Showing posts with label The Tet Offensive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Tet Offensive. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. Accidental Legal Muse.

Nguyễn Chí Thanh. By Sử dụng hợp lí - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=118355303
 

Nguyễn Chí Thanh is the man who caused me to go to law school.

Eh?

Now, Nguyễn Chí Thanh was a General in the North Vietnamese Vietnam People's Army and former North Vietnamese politician who died in 1967, when I was just four  years old.  How could this be?

Well, he was the figure who thought of what became the Tet Offensive of 1968.

From a Vietnamese middle class family, Thanh's father died when he was 14 which forced Thanh into farming, as his family entered poverty.  Perhaps it was this experience which lead him in 1937 to join the Vietnamese Communist Party, which in turn lead to being sentenced to French labor camps.  He was both a political and military figure, and following 1960, was principally a military one.  It was his idea to launch what became the Tet Offensive of 1968, a disastrous, in military terms, general uprising that cost the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese over 100,000 casualties, over twice as much as the Southern effort lost, and which ended so badly that Gen. Võ Nguyên, who accented to the plan and help prepare it, thought that he was going to be arrested and potentially suffer the fate of all who get blamed for stuff in Communist societies do.

Thanh didn't get the blame, for the military failure.  Nor did he get the credit for the massive political success, as the offensive shocked the American public and lead to the US abandoning South Vietnam to its fate.  He was killed from wounds sustained by a B-52 raid in 1967.

What's that have to do with law school?

Well, this.

In 1980, I had to write a paper in my community college freshman composition class.  I was still in high school, but I only went half days and took freshman comp at the college in the afternoon.  I wrote a detailed paper on the Tet Offensive of 1968, taking the position that the U.S. had won the battle militarily, but lost the war due to it due to the huge public reaction.

That thesis is widely held now, but at the time, not so much.

Sometime in the next couple of years, I had an American history class of some sort.  I can't recall, but I do recall it was well attended.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, the professor was a lawyer, but one who had largely not practiced, if he ever had, after doing a stint in the U.S. Navy.  I had to write a paper, and what I did, which was legitimate, was to revise and dust off my preexisting one.

Keep in mind, this was in the typewriter days, so that was more difficult than it might sound.  Indeed, writing in general was more laborious in those days.

Anyhow, when it came back, I had received an A, and the professor had marked "You should consider an analytical career".

The part of the story I usually don't tell is that I asked my father, "what's an analytical career"?  That's probably as I don't want to have my father tagged with any other problematic career stories other than the one that's been mentioned before, which is unintentionally dissuading me from becoming a game warden. Anyhow, he mentioned lawyer.  I think that's the only analytical career he mentioned.  It's probably the only one that occurred to him, and frankly, it is hard to think of analytical careers.

And hence the seed was planted.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

October 30, 1968: the Uljin-Samcheok Landings

On this day in 1968 the North Koreans landed a commando force on South Korean shores in an attempt to establish guerrilla bases in South Korea.  The attack was part of a delusional series of increasingly aggressive moves that grossly underestimated the lack of support for communists in South Korea.

The landings promoted a massive reaction in the South with 70,000 troops being deployed to counter the 124 commandos who landed and attempted to infiltrate South Korean villages.  110 of the force were killed.  Under 70 South Koreans, of which 23 were civilians, died in the event.  Three Americans lost their lives.

Coming in the hottest year of the war in Vietnam, and dating back to an attempted raid in January that coincided with the Tet Offensive, this event served to remind that the Korean War had ended in an armistice, not a true peace, and the North Korean effort continued; even violently.

Friday, August 17, 2018

Phase Three of the Tet Offensive Commences. August 17, 1968


Cẩm Lệ Bridge reopened on August 24, 1968 after having been held by the Viet Cong.

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched the third, and final, phase of the Tet Offensive, eight months after the offensive had first commenced, by launching strikes on 27 South Vietnamese cities and towns, 47 airfields and 100 outposts.  This concluding phase would last a month and a half.

