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 Mortal Sins of OmissionPosted on Mar 18, 2011
By Nick Turse Recently Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, used particularly bloodthirsty language to announce success there. “We’ve got our teeth in the enemy’s jugular now, and we’re not going to let go,” he said after a morning staff briefing in January. Petraeus has used this type of imagery before. In his latest guidance for counterinsurgency (known within the military as COIN) efforts in Afghanistan, issued last August, Petraeus wrote that what U.S. troops and their allies needed was to “get our teeth into the insurgents and don’t let go.” It seemed to me almost as if he was channeling retired major-general-turned-author Ira Hunt. (In the early 1970s, Hunt was quoted as favoring “pounding the shit” out of Vietnamese enemies he referred to as “bastards,” “sonofabitches” or “gooks.”) Hyperbolic talk like this is, of course, the stock in trade of many military men. But there’s another side to David Petraeus. A soldier-scholar and Princeton Ph.D., “King David,” as he’s known to fans and detractors alike, literally wrote the book on COIN—having overseen the revision of FM 3-24, the military’s counterinsurgency field manual, in 2005-2006. Petraeus revived the strategy—long discredited and shunned in military circles—that went down in flames with the American defeat in Vietnam. Supposedly a kinder, gentler brand of warfare, counterinsurgency is geared toward winning the “hearts and minds” of the people, and Petraeus knew it well, since his 1987 doctoral dissertation was titled “The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam.”
The 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam: Unparalleled and Unequaled
By Ira A. Hunt
The University Press of Kentucky, 216 pages
The kinder, gentler side of Petraeus is heard from mostly in his COIN guidance to U.S. troops in Afghanistan: “[U]se only the firepower needed to win a fight … if we kill civilians or damage their property in the course of our operations, we will create more enemies than our operations eliminate. … Treat the Afghan people and their property with respect.” That is, of course, the essence of COIN: Use the rifle instead of the bomb, or better yet use the knife, protect the civilian population and their property, facilitate good governance and offer economic opportunity. Win hearts and minds. But although he’s been Mr. Nice Guy on paper, in the field Petraeus has decidedly been the guy looking to go for the throat. Again, he reminded me of Ira Hunt. Since Petraeus took command in Afghanistan, airstrikes—which were curtailed by his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, before he was laid low by a Rolling Stone article—have gone through the roof, tripling in number last fall and then doubling the January 2010 rate in the new year. Kick-down-the-door night raids, which have alienated many and provoked repeated outcries from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, have tripled too. For the first time, big U.S. battle tanks—much like the ones the Soviets used in the 1980s—have been deployed to provide, said one officer, “awe, shock and firepower.” (Yes, you read it right: shock and awe.) U.S. forces are also meting out home destruction as never before in Afghanistan, reportedly blowing up hundreds of houses thought to be booby-trapped and even blasting villages off the map, as Afghan farmers abandon their homes, fields and crops and stream out of the countryside into Kabul’s expanding slums. It all made me wonder whether David Petraeus was taking a page from “The 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam,” that is, whether he was reading from Ira Hunt’s playbook.
