Short Story: The Bombings, Civilians Killed and Damages in Vietnam

by Edmond Davoodi:

Final Project-97M

3/2/18

The Bombings, Civilians Killed and Damages in Vietnam

My name is Duc Pham. I was living in Vietnam in 1966 during the American War. I was living in north-west of Saigon in the Iron Triangle with my family. I was sixteen at the time, and I realized that the American army and the South Vietnamese government were using air power, artillery and napalm to remove the NLF forces in the free-fire zones. There were no restrictions of the use of fire power, and there were tons of bombs and weapons that I have never seen before. Villages were bombed for four days. There was a new form of tactic used which was toxic chemical defoliants that destroyed most of the lucrative business of vegetable crops. All of the rice fields were gone, and civilians died without food. The defoliants used were under a military operation by the U.S. army general that called it Operation Ranch Hand. My fellow Vietnamese civilians died from high rates of cancer, and there were a lot of birth defects within families.

Tram, one of my family friends, said that his son had problems standing up straight and can take no more than a couple of steps at a time with a walker due to the defoliants. The boy could also never roll over and he never learned to talk. Tram’s brothers died in free-fire zones in a crossfire, and their village of Ben Suc was destroyed. Tram recalls that over 6,000 civilians had to be evacuated, and the village was completely destroyed. The worst part of the war in his opinion was when for seven months between May and November 1967, the U.S. Army’s “Tiger Force” traveled across the central highlands murdering hundreds of unarmed civilians. The army sometimes tortured, mangled, and raped innocent people before firing at them. Tram saw his wife Nan being raped and her cousin Bao being beaten up by several of the U.S. forces. Bao was badly bruised and then shot multiple times in the chest. Since she survived, the forces decided to shoot Bao with an M-16 in her heart and then in her brain. Bao was bleeding and screaming, but the U.S. forces did not care and were ruthless, killing anyone who they feared would pose a threat. Bao eventually died in a very painful way, and we could not take her to see a doctor. The Tiger Force wanted vengeance because members of their army were being killed, and they knew they could take out their anger on the Vietnamese civilians.

In my opinion, one of the most dramatic stories of the war that I heard about in North Vietnam was from a survivor named Huy, who moved to the south from the north, and mentioned the disturbance of the bombings on local civilians in 1966. Huy said “One bombing campaign known as Rolling Thunder caused U.S. bombers to fly three- hundred-thousand stories above the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and dropped eight-hundred and sixty thousand tons of bombs. That averages to about thirty-two tons of bombs per hour within three years. In addition, Rolling Thunder killed about fifty-thousand civilians. The campaign was targeting the lowland northern part of Vietnam. Not only were there civilian casualties, but the industrial cities where the civilians worked and lived were severely damaged. This includes areas such as the rural northern part of Vietnam.”

Huy also recalled that seventy percent of North Vietnam was bombed, and five percent of the districts which civilians lived in were ruined. Numerous amounts of Vietnamese were killed by the rockets and bombs. In addition, buffaloes and oxen were killed, and land was damaged enough, so it could not be planted. The irrigation systems were destroyed, leaving people without water so people died young. Residents did not have enough food to eat due to the elimination of animals, which meant that food consumption declined to up to fifteen percent and civilians living in villages were not fed properly. In one village, more than forty percent of the people were not getting enough food. This resulted in innocent Vietnamese civilians dying young. The other people who survived did not have access to clean water and developed health problems.

A different survivor of the bombs named Lanh told me what happened as he was living in the south. In the south, there were severe bombings, which nearly demolished cities. To escape the bombings and to survive without suffering any casualties, civilians in Hanoi had to trust the DRV and evacuate in June 1966. Everyone was ordered to leave and enter the countryside. This made one-third to one-half of Hanoi and other cities to relocate to rural areas. Schools were created in the countryside for the remaining civilians. The civilians that survived were impoverished. During 1967, when survivors relocated to the rural areas in Vietnam, tensions were also severe and repeating. In the village he moved to, he encountered the dropping of not only bombs, but massive rockets.

After hearing all these stories, me and my family decided to move from north-west of Saigon to Son My village in order to seek better economic opportunities and live a safer life. The village was friendly, and everyone knew each other. One of my good friends that lived in the village told me that I would be able to live a good life there with an abundant amount of food. I was planning to grow rice in the fields and sell them for a good amount of money. I heard that there would be no toxic defoliants which would kill the crops and damage the livestock. I wanted to be away from the free-fire zones which was simply a battlefield of dangerous weapons. I was told that there would be no napalm thrown on the residents, and the village looked pretty nice. Most importantly, the village was not planned to be bombed, and I really did not want to experience tons of explosions which just drives me crazy. I did not want to go to the north because it was far, so my only option was to relocate and stay in the south. As I stayed here for two months, life was going well, and I made new friends. I sold rice and made an average amount of money. I was living a good life, and it was a fresh start.