The operation was similar to the earlier, better known ones, and involved mass assaults on numerous targets as well as a large number of raids.  Th e fact that this could be done after the massive losses the NVA and the VC had sustained to date was impressive but there is good evidence that by this stage in this operation the Communist forces, which had been surprised by the success of the earlier phases, simply did not know what to do.  The results were similar in that the positions were all retaken by late September and the Communist forces sustained significant losses in the effort.

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Some major 1968 events we already missed.


 USS Pueblo.

This blog won't become the This Day In 1968 Blog, like it threatened to become for 1915, 16, 17, and 18.

But it is 50 years ago, and it was quite a year, as already noted.  We may, therefore, take note of some things that occurred during it.

Here's what we already missed:

January 4:  Mattel introduced Hot Wheels.

I, and every boy I knew, loved those little cars.

Shoot, I still do.

January 5:  Alexander Dubcek chosen as the leader of the Czech Communist party, ushering in the Prague Spring.

This seemed to usher in some hope that Communism in Eastern Europe would evolve into Democratic Socialism, something, it would would soon show, that the USSR was not prepared to accept.

January 21.  The Battle of Khe Sanh, a diversion of for the Tet Offensive, commences.

The battle was one of the few real sieges of the American war in Vietnam.  The Marine Corps defended the base valiantly, supplied from the air by the United States Air Force.  In April the siege ended when the U.S. Army reestablished ground connection with the base.  While an American victory of a sort, the fact that the NVA was capable of laying an American force to siege, would be a factor in the change in the public's mind on the war.   And, we started to look like the French, in a way, with there being shades of Dien Bien Phu.

January 22:  Rowan & Martin's Laugh In debuts. 

Funny, and irreverent, and featuring a mild form of the exist humor that characterized a lot of American humor at the time, it was hugely popular.

January 23. The USS Pueblo taken.

As if there wasn't enough grim news, the seizure of an American vessel, and the poor performance of the Navy's officer corps as it happened, made the Americans look anemic and caused concern that the Korean War was about to revive.

The ship is still held by North Korea.

January 30.  The Tet Offensive launched.

We'd win the battle, but the public's mind was lost by the fact that the NVA and VC could launch such a major offensive after years of war.  A desperate gamble on their part, it proved to be a gamble that would pay off.

January 31:  The US embassy in Saigon attacked by the Viet Cong.

Part of the Tet Offensive, of course.


All that and 1968 was just a month old.

Monday, October 9, 2017

Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?. The Face of the Executioner.

Earlier this past week I ran this item:
Lex Anteinternet: Is it murder?: The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.
And then the whole week turned to crud and became exceedingly weird, so I was not able to followup as I had intended.  I'm doing so now.

The item linked in above, as people will recall,  dealt with the topic mentioned above.  I noted in that post that:
Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:

The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?
He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:
The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.
No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.
I didn't say a lot more about Loan. Right now, unless you've looked into it, you know about as much about Loan as you do about Lem.

Well, let's correct that.

Loan was about 37 years old at the time the photograph was taken, and the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. He'd live another thirty years after this photo was taken.  He was an ardent Vietnamese nationalist and was noted to not accord Americans any special treatment in the ares he was in charge of.  He openly disagreed with some American backed efforts  including the CIA backed Phoenix Program that sponsored assassinations.  He was a sponsor of hospital construction.  A few weeks after this photograph was taken he was badly wounded in a battle and his life was saved by an Australian journalist.  He lost his leg as a result of his wounds.

He moved to the United States in 1975, after the South fell, and opened a pizza restaurant in a mall.  His identify was later made known and he was harassed to the point where he had to close it. He died of a heart attack in 1991 at age 67.  His wife died a few years later of cancer, also at age 67.

Bad guy, or a guy acting badly in one bad moment?  Or none of the above?

What about these guys:


These are American military policemen and the men on the poles are German commandos who are about to be executed as they infiltrated American lines wearing American uniforms.  Specially chosen for their ability to speak English, they were quite a concern to the U.S. Army during the Battle of the Bulge, but they were largely (or maybe completely) caught and executed.