Ira “Jim” Hunt’s “The 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam: Unparalleled and Unequaled” chronicles a unit that carried out a particularly heavy-handed version of counterinsurgency in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. The shocking thing is, you wouldn’t know it from reading Hunt’s book. One would expect a history of the 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam to address long-standing allegations that the division wiped out thousands of civilians using heavy firepower. One would assume it would mention the division commander’s oft-noted obsession with the notorious “body count.” One would imagine that the book would attempt to explain how the division reportedly killed almost 11,000 armed enemy fighters, in just one operation, but recovered fewer than 800 weapons. One would suppose that somewhere in its close to 200 pages the author would at least give the name of the infamous operation that so many prior books and articles have called into question. But nowhere does Hunt dare to mention “Speedy Express.” It’s almost as if he wants us to forget it ever existed. The reason might be that Ira Hunt was, in fact, the No. 2 commander of the 9th Division during the operation. Over the course of his new book, Hunt—a West Point grad who also studied at the French engineering school at Grenoble and worked for Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara before serving in Vietnam—offers, in painstaking detail, the official history of the efforts of the “Old Reliables” in Southeast Asia from May 1968 to July 1969, complete with numerous black-and-white photographs and 20 tables filled with statistics. In his introduction, he explains his motives for writing the book as twofold: first to “enlighten those who disparage the division’s combat record in eliminating the enemy and pacifying the Mekong Delta region” and also “to provide examples of the bravery and dedication of all the 9th Division soldiers” who fought in the sweltering far south of Vietnam against an enemy the Americans called the VC (shorthand for Viet Cong or Vietnamese communists). In page after page, Hunt chronicles tactical innovations, lauds American combat triumphs and obsessively reiterates that the 9th Infantry Division’s methods—that is, his methods—were incredibly effective in “stunning and eliminating the enemy” and enabling troops to “scarf up groups of guerillas and VCIs” (Viet Cong Infrastructure—civilians who worked for the Vietnamese revolution). All of this, Hunt reminds us again and again, was done for the purpose of “accelerating pacification.” In many ways, “The 9th Infantry Division in Vietnam” rehashes much of the material included in “Sharpening the Combat Edge,” an official history written as part of an Army program to develop “future operational concepts” that he co-authored in 1974 with the late Julian Ewell, who commanded the 9th Division in 1968-1969. Unlike Hunt’s latest volume, that book at least contains an oblique reference to criticisms made about the unit. Ewell and Hunt defensively noted, “The 9th Infantry Division … [has] been criticized on the grounds that ‘their obsession with body count’ was either basically wrong or else led to undesirable practices.” In Hunt’s latest offering there is only a handful of mentions of “body count”—the main indicator of success in America’s war of attrition in Vietnam—and the lack of references to that core concept, like so much else missing from the book, is conspicuous by its absence. In a military where “if it’s dead and Vietnamese it’s VC” became standard operating procedure, Ewell—who came to be called “the Butcher of the Mekong Delta”—and Hunt were especially known to be fixated on stacking up Vietnamese bodies without, contemporaries observed, much care as to whether they were armed guerrillas or innocent civilians. In his 2002 memoir, “Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts,” the late David Hackworth, who took command of one of the 9th Division’s infantry battalions in January 1969, wrote of the overwhelming pressure to produce high body counts. “[A] lot of innocent Vietnamese civilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have the highest count in the land,” he wrote. He also noted that when Hunt submitted a recommendation for a citation, citing a huge kill ratio—the number of Vietnamese killed to the number of Americans lost—he left out the uncomfortable fact that “the 9th Division had the lowest weapons-captured-to-enemy-killed ratio in Vietnam.”
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By UreKismet, March 22, 2011 at 1:51 am Link to this comment
The ninny that wrote “Had we not invaded Iraq, Hussein would still be slaughtering his Shiite citizens and the Taliban still in power in Afghanistan” deserves to be shocked & awed himself.
Setting aside the fact that even the most over the top exaggerations of Saddam Hussein’s victims fall several orders of magnitude short of the 1 million dead & 4 million refugee Iraqis which amerika inflicted on that country, what goddamned business was it of a bunch of flabby braindead whitefellas on the other side of the world who was running Iraq?
Most Afghans were perfectly happy with the Taliban who had finally bought peace and security to their nation, but amerika needed a scapegoat for 911, and couldn’t attack Saudi Arabia where al Quaeda funding was sourced (don’t wanna get offside with mr Oil) & were told by their zionist bosses (where the 911 perps came from) that any attack on Egypt would cause israel problems so they bulldozed a mandate for an invasion of afghanistan through the UN by using a mixture of extortion (hence the interception of all UN delegates mail and phones) and abusing the goodwill of other nations who were sympathetic after 911.
Report thisIf there is one thing worse than a neo-con warmonger it is a sad sack liberal warmonger. At least the neo-con practices what he/she preaches - the liberal is just an out and out hypocrite. Slug-faced, combed-over dems voted for those invasions just as eagerly as any slobbering, slack-jawed rethug, so don’t be trying to make amerika’s murdering and raping ways a partisan thing, you are all equally culpable.
By msgmi, March 20, 2011 at 10:57 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Like Alexander the Great et al , glory has no bounds.
Report thisBy mitchum22, March 20, 2011 at 7:54 pm Link to this comment
What an appropriate cover photo for this flyspeck of a book: a soldier who looks like he’s about to take it up the ass.
