You don't see....I had some people who had been there for a long time and that adds to this sort of, you know, momentum towards being other than a lawful warrior. That plus the fact, as I said, you don't see the light at the end of the tunnel. There is no, there's no victory. You can't see the victory clearly, you can't see an end coming, you can't see when you will go home other than your rotation date. And you know your rotation date is subject to change."

CHUCALA on the investigation: "What the news media is even doing today in influencing the behavior of soldiers in the field ...if you browbeat the whole purpose of us being there, if you demean the whole purpose of why we're there, there will be a certain group of people in any society that will react against whom they're supposed to be freeing or taking care of. So the terms 'gook' and all these other terms that started -- I think were fed even -- by the news media creating more anger in these people for not wanting to be there."
"What I'm saying to you is, you're also dealing with another phenomenon. A soldier is trained to kill, not to be killed. I don't know any soldiers who like killing. I don't know any. I was first trained as an infantry unit commander, Fort Benning. Nobody I know wants to kill anybody. Now, how do you get this individual to have the gumption to kill someone? You don't tell them hold hands and sing Kum Ba Yah. You have to install in them something that says he's really bad, and if it's you or him, it's him. That's where these terms [gook, Jap, etc] come from ... this person has to be geared towards killing the enemy. If not, he shouldn't be there. He's going to get himself killed and whoever's with him. It's unfortunate..."

JOHNS: [Johns] understood the reluctance to prosecute soldiers, and didn't consider it as egregious as sending them into a senseless war and placing them in untenable combat situations. "You have to forgive me, but I have a reservation about blaming soldiers who are told to do something, and they let it get out of hand. I believe the chain of command should be disciplined and curbed. I don't think they [army leaders] did that."
As a staff officer on the Department of the Army Staff in the late 1960s, Johns wrote a study on the nation-building aspect of counterinsurgency. The study was distributed by the army secretary as policy guidance. However, Johns says the army rejected one important conclusion of his analysis, which looked at counterinsurgency operations from WWII onward: Foreign combat forces, such as the U.S. military in Vietnam, could not successfully conduct such wars. The most fundamental reason, he argued, was that the nature of such wars made atrocities inevitable, regardless of leadership and training of the troops. Fighting insurgents would place U.S. troops in populated areas, where the combatants were mixed in with civilians. That would give the insurgents a tremendous advantage, unless the U.S. forces were willing to accept a high level of civilian casualties. But killing civilians would only increase support for the insurgency. For those reasons, he strongly advised that U.S. military involvement not go beyond an advisory role.

JOHNS: "I don't think it is good for people to just, every time they see something they don't like, to go out to the public and undermine confidence in the military."

HENRY: "It doesn't seem to me that it would be that difficult to accomplish. Just don't kill people that are NOT shooting at you. How complicated can that concept be?"

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Vietnam Veteran I find this book confirms what I have long thought occurred (and is likely occurring now). Higher ups find a way to sweep dirt under the rug. If they can't sweep it all they find the lowest possible person to scapegoat. The authors visit some who reported the incidents to get their reaction to what occurred to their complaints and confront some of those involved in the investigations or public relations responses. Atrocities take place in all wars is a truism. The appendix has a long list that is probably only a small portion of the number of crimes committed. Part of the problem was a lack of training but a larger part was the need for infantrymen. Men were accepted who should not have been in the service at all. It is worrisome for today because for an all-volunteer military to reach its quota "moral" waivers are issued so people who have committed crimes, sometimes violent crimes can join US forces. This creates dangerous situations not only for populations whose 'hearts and minds' were are trying to sway but to service personnel who have to serve with these individuals. This book should be read by all Americans.

[Khánh Ngô · Rating 1 out of 5]

Cuốn sách thực sự khô khan. Sách chỉ liệt kê những nạn nhân, những vụ thả bom, những lần công kích. Tôi đã kỳ vọng một câu chuyện, một cái nhìn của người Mỹ về chiến tranh Việt Nam hơn là những trang liệt kê tội ác này.

[Sheehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read that packs a wallop...

Best part of the book is the refusal to blame the actual soldiers exclusively, in fact, most of the book is an expose on the systemic malfunction of the generals (promoting body counts as indicators of success) and politicians (trying to mitigate loss of face) in administering the fight.