Now, that execution is completely legal under the law of war, or at least it was at the time.  I wager now that it would be regarded as murderous, but it wasn't at the time.  And because it wasn't at the time, and because of course we won the war, this is never questioned.

How about this.

At one point, during the World War One, John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, authorized officers to shoot men who were fleeing the battlefield.  You don't hear much about this, and I strongly doubt that the license was used while it existed, but it did briefly exist.

That sort of conduct would clearly be illegal, then and now, but there was a time when the use of deadly force in that situation was regarded as legitimate, if not legal.  Pershing apparently believed he had sufficient latitude so as to be able to order it. It was, we might note, fairly common in some armies at that time, if not the US Army.

Changing times?  Different circumstances? Selective blindness?

Monday, October 2, 2017

Is it murder?

The episode of Burn's and Novik's documentary on the Vietnam War prominently featured the prize winning photo and film footage of Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, head of the South Vietnamese National Police shooting Nguyễn Văn Lém in the head, in the streets of Saigon, with a revolver, during the 1968 Tet Offensive.  The podcast that came about on the topic of the documentary (it wasn't part of the documentary, it's oddly a podcast about each episode of the documentary, very prominently featured the same thing.

In the podcast, the shooting is repeatedly referred to as a "murder".

Was it.

First some background.

As noted Nguyễn Ngọc Loan was the head of the South Vietnamese National Police.  He was not, as the speakers in the podcast incorrectly stated (and I can't recall what the documentary stated) an army officer.  He had been, but at the time of the shooting he was the head of the police.

Nguyễn Văn Lém was what we'd normally refer to now, and was occasionally referred to then, a terrorist.  He was in handcuffs and under arrest as he'd been detained after his actions in the offensive.  Head of a small unit, Lém had eariler captured ARVN Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Tuan and his family and attempted to force the Colonel to show them how to drive tanks.   Lieutenant Colonel Tuan refused.  Lém killed then killed Col. Tuan, his wife, six children and his eighty year-old mother by cutting their throats.  There was one survivor, a seriously injured ten year old boy.

So, quite frankly, Lém was a real bastard.  A bastard, we'd note, of the Communist true believer type from all over the globe for whom such actions were not uncommon.  And things like this were not uncommon during Tet.

So, getting back to Loan, was his shooting of Lém a murder, or something else?

That may be trickier to determine that a person might suppose.

Let's start with this.  What's murder?

Every human community on earth recognizes that there's such a thing as murder and that its one of the most horrible of crimes.  But nearly every human community also recognizes that not every instance of one human killing another is murder.  Rather, generally, most societies of all types hold that killing another human being without an extreme justification is murder.  Killings in self defense are not murder.  Killing in defense of others, which extends out, commonly, to how we view actions by the police and the ultimately the military, are not murder.  Most people agree on that much.

Beyond that, there's other instances of humans killing other humans that are not generally regarded as murder, but they get trickier.

Actually, it's not even beyond that. We mentioned policemen and soldiers, but let's break that down.

That policemen are authorized to use deadly force in their work is not doubted by anyone, but where that line is drawn is not agreed upon and never has been.  In some societies (and this is something directly relevant to what we are discussing here) police use of deadly force has been regarded as very wide indeed, although not usually to the level of summary execution. . . always.

Under the Common Law, at one time, the police in Common Law jurisdictions were regarded as authorized to use deadly force to apprehend a suspected felon up until he was apprehended.  That's where the old line that we used to shout when we played police as kids, "Stop in the name of the law" came from.  If you didn't stop, back in the day, a policeman could shoot you.  There were no investigations or anything much that happened.  That's the way it was. Fleeing from the law is still regarded as evidence of guilt (a questionable proposition).  Not all that long ago that presumption went pretty far in what it authorized.