Which is exactly where the US military took it—a force run by bitches who never fight anyone without a 1000-1 firepower advantage—from the NLF and North Vietnamese army.
Report thisBy gerard, March 20, 2011 at 7:43 pm Link to this comment
Are the high school and college drop-outs and numb skulls any better than the
Ivy League nitwits?
The nitwits usually have more money to promote themselves into politics and
other positions of power.
The high school and college drop-outs and numbskulls vote to put the nit=wits in
Report thisoffice and then when they do mean, stupid things, the drop-outs and numbskulls
find a hundred reasons why they are only victims, not perpetrators—why there’s
“nothing they can do” and why it’s “all the fault of the Ivy League nitwits..”
By frecklefever, March 20, 2011 at 3:05 pm Link to this comment
SORRY FOR TAKING UP SO MUCH SPACE…BUT I FORGOT TO THANK NICK FOR A GREAT
Report thisARTICLE…AND ALSO FORGETTING TO INCLUDE OBAMA AS ANOTHER IVY LEAGUER THAT
CONTRIBUTED TO AMERICAS STAGGERINGLY INEPT FOREIGN POLICY RECORD…IVY LEAGUE
ECONOMICS AND FOREIGN POLICIES DESERVE A GRADE OF F…
By Star Thrower, March 20, 2011 at 1:04 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
“A surge is nothing more than a directive to apply a “no holds barred” tactic
which embraces the “kill anything that moves” strategy which has produced so
many burnt out and mentally disturbed U.S. soldiers. Consequently we should not
be surprised at the number of suicides over the recent years.”
From Harper’s Index, April 2011
Number of American soldiers who died in combat last year: 455
Report thisMinimum number who committed suicide: 407
By JSand, March 20, 2011 at 9:21 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
“WAR IS HELL” True, but not for the MIC suppliers & contractors. I don’t think Cheany is worried about war being hell.
Report thisBy Lafayette, March 20, 2011 at 2:57 am Link to this comment
NINTENDO NERDS
Yes, so what is different from any other combat activity that any ground or air forces have fought for centuries? Do you think the Revolutionary War was fought without civilian casualties?
Collateral civilian deaths in war is an historical fact. Such casualties from WW2 are higher than combat casualties. The civilian to combatant fatality rate in World War II lies somewhere between 3:2 and 2:1.
THE POINT
The point is to not make war. Which is an easy notion to hold near-and-dear to one’s heart but difficult to interpret into foreign policy.
Sh*t happens and not necessarily because Uncle Sam provokes it - though he’s gone out of his way more than once to do so. And always, it seems, out of “national interest”. (What in heaven’s name was the “national interest” in invading Grenada?)
More so, it is entirely possible that violence is ingrained in America as a cultural attribute. It is difficult to imagine otherwise how the Army/Marines can recruit addle-headed teenagers to put their asses in the line of fire. Which seems dumber-than-dumb to a more adult individual who would more likely seek “due cause” before doing so.
Do these Nintendo Nerds think it’s like playing some video-game? If so, why do we never ever see the body-bags on such games?
Report thisBy Lafayette, March 20, 2011 at 1:52 am Link to this comment
JUST THE FACTS, MA’AM
The US is not “at war” anywhere on this planet. We are skirmishing in Afghanistan and providing “technical assistance” in Libya.
Launching Tomahawks and drones controlled by twenty-year olds from some bunker in Montana is NOT war. It is more like Ninentdo “Battle Stations”.
So let’s not stretch the word “war” beyond its breaking point. The UN vote did not declare war on Libya. It authorized a No Fly Zone along the Eastern Libyan coast. The first operations were to assure that the Libyan Air Force remains blinded and grounded.
Kadaffi had first announced a Cease Fire and his Air Force broke it immediately by flying over Benghazi. The guy’s a certified nutter.
Any further combat will be undertaken by Libyan ground forces (both mercenaries and rebels), since any international intervention by land combat forces is expressly forbidden by the UN motion voted on Friday.
Down boys ...
POST SCRIPTUM
Let’s not forget that Afghanistan is the only combat theatre in which US ground combat forces are engaged. This combat was not Obama’s but Bush’s legacy to the new Administration.
