From Derry to Vietnam’s killing fields, the waste of war is laid bare

AS the media were reporting here on the finding of the Saville Inquiry into the events in Derry on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, I was in the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, where 5,075 American soldiers and one American nurse were buried. All were victims of the Second World War.

It had long been my ambition to visit the cemetery, as my father is buried there. The man who directed me to the grave was actually with my father when he died. I have previously written about the chance finding on the internet of John Thomas Ingram and learning that he had been decorated for helping my dying father after he was fatally shot in Wallmerath, Germany.

On February 11, 1945 — two days before my mother was informed by telegram that my father had been killed in action in Germany on January 31, 1945 — Private John T Ingram was recommended for the Silver Star for bravery for trying to save my father. “The company was then halted by an enemy counter-attack with four tanks, strong machine gun and small arms fire and sporadic artillery and mortar fire. Much of the machine gun and small arms fire came from the enemy-occupied buildings in the rest of the town,” according to the official report.

“When one of the Company Officers was hit by sniper fire from a building 40 yards away, the enemy tanks began to fire point blank at the completely exposed position on the forward slope of the hill where he lay. As the rest of the company pulled off the slope to secure protection from the fire, Pvt John T Ingram remained with the officer, giving him first aid and assistance, ignoring the continuous direct tank fire and machine gun and small arms which fired at him as he dressed the officer’s wound.”

Their only cover in the open field was the 18 inches of snow that lay on the ground. Tom Ingram — a 19-year-old private with no medical training — found himself with two dead and three dying soldiers. There was no mention of the three wounded privates in the recommendation, just the wounded officer, who was my father.

“Pvt Ingram remained under the heavy small arms fire and direct tank fire and dressed the officer’s wound,” the report continued. “The rest of the company was forced to withdraw, but Pvt Ingram refused to leave until he had given all possible aid he could.”

As Tom Ingram, now a cotton farmer in Alabama, was only a private somebody crossed out the recommendation for the “Silver” Star and wrote in “Bronze” instead. He was duly awarded the Bronze Star. Although the report stated that there were four tanks involved in the attack, Tom told me last week there was only one. If there had been four, he joked he should have got the Congressional Medal of Honour.

Three of those who died with my father are also buried in Luxembourg. There is one Irish recruit listed there — Leland T Prentz, who was killed on February 9, 1945. The cemetery is beautifully maintained, without a daisy or weed in the place. The grass is cut every three days and the surrounds of each of the 5,076 white marble headstones are hand clipped.

As I looked at the 50-acre site on that glorious Wednesday afternoon, my mind went back to 1965 when the future Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke at the university I was attending in Texas. He was supporting American involvement in the Vietnam War.

The United States had to uphold its commitment to the government of South Vietnam, or others would not trust America to defend them, he argued. This would lead to nuclear proliferation and ultimately to disaster. The argument sounded convincing. Then Kissinger took questions from the audience. One person asked if the United States was supporting a government that was refusing to hold free elections. I thought it was a stupid question. Sure, such behaviour would negate the sacrifices of those Americans who had died in the two world wars. Kissinger ignored the question and took other questions. But then somebody else asked that question again. He tried to avoid it a second time, but the next person he called on asked him to answer the previous question first.

At the time, Kissinger was an adviser to the US Ambassador in Saigon. Because of his position, he said, he could not answer that question honestly. That really answered it, and I was staggered.

Facing imminent defeat in 1954 the French abandoned their colonial claims and agreed to withdraw from Indochina. Ho Chi Minh allowed the French to save face by withdrawing his forces north of the 17th parallel, while the French moved south and agreed to withdraw completely within two years. The agreement, signed at Geneva, stipulated that the 17th parallel was a military demarcation line, not a political boundary. Elections were to be held throughout Vietnam in 1956.

The Americans set up a puppet regime in Saigon and it blocked the elections. President Dwight Eisenhower explained in his memoirs this was because Ho Chi Minh, a communist, was likely win at least 80% of the vote.

American involvement in Vietnam was therefore designed to subvert local democracy. The 14 people killed or fatally wounded in Derry on Bloody Sunday were a tiny number in comparison with the 5,076 buried at the cemetery in Luxembourg, which was small compared with the 59,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam War, and they were only a fraction of the two million Vietnamese people killed in that conflict.

In 1969 a friend called on me following his return from Vietnam. We had joined a fraternity together, and I introduced him to younger members. They asked him about rumours of atrocities.

Nobody knew how he would behave until he got there, my friend explained. With his university degree he quickly became a sergeant and he told of a medic who complained to him when some of the men were “slapping around” an old man for information. About a month later they were ordered to “shoot up” a village. This meant killing anyone in it.

My friend told his men they were not supposed to shoot civilians. If they did, they could get into trouble, so he was not going to do it. He just watched.

He saw the same medic gather children and put them into a drainage ditch. The medic then lobbed in a grenade and just stood there and got hit in the face himself. The point of the story was how one person had changed in just one month of war.

My friend came back to university and we shared a place. The day the story broke about the 1968 massacre at My Lai of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians — mostly women and children — he was standing in the middle of the room. “That’s where I was,” he said. “We called it Pinkville.”

As I stood looking over the expanse of the cemetery in Luxembourg I felt no sense of glory, because the idealism that inspired those buried there had been shamelessly betrayed in Vietnam. For me there was just an overpowering sense of the appalling waste of war.