Indeed in some regions of our own country the use of deadly force against suspected criminals was regarded as so proper that there was a common assumption that the police need not really bring a suspect in alive. In the American West it was truly the case that sheriffs and marshals shooting suspects in the sticks was pretty accepted.  This generally applied to average citizens as well who were generally regarded as authorized to act on what everyone knew to be against the law.  Indeed, a sheriff in North Dakota openly questioned Theodore Roosevelt as to why he simply had not shot some suspects he chased down over a long distance who had stolen a boat.  It seemed odd to the sheriff, and it would have seemed odd to most residents of the west at the time.  Hanging thieves and murderers, even by civilians, was seen as perfectly legitimate and an extension of the proper enforcement of the law.  The scene from Lonesome Dove in which cowhands hang murderers is pretty much spot on.  People didn't worry that much about taking people to the law and they felt authorized to simply "carry it out".  A much different concept of the law, to be sure.

Carrying on, even now in some regions of the world the police can go very far in using deadly force and not be regarded as acting outside of the law.  A friend of mine who was in the Navy in the 1970s recounted being on leave in a Caribbean nation when a fellow sailor had his wallet lifted.  They ran to a nearby traffic policeman and pointed otu a fleeing man they knew to have taken it.  The officer unholstered his pistol, shot the fleeing man, and gave them the wallet back.

We'd regard this as a shocking violation of the law and murder.  There, he was simply acting as a policeman.  The old Common Law in full force.

Indeed, beyond the Common Law, there's the "old law" we've spoken of before.  Restraint on the use of deadly force in revenge or self protection or out of a sense of justice is a societal restraint.  While all people everywhere recognize murder, most cultures at one time sanctioned a lot of violence and most people still sympathize with a type of it that's well beyond what the law allows.  There are a lot of movies on this topic in the Western World where restraints on official killings are the highest.  In spite of that, the man or woman acting in revenge who takes life outside of the confines of the law remain popular.

More on all of this in a moment.  Let's talk about soldiers in war first.

There's sort of a general concept out there that any killing in war is legitimate, but it isn't.  Indeed, since World War Two it is in fact the case that people all over the world have tolerated less and less deadly violence in war.  Wartime never authorized wholesale slaughter, although there's been plenty of it.  As early as the aftermath of World War One there were war crime trials and during the war itself the the Germans were rightly condemned for their murderous actions against Belgian and French civilians.  Some have noted how this played into Allied propaganda, but the fact of the matter is that the Germans during the Great War already foreshadowed what they'd do in the Second World War and were condemned for it.  Soldiers are not to kill civilians. Nor are they to kill Prisoners of War.

Not that don't both happen and the latter, in fact, has often been tolerated.  Indeed in various ages it was highly tolerated.  An order to give "no quarter", i.e., don't bother with taking prisoners, was at one time regarded as a legitimate order for various reasons, often because the battle had become too much of a mess to sort out friend from foe quickly.  At least since some point in the 19th Century, however, such orders have not been regarded as legitimate, and indeed have been regarded as illegal.  That doesn't mean that they haven't been given or suggested.

For Americans, a lot of struggle over such suggestions came about during the later stages of the Indians Wars, by which time most Americans did not regard them as legitimate.  By that point they'd frankly stopped, although tragically the battle that such things are most associated with, mistakenly, occurred in that period, Wounded Knee.  Wounded Knee was more of a general mess than people suppose and less of a real massacre.  Real massacres did occur however, particularly prior to the 1870s and often not by Federal troops but mustered militia. Bear River in Idaho and Sand Creek in Colorado are good example of real unformed massacres by men marching under the Stars and Stripes.  The latter is a particularly heinous example.

By the Philippine Insurrection Americans were no longer willing to tolerate it and the one example some agitated people mention today, inaccurately attributing it to Pershing who had nothing to do with it, is an example of one commander authorizing very broad deadly force. That resulted in an investigation which was aimed towards a prosecution but that did not occur as the sufficient evidence could not be gathered. That did stop such actions in the prosecution of that war, however.

The shooting of prisoners again arose, although not in the public eye, as a feature of World War Two even with the American military. It's still a topic that isn't addressed much, but generally what occurred is that there were instances in which certain units simply stopped taking prisoners or mostly stopped.  In Europe this tended to to occur, on a very limited basis, where those units had suffered from the same conduct by the Germans. As a reprisal, they stopped.  In the Pacific, however, it was very widespread.  Taking Japanese prisoners was dangerous anyhow and the war in the Pacific degenerated to some extent to one with heavy racist overtones.  Not many Japanese soldiers attempted to surrender but a lot of Americans weren't very interested in taking Japanese prisoners anyhow.

In Vietnam something like that occurred, but on a much more limited scale.  As this became known it became widely circulated in the American press and after the My Lai massacre it became very widely know.  "Search and Destroy" missions and the like tainted the American military for years in the minds of the American public even though most US troops never served in units that either conducted them or committed any atrocities.  None the less, some atrocities did occur.

Which gets back to what is considered legitimate in war. Atrocities never are, but conduct towards prisoners and even combatants has varied widely. At one time, an order of "no quarter" was regarded as legitimate.  It certainly isn't now.  The French were regarded as barbarous at Amiens for raiding the English rear and killing the boys in the train, a truly hideous act.  The Welsh in the same battle killed a lot of French downed chivalry, which was regarded as bad monetary practice.  Standards haven't been always exactly the same.

So what does that all have to do with Nguyễn Ngọc Loan and Nguyễn Văn Lém?

Well, maybe more than we think.

Both Vietnamese sides took prisoners during the Vietnam War but the north uniformly treated them horribly.  NVA treatment of prisoners was based on the Communist concept that anyone fighting a Communist nation is guilty of a crime. The Soviets treated German prisoners of war the same way during World War Two (the Nazi treatment of Soviet prisoners was more purely genocidal).  The NVA treatment of prisoners was itself criminal. And when their fortunes appeared good they were not above mass execution of civilians.  The ARVN may not have been sweethearts towards prisoners they took, but htey were much better and there was always an official policy of trying to convert prisoners to the Southern cause.

Of course, not all prisoners were uniformed by any means, which creates the classic franc tireur problem.  For years it was regarded as perfectly legitimate to execute, on the spot, men bearing arms but not wearing uniforms.  Nations complained about it, but it was regarded as legitimate.  And execution of men captured wearing your uniforms against you also routinely resorted in execution. The United States in fact did this during World War Two when it captured Germans wearing American uniforms.  Military Police shot them.  No trial, just execution.  Nobody has ever suggested at any time that the US was acting improperly in doing that.

So, where does that leave us.

Well, I don't know .

I have to presume that the Republic of Vietnam had some sort of judicial code that prevented the execution of suspects.

I know that the Republic of Vietnam, with American assistance, was carrying out a program of assassination of suspected Communist agents in the countryside, which seems to be much the same thing.

What the actual standard in the country was is hard to know, particularly given the level of corruption that was common in South Vietnam.

So, was the killing of Nguyễn Văn Lém an extra judicial police murder or simply a rare filmed example of common South Vietnamese justice in action?  Or was it a battlefield execution of a franc tireur, if that practice was still regarded as legitimate by the Republic of Vietnam.

Did South Vietnam have an official death penalty for murder?  Most nations have had one at some time. Indeed most nations have had one that applied more broadly than murder, to be sure.  That has generally not been regarded as illegitimate for true crimes.  But it's also generally been regarded as requiring a real fair trial as well.

No trial here.

So was this, then murder?

That's hard to know.  It was probably technically at least a crime and that crime was murder (although the author of the Wikipedia article on Loan argues that it was not technically illegal).  And it was horrible.  But Lem had done something horrible. But that doesn't sanction a horrible extra judicial murder.  But maybe that was official justice in South Vietnam.

Indeed, in the rough justice sense, the photographer who took the famous still photograph came to deeply regret it.  He later stated about the photograph:
The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, "What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American soldiers?
He, Eddie Adams, later went even further, and apologized to Loan for the photograph.  Upon Loan's death at age 67, Adams stated:
The guy was a hero. America should be crying. I just hate to see him go this way, without people knowing anything about him.
No answers.  Just a lot of awful questions.

None of which even begin to approach the question of whether such actions are moral.  I would say clearly not, but my view may be in the minority on a lot of the questions I've raised.