The corrupt present Afghan administration is lead by an Afghan exile (and his family) hand-picked by the Bush Cronies. Karzai had fled to the US when the Taliban came to power and was selected by Zalmay Khalilzad (a naturalized American of Afghan origin) who was working for the Rand Corpoation - which was close to the Bush Administration.
Had we not invaded Iraq, Hussein would still be slaughtering his Shiite citizens and the Taliban still in power in Afghanistan.
Report thisBy frecklefever, March 19, 2011 at 7:43 pm Link to this comment
PETRAEUS IS AN IVY LEAGUER AS WAS THE LITTLE BUSH AND JOHNSONS ADVISERS…THEIR
Report thisBATTING AVERAGE IS PATHETIC…GETTING A PHD ON THE VIETNAM WAR THEN USING THOSE
TACTICS THAT FAILED MIGHT INDICATE A SLOWNESS..BEING IN AN ARMY STOCKADE IN 1970
WAS UPLIFTING BECAUSE THE AWOLS EACH HAD THEIR OWN UNIQUE WAY OF OPPOSING THE
VIETNAM WAR…THEIR INTUITION WAS MORE INTUNE WITH REALITY..THEN THE TOME READERS
AND THEIR EXAGGERATED POSTURING…THINKING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN
SCHOLARSHIP..CHRIST AND BUDDHA ARE GOOD EXAMPLES OF THAT ASSERTION..
By frecklefever, March 19, 2011 at 7:14 pm Link to this comment
BEING IN AN ARMY STOCKADE IN 1970……WITH AWOLS FROM ALL CLASSES AND RACES WAS
Report thisAN UPLIFTING EXPERIENCE BECAUSE EACH IN THEIR OWN UNIQE WAY OPPOSED THAT GREAT
AMERICAN TRAGEDY THAT WAS THE VIET NAM WAR..PETRAEUS GETTING A PHD ON THE
VIETNAM WAR DOESN’T SEEM TO HAVE LEARNED MUCH FROM IT…USING THE SAME TACTICS
THAT DIDN’T SUCCEED VIETNAM MIGHT INDICATE HE IS SLOW…IVY LEAGUERS WERE JOHNSONS
ADVISERS ON VIETNAM..AND WASN’T LITTLE BUSH A IVY LEAGUE CHEERLEADER..THE AWOLS
HAD MORE OF A GRIP ON THE REAL WORLD..THEN THE TOME READERS AND THEIR
EXAGGERATED PRETENSES…THINKING IS SUPERIOR TO READING…I THINK CHRIST AND BUDDHA
PROVED THAT..
By M L, March 19, 2011 at 4:44 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Our U.S. Military indiscrimately kills innocent men women and children. They bombed Iraq destroying not only their infrastructure but their libraries, museums and artifacts simply destroying the history of the Arab people. Military men, like Petraeus, have no empathy for the people they kill or respect for their history. Paetraeus uses macho words so people will think he is tough, stong and courages but we all know he is simply a man with a “small penis complex” I say put Paetraeus on the “front line” to assess his courage. Military “talk” is cheap and cowardly”
Report thisBy gerard, March 19, 2011 at 1:06 pm Link to this comment
War is Hell. Everybody knows this, instinctively if not “in the flesh,” so to speak.
Report thisWill this book help stop war? If not, why not? What will stop war? Answer:
People (meaning you and me and Joe Sick Pack and Jane Lame Brain by the tens of
thousands.
By Aarky, March 18, 2011 at 9:19 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
The one comment that Petraeous doesn’t use is, “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel”. So he and all the many Generals use the phrase, “We have reached a tipping point”. This is a very fine and properly scathing review of the bloodthirsty actions of one Army division In Viet Nam. There have been some studys done of the Phoenix Program from Viet Nam and I would suggest this is the model that has been adapted to Afghanistan. It was designed to capture or kill the top cadre of the Viet Cong. There are estimates that 50,000 people were killed. The people were seized and a lie detector was used to try to determine guilt or innocence. Any suspects were killed. The nighttime raids on the Afghans are quite similar to the techniques in Viet Nam. As a Federal cop, I took a Lie detector test administered by a private detective in San Diego. As I was leaving his office, I noticed a plaque on the wall, “Best Wishes to (???Can’t remember the name) Deputy Director, Phoenix Program” and a date. I’m damned glad I passed the test.