Then I heard that there was soon going to be massive amounts of murder in my village from a group of local friends. They said they overheard some of the U.S. army troops speaking, and they planned to kill innocent people, but I did not believe them. So I resumed my job of growing rice until I saw a group of men holding M-16’s and coming into my village. Then I decided to go home. The men were part of the U.S. army, and I thought they were not going to hurt anyone until I heard gun shots coming from my neighbor’s home. As I was getting dressed to leave home and go outside, I heard more gun shots. It was loud, and it reminded me of what was going on in north-west of Saigon. I thought that I was dreaming at first, but I was wrong. So, I decided to come outside, and I saw a few men shooting my neighbor’s windows and his door. I was terrified and decided to go back into my house and take cover. I believe the leader’s name of the shootings was a man named William Calley.

I was eighteen years old during when the village I was living in was under attack on March 16, 1968. Calley did not care about the innocent people in Vietnam and ordered about a hundred and nine Vietnamese civilians to be gunned down. He and his men had only one intention, which was to simply destroy anything that got in their way. I believe their group was known as the Charlie Company, and it was not just one men attacking my people. There were a few American troops. The company killed both of my brothers, my three sisters, my parents, and even my grandparents, leaving me all by myself. Although I escaped, I was shot at with an M-16, which hurt badly until my friend who was a nurse helped take the bullet out of my body. I remember that one person killed over twenty-five people who did not pose any threats. I never thought that such a thing would ever happen, and I was just shocked because it was a bloodbath in Vietnam. As I recall after counting the numerous bodies, there were over four hundred people lying down in blood. There was barely anyone one left in my village of Son My. All these innocent people died within four to five hours with the most vicious weapons. The people were lined up, from women, old men, and even children, and were gunned down with an M-16. The victims also included babies being held in their mother’s arms.

It was proven later that Calley had ordered Private Paul Meadlo to shoot small children and even the babies. He thought they were going to attack him. He claims somehow the babies might have had a fully loaded grenade to throw at him and Calley, which just sounds ridiculous. Meadlo also believed that the civilian mothers would throw grenades at him, which sounds unreasonable. Calley and his men believed that they had a license to kill any civilian that they thought was dangerous. One of my main sources told me that an unbelievable five-hundred and four Vietnamese civilians died, and the U.S. troops did not suffer any casualties. Some women were even raped before being murdered. People who were not lined up, such as the elders that were lacking physical strength to rise from their beds and escape, were also killed. My friends who survived the massacre told me that the Charlie Company was headed by a different man named Colonel Frank Barker. People who survived the attack told me that Barker’s troops killed every living thing in Son My including livestock. It was commonly known that the United States weapons had the highest of all technologies to make someone suffer to a maximum level.

One of my good friends Nam told me that his family was not only attacked by an M-16, but the Charlie Company also used artillery, rocket grenades, napalm bombs, and B-52 carpet bombs in free fire zones to bomb his home. Nam claims when the napalm was dropped on his home, the napalm stuck to his skin and caused burning, which was the most terrible pain he could imagine. Nam’s wife and children were killed when the napalm burned their skin felt like a two-thousand-degree Fahrenheit heat burn. Nam said, “The substance was sticky and there was no way for removing the chemical once it attached to your skin.” Nam thought that the shady part of the massacre was that the United States soldiers were trying to cover up the incident. The news about the massacre took about a year and a half to be known in public. Even after the rest of my friends in South Vietnam found out about the event, Lieutenant Calley was the one only person from the massacre to be punished.

After experiencing the massacre in Son My, in the hamlet of My Lai, I decided to take a member of the U.S. army named Private Paul Meadlo to court for prosecution. Proving Paul guilty was hard because the judge claimed the case was unclear at the time. I told the judge, “How can a baby in his mother’s arms attack a person”, but the judge found the case ambiguous because the U.S. army was trying to hide the case, and the bodies were cleared up immediately after the event. Nearly the whole village was wiped out, and when I asked Nam to testify, he said no because was afraid he would be killed afterwards by Barker’s men. There was a lot of evidence that had been demolished, and Nam did not remember the critical events of the massacre. Also, the Nixon Administration refused to bring civilians before army court martials. I realized that after a while, one general was protecting the other generals, and one person was being blamed for the whole massacre.

Due to these factors, Paul Meadlo escaped from being proven guilty. Thus, the secret of My Lai was kept among the Americal Division before everyone learned what truly happened. One reason the My Lai massacre occurred as I read in a newspaper was because a man named Ernest Medina, who was a captain of the U.S. Army, made it clear that the hostile inhabitants of the village were part of the land mines and booby traps in South Vietnam. So, they were to be killed with no mercy. Everyone remaining in the village thought this was the biggest lie ever. None of the civilians ever planned anything against American troops, and innocent civilians died for no specific reason. The massacre was first planned and then taken into action. It took a while and some guts to take down my fellow villagers. One G.I. was talking about the Vietnamese and said that ” They’re are not people. Therefore, it doesn’t matter what you do to them.” Another G.I. remembered that the civilian deaths were so violent that nobody could believe it. I also heard from the same G.I. information about other civilian attacks and casualties, and he said that people are never going to figure out why it happened, and people are not even going to know.

