Secret documents support Vietnam massacre claims

FOR almost 40 years, Jamie Henry’s account of how members of his company had gunned down 19 Vietnamese villagers was dismissed by the military establishment and his fight for justice ignored.

But now top secret Pentagon documents have come to light which show that senior officials knew that he — and other soldiers who had spoken out against US army atrocities and suffered a sustained campaign of vilification as a result — were telling the truth.

The archive, which was assembled by a task force, confirmed that US troops had carried out far more massacres than had previously been suspected.

In all, army investigators were able to substantiate 320 incidents. And the file did not include the most notorious of all, the My Lai massacre of 1968 in which 500 villagers were killed.

However, files — the existence of which were revealed by the Los Angeles Times this week — show that far from being an aberration, soldiers from every army division in Vietnam had carried out murders, rapes and tortures.

Army investigators found that between 1967 and 1971 seven massacres had killed at least 137. They also confirmed that 57 civilians had been unlawfully killed and counted hundreds of instances of rape and torture.

Despite the fact that the investigators decided that the evidence was strong enough to charge 203 soldiers, just 23 were ever convicted.

Mr Henry was serving as a medic in B Company of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division at the time of the massacre.

On the morning of February 8, 1968, they were sweeping villages in the Quang Nam province. The 19 villagers had been rounded up and the soldiers were awaiting further instructions when the order came: “kill everything that moves”.

When his tour of duty ended, the combat medic told an army legal officer about the killing and others he had seen. These included soldiers beating a 12-year-old boy to death.

The legal advisor told him to keep quiet and warned “of the million and one charges you can be brought up on for blinking your eye.”

After being honourably discharged in 1969, the Californian joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War and published his account of the massacre in a magazine.

For the next couple of years he continued his campaign, shadowed all the while by intelligence agents. A forum on war crimes attended by more than 100 veterans was bugged by the FBI. Meanwhile, the White House began a major operation to discredit critics of the war like Mr Henry.

“We tried to get as much publicity as we could, and it just never went anywhere,” he told the LA Times. “Nothing ever happened.”

However, other elements of the military did take his claims seriously. Their interviews with other members of his unit corroborated Mr Henry’s claims.

But Lieutenant Colonel William Taylor, the man Mr Henry said issued the order to kill everything that moved, denied all knowledge of the massacre.

Tracked down by the LA Times recently, he said: “I would not have given an order to kill civilians. I’ve been in enough wars to know that it’s not the right thing to do.”

Warrant Officer Jonathan Coulson had completed the army’s report into Mr Henry’s claims by January 1974. He was able to confirm all but one of Mr Henry’s claims and said there was evidence to charge nine soldiers. However, there is no record that anyone was ever charged in connection with Mr Henry’s claims.

He eventually drifted away from anti-war circles and became a logger in northern California. He said he had no idea the army’s own investigation had vindicated him until last year.

“It was like a time warp that put me right back in the middle of that mess,” the 59-year-old said.