Some of the information is commonly known, My Lai, the failed body count strategies, the free-fire zones, etc. Of course, the interesting part of the thesis is how the politicians pressed the armed forces into doing actual investigations of all alleged massacres and incidents, when caught with My Lai, most all of which were never prosecuted, but kept of record so Nixon could not be caught "not knowing" and could keep the stories out the papers. The book explores the depth of deception that was perpetrated by the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) at the behest of the government to act like progress was being made on the allegations while really just sweeping it all under the rug. Bless the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the authors for uncovering these truths.

What it seems to boil down to is a failed strategy, one of the battalion commanders suggests that as soon as body counts and free-fire zones became working strategy, all Vietnamese (civilians included) became targets with incentives for their destruction. Furthermore, Seymour Hersh's, "My Lai a month" assertion was much more structurally based than any sort of aberration, although the successful use of impotent "investigations" allowed the public to believe My Lai was the exception and not the rule.

I thought this book was going to be more oral histories of the participants and less journalism, but was pleasantly surprised as it progressed at how the personal comments were interspersed with the FOIA information and interviews.

This is a really well done text on the topic, all high school students should read this book.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Depressing but important investigative work on war crimes committed by US in the Viet Nam war, as well as the apparently cursory efforts to prosecute those crimes and extensive efforts to cover them up. Lots of it involved review of documents obtained by FOIA, but she also did some interviewing of Army higher-ups and went to Viet Nam and interviewed people there about what they had witnessed.

Besides the obvious point that people will do incredible acts in extreme situations, the other point that came through clearly was the pernicious effect of official emphasis on the "body count" as a metric for how we were doing in the war. Enemy is elusive? Can just kill civilians, say their weapons got lost, and secure a high body count.

Clearly most of the time the stakes are not as high as this, but "you get what you count and reward" seems to be a broadly applicable point. If you give baseball players high salaries for hitting home runs and ignore defense, you get a team full of steroid-addled sluggers. If you judge and compensate teachers per standardized test scores, you get teaching to the test, test prep rallies, etc. And if you judge army units by body counts, you get troops decapitating civilians.

My rating of the book is a compromise. Subject matter and investigative digging = 5 stars. Writing = 1 star. Not a graceful stylist in general, but my main quibble in this respect was the excessive focus on her and her process (" so I asked him if.....and he said that.....and then we drove to.....where I met with ......who said....."). High point was when she obtained an important but lengthy document and described in some detail how her partner sent it to her, as well as the tidbit that "I printed it out and read it" before proceeding to say what it revealed. Really? You printed it? Why didn't you just read it on the screen? Do say more........

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

As far as itemizing the atrocities (in superbly put together appendices) that took place during the mostly latter half of the Vietnam War, Nelson does a great job. I give the book three stars mainly because of the fact that she might have spent more time going into detail as to what the war crimes did to veterans and how they impacted morale and operations.

In her defense, Ms. Nelson is an investigative journalist and her ability to track responsible parties down is admirable. However, not too many of those who were in command at the time of the war would be willing to fess up to atrocities save for a few men who did disclose as much as they knew.

I believe this book should definitely be continued as another study of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. There is definitely material in this book for scholars to take and run with. Due to the length of the book itself, (just under 200 pages), it seemed more like a sketchy precis for a more detailed study to be made later.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nelson reports succinctly on military investigations into atrocities/war crimes committed by U.S. troops in Vietnam and then reports on a set of follow up interviews with the accused, the accusers, the investigators, and the higher ups. The picture is not pretty, and some more contemporary proper nouns keep cropping up: Abu Ghraib, Iraq. What saves this book from being a total downer is the honorable folks who spoke out then, and again, there is a sense that we must honor them and their lineal descendants speaking out now.

[Thảo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cuốn sách cung cấp có hệ thống một số lượng tương đối tư liệu mật về tội ác chiến tranh của quân đội Mỹ trong chiến tranh Việt Nam, những tư liệu mà có thể cũng khiến chính người VN khi đọc phải bàng hoàng chứ không chỉ người Mỹ. Deborah Nelson là một phóng viên, vì vậy tác phẩm được viết rất mạch lạc và có hệ thống với nhiều nhận định sắc bén, có tính gợi mở để suy ngẫm. Tóm lại, đây là một tư liệu hết sức đáng quý cho bất kì ai muốn tìm hiểu về chiến tranh Việt Nam.

[Betsy Boo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow...I finally realized we're all Nazis.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dry, but extremely informative. A lot of the incidents were hidden from the public and this book covered a lot of them