Report thisBy TDoff, March 18, 2011 at 5:37 pm Link to this comment
Seems to me that an officer in battle has two priorities, Win the conflict, Protect his men. Depending on the officer and the immediate situation, either of these priorities can take precedence over the other. In any situation, either of these priorities should take precedence over any other consideration. War is not a humane enterprise.
If one is given an order, an added priority to Protect the indigenous population, that will be, and should be, the far lesser priority than protecting our own troops, especially in a conflict in which the enemy is part of, and indistinguishable from the indigenous population. So many of the indigenous folk, both enemy and non-enemy, if any, will die. Killing non-enemies is not a good way to win Hearts and Minds. But, again, war is not a humane enterprise.
Which is why we should not engage in other folk’s civil wars or revolutions, or start other folk’s civil wars by ‘Nation Building’.
Nowhere in the bible does it say that ‘god’ made US ‘god’, despite what the CrazyChristianConservative EvangelicalFundamentalist WhackoBornAgainBoobs say.
Report thisBy Mike Strong, March 18, 2011 at 5:01 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Another missing-info book is the above-mentioned “Petreaus” COIN Field Manual. Missing are genuine solutions. When it first came out, and in each update, I looked in particular for even one way in which counter-insurgency efforts in history worked. There should have been detailed and well evidenced and researched lessons/analyses.
I found none. I did find some of the old mis-information about both Algeria and Malaysia with claims that these worked because, followed by not much in the way of “because.” Then, of course a few smart-sounding pithy sound bytes to make Petraeus seem a sharp and forward thinking commentator.
Just remember, even if we are there a 100 years, sooner or later we go “home” to somewhere else. They are home. They live there. They will be there. Unless we massacre all of them (like so many biblical accounts of what the “good guys” did).
And as far as all our efforts, struggles and so-called heroic exploits (at slaughter) the fact remains we lost. Or, as General Giap told Harry Summers after Summers made the statement to Giap that US forces never lost a battle (implying that the military left alone, no politics, no “backstabbing” [shades of Nazis and “Jew backstabbers”], would have won) and Giap said, “that is irrelevant.”
Irrelevant. Indeed. No wonder they won with someone like General Giap. He counted.
We were irrelevant.
Report thisBy Big B, March 18, 2011 at 3:44 pm Link to this comment
I am afraid to say that I will probably read it. The methodology used to fight the war, and its subsequent conclusion have turned us into the nation we are today.
Every time I read another account of Vietnam I am reminded of my mother, sitting at the dinner table in 1968, watching the news on a black and white zenith television (with a coat hanger for an antenna) and muttering about that “son-of-a-bitch Johnson!” Although I was only 6, I have been a peace-nik ever since.
Report thisBy RiverRat2U, March 18, 2011 at 3:35 pm Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
As a son of the South it is easy to empathize with civilians caught up war . I grew up with the Southern perception of Shermans burned earth policy through Georgia. Even after a hundred years of revisionist history he and his troops were still hated. One can expect the same in Viet Nam, Iraq and Afgan. The wounds heal slowly.
Report thisBy Jim Yell, March 18, 2011 at 11:59 am Link to this comment
(Unregistered commenter)
Remember the flap over calling him General Betray-us? I think it is obvious that was very close to who he is. The word used to be a Military Martinet. It works for me.
Report thisBy Steve E, March 18, 2011 at 5:46 am Link to this comment
Terrific work Mr. Turse, I’m sure Hunt and other ambitious blood thirsty military
Report thishonchos will gloss over your great piece and remark, “your either with us or
against us”. This mentality if you can call it that, can be applied to most any
corporate mindset. One that comes to mind at the domestic level is the on-going
rape of our financial system with so many casualties around the world. Petraeus is
a corporate stooge and has applied the so called “surge” tactics made famous in
Iraq. A surge is nothing more than a directive to apply a “no holds barred” tactic
which embraces the “kill anything that moves” strategy which has produced so
many burnt out and mentally disturbed U.S. soldiers. Consequently we should not
be surprised at the number of suicides over the recent years. I applaud your
article for getting the facts straight and comparing the insanity used to spread
“democracy” in Vietnam and spreading “democracy” by U.S. forces in other
countries. The body count goes on and on perpetually.