I remember the parts of My Lai and how it was uncovered and who survived. A helicopter pilot named Officer Thompson saw what the ground forces were doing, and with his sympathy, he decided to land the helicopter in the village and save a few civilians. The My Lai massacre secret began to be uncovered by a person named George Bower, a discharged G.I., who wrote a letter to members of Congress. He asked for an investigation for the killing of every man, women, child, and baby in the My Lai village. If this letter was not mailed to Congress, the secret crimes of My Lai would have never been investigated. George was not in My Lai, but knew a couple of men who lived within My Lai. Someone described the events to George with precise detail, and he decided to look for more witnesses, which he found, and then he decided to speak out to Congress with what he was told about what happened.

After investigations went on, the Criminal Investigation Division of the Army decided to schedule interviews with members of the Charlie Company. The division realized that laws of warfare had been transgressed. The truth of the story came out in September 1969 when Calley was arrested, and a reporter named Seymour Hersh began to look into the case for more information, and then started to publish reports. George was full of information, and this is what Hersh was looking for. George told Hersh everything that he knew about My Lai, which then Hersh shared it in his newspaper The Chicago Tribune. Photographs of the dead civilians were also published in the newspaper.

I know that my Vietnamese people suffered from a lot of deaths, but there were other damages that we and the Americans went through. An American army troop told me that over eight-hundred thousand American troops survived with inflictions including psychological hardships, such as bad dreams, anxiety, flashbacks, psychic numbing, violent behavior and feeling guilt from either murdering or seeing their allies being killed. The behavior of these people included alcohol and drug abuse, split marriages, violent outbreaks, and feeling isolated from others. In other words, the civilians and the army troops developed post-traumatic stress disorder. The damages were severe in some cases that doctors could not treat them.

After nearly being killed in the village of Son My and experiencing bombs and other weapons of mass destruction near Saigon, I decided to move to Hanoi which is the capital of Vietnam. The Red River looked spectacular, and I was off to a new start trying to avoid being killed. I know it happened to me twice as I was almost killed, but I don’t think I was going to experience any more trouble. I decided to change my job from planting rice to growing bananas. My job was going well after selling fifty-three bananas a day. I made enough money to pay for my rent and set aside additional money for an emergency. I lived in an apartment with one bedroom and one bathroom. When Christmas time came, there were dozens of instances that blew me away. On December 18, 1972, I saw the U.S. army bringing tons of bombs, and I didn’t know what to do. So, I decided to tell my neighbor, and we both decided to go to our apartments and hide. My neighbor Nay, alerted everyone he knew by yelling that we were in a bomb zone and announced that we might be blown up. So the next day, the U.S. attacked Hanoi.

From December 19th to the 29th in 1972, a bombing campaign known as Linebacker II, or the Christmas bombings, dropped more than thirty-thousand bombs by using laser smart bombs. The U.S. bombers aimed for the Vietnamese military, but other attacks went away from the correct path. The suburbs were all destroyed causing tens of thousands of people to become homeless. Casualties among civilians was numbered at around two-thousand. Nay told me that “I found my father, brother, and sister dead while digging into to the ground. I could not find my wife and she disappeared. As I woke up for the next day, I found my older sister’s head which was scary. I could never find my aunt and uncle, and I never saw them again. Three months later, a neighbor showed me my aunt and uncle’s body near his house. After all these deaths, I was screaming so loud and in shock that my neighbor decided to take me to a psychologist, and I was told I have post-traumatic stress disorder. I lost a huge part of my family and did not know where to begin with my life. I also did not know what to tell my children who missed their mother. My children were safe and found, but did receive damages and scars on their body.”

After experiencing all of these tragedies, I decided to flee from Vietnam to Thailand in 1978 on a boat and survived dangerous storms while others died. I ended up in a refugee camp with a lot of people. I stayed in Thailand for three months until I was admitted to the United States, which made me settle in San Diego, California. I had a hard time obtaining a visa and when I got one I was in luck. This time I knew I was not going to get into trouble. A lot of my friends from Vietnam also came to California, and we decided to run our own businesses there. I decided to open up my own shop, and I sold rugs which was a good business. I made over five-hundred dollars a day in profits, which allowed me to buy my own house. I bought a Toyota to get me to work. I never saw a bomb ever again or anyone holding a gun other than a police officer. I married a woman named An when I turned thirty-three years old. She was also an immigrant. She owned a cleaners store, and we decided to have children. When my son turned five, I told him the story about the Vietnam war, and he was fascinated with all the events that took place, and he wondered how I survived and made it to California. As a family, we lived a happy life, and my kids passed down my story to their kids. When I became a grandpa, I gave my rug business to my eldest son, and he managed my job. My family and I lived in peace for the rest of our lives.

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Photo description and source:

Women and children crouch in a muddy canal as they take cover from intense Viet Cong fire at Bao Trai, about 20 miles west of Saigon on Jan. 1, 1966. Image Source:

https://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/35-years-after-fall-vietnam-war-pictures-36859810