The Fog of War and Man's Inhumanity to Man

 The flight from Travis Air Force Base near Oakland, California, to Bien Hoa Air Base in South Vietnam was one of the longest I had ever experienced. The journey lasted eighteen flight hours.  Our airplane was a Continental Airlines charter with a full load of U.S. soldiers (about 300).  Along the way, the plane made two scheduled stops: the first in Hawaii, and the second at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Bien Hoa Air Base is located about a half hour north of Saigon. 

 

As we were approaching our landing at Bien Hoa I could see flashes of what appeared to be artillery fire to the right of the airplane.  Soon after landing we were rushed into an Isuzu bus and driven to the St. George Hotel in the Cholon section of Saigon.  This was May of 1968 during the Viet Cong Tet Offensive.  Fighting on Saigon city streets was in progress as we approached Cholon.  The sound of helicopters overhead and the noise of combat was surreal.  As we were led into the hotel, I noticed a fellow soldier take out his cassette recorder and record the sound of battle.  I asked him what he was going to do with it and he said that he would send it to his parents. I did not ask any further questions.  As we settled in the hotel, Australian soldiers were drinking at the bar on the first floor of the hotel.  

After a couple of days in Saigon, and duty at Tan Son Nhat Airport I finally reached my duty station, First Field Force, Headquarters II Corps in Nha Trang, on the central coast of South Vietnam just north of Cam Ran Bay.  Upon arriving at Camp McDermott, a U.S. Army base, I saw a sign that read:  “Even though I walk in the Valley of the shadow of evil, I fear no evil for I am the evilest son of a bitch in the valley “(a bad reference to Psalm 23).  Welcome to a new world, I thought, where there is a different moral compass.  As I discovered later, in some cases there was no compass at all. An example was the My Lai Massacre, where about 500 Vietnamese civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers.  Lieutenant William Calley was Court Martialed and convicted but spent less than three years of “house arrest” and his sentence commuted by President Nixon.  Wars do this to men in battle; some lose all contact with their moral compass.  In a recent book on the invasion of Sicily in 1943 called “Sicily ‘43” by James Holland, it describes at least two occasions when American soldier executed captured Italian prisoners.  None of the soldiers faced any discipline. 

 

In World War II, the Nazis and the Russians and perhaps the Japanese were the most brutal.  First prize would go to the Nazis and the Russians.  The Nazi invasion of Russia was murderous.  The Nazis just killed everyone they encountered and had no hesitation about it.  The Russians were brutal beyond belief.  They would kill their own soldiers who had been captured and managed to return.  Russian commanders would order suicidal frontal assaults, and any Russian soldier who hesitated, was shot by his own men.  Russian prisoners of war were killed or starved to death.  It is estimated that between 350,000 and 1,000,000 German prisoners of war died in captivity. Another estimated 50,000 Italian Russian prisoners of war died in captivity.  Man’s inhumanity to man has no bounds and war makes men abandon any moral compass.

 

For more reading on this and related topic, see the following:

1. Sicily ’43, James Holland

2. Leningrad State of Siege, Michael Jones

3. Kiev 1941, David Stahel

4. Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor