Vietnamese Senior Quotes

On September 1, 1969, for example, members of the 196th Infantry Brigade in Quang Tin Province spotted a group of Vietnamese. Officers and sergeants, peering through binoculars, conferred about the situation. After about ten minutes of observation the senior officer, Captain David Janca, ordered his machine gunners to open fire and called in an artillery fire mission. A small patrol was then dispatched to the kill zone. “Upon arrival,” assistant machine gunner Robert Gray said later, “we found dead and wounded Vietnamese children.”28 Patrol member Welkie Louie described the scene: “I observed about four to six Vietnamese children lying in one pile, dead. About five meters from this position were two or three wounded Vietnamese children huddled together.”29 Afterward, artillery forward observer Robert Wolz told army investigators that he saw an official document in which “the dead were listed as VC.”30 Another report even referred to them as “NVA”—that is, North Vietnamese army troops.31 In death, this small group of children had morphed into guerrillas and then into uniformed enemy soldiers as the body count wound its way through the military’s statistics generation machine.

For their part, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese were flabbergasted when they learned of Diệm’s and Nhu’s deaths as a result of an American-inspired coup; they could not believe the Americans would allow South Vietnam to be disrupted in this way. “They were gifts from heaven for us,” said a senior Vietcong official.155 “Both Ho Chi Minh and he (Mao) thought that Ngo Dinh Diem was not so bad,” wrote journalist Edgar Snow, based on an interview with Mao Zedong in January 1965. “After all,” said Mao, “following his assassination, was everything between Heaven and Earth more peaceful?” Even Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who participated in the coup that brought down Diệm, later said that “he actually ran the country pretty well” given the circumstances confronting him.156 Diệm had many faults, but his pride meant that he “didn’t want us in there fighting his war,” noted McNamara.157