Vietnam War crimes 'a wound that has never healed'

Growing up in the 1960s, Deborah Nelson could see the nation's wide range of attitudes about the Vietnam War from her house in Grayslake. Her father, a prominent Republican lawyer, was a hawk. She knew conscientious objectors and protesters. During her first two years of college, some of her fellow students at the College of Lake County were Vietnam veterans opposed to the war they had just fought.

"I've been struck my whole life about how it really divided my generation," says Nelson, 55, who was a Daily Herald reporter before she left for bigger newspapers and a career as a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter. "It's remained a really emotional issue throughout my life."

In her new book, "The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes," Nelson takes the lid off an archive of Army documents and secrets that have been kept for a generation - hundreds of reports of rapes, murdered children, executions, torture, the slaughter of civilians to raise "body counts," decapitations and severed ear "souvenirs."

The archive contained thousands of pages of sworn statements from soldiers who committed or witnessed the crimes. The Army's own investigations substantiated 300 crimes, while hundreds of others were not fully investigated or were mysteriously dropped, Nelson says.

She tells the story of a 19-year-old medic named Jamie Henry who was threatened when he complained in vain about soldiers who stabbed a pig to death just for fun. He saw his fellow soldiers later shoot a water buffalo for sport. Then he says a shirtless, 12-year-old Vietnamese boy was taken behind a rock and executed.

"There were no consequences for that," Nelson says. "They weren't taken aside and told to stop."

And on Feb. 8, 1968, the day after his company lost five men to snipers, the soldiers conducted a search-and-destroy mission in a hamlet that ended with 19 unarmed civilians - women, children, babies and one old man - herded into a clearing and shot to death.

In traveling to Vietnam to find a memorial to that massacre, "it was a shocking thing going from town to town looking for this one (site), and finding so many others," Nelson says.

When war crimes were mentioned during those turbulent Vietnam years (such as John Kerry's 1971 testimony on Capitol Hill), "the people on the left thought you were a monster, and the people on the right thought you were a liar," Nelson says. "They now can talk about what happened with the full force of the Army investigation behind them."

The documents, which Nelson originally combed with military historian Nicholas Turse for a series of newspaper stories, were horrifying to Nelson. Now a visiting professor at the University of Maryland College of Journalism, Nelson and her journalist husband, Tom Brune, have daughters, Molly, 18, and Anna, 15, who are teenagers just like so many of the victims and the people who committed those war crimes.

"What really saved me was being able to meet with so many people who did the right thing," Nelson says, adding that the vast majority of our soldiers who fought that war were decent, law-abiding patriots.

"Most Vietnam veterans chose not to harm citizens. They resent that notion that 'War is hell, and this sort of thing happens,'" Nelson says. "So many Vietnam veterans who went through that and didn't succumb to those things are less forgiving."

With her new book, she is hearing from Vietnam veterans grateful for the chance to tell their stories.

"This isn't opening old wounds; this is a wound that has never healed," Nelson says. "As a journalist, I really believe you have to seize the truth when it reveals itself - whether it's three weeks or three decades later."

Ret. Brig. Gen. John Johns, who served on a committee that monitored the war crimes during the Vietnam War, says in Nelson's book that U.S. leaders were wrong to put combat soldiers in civilian populations, where war crimes will occur and "turn the people against us."

"We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past," Johns told Nelson. "If we rationalize it as isolated acts, as we did in Vietnam and as we're doing with Abu Ghraib and similar atrocities, we'll never correct the problem."

Some of the errors of Vietnam have been repeated in our current wars.

"Body counts reappeared in Iraq. Torture did as well," Nelson says. "The tragedy of keeping these secrets for so long is that there were no lessons learned."

Nelson will discuss her book, "The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes," at 5:30 p.m. today at Roosevelt University's Gage Gallery, 18 S. Michigan Ave., Chicago; and from 8-9:30 p.m. Saturday at The Book Cellar, 4736 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago.