-Caveat Lector-
It is nothing new that Powell is WAYYYYYYYYY over rated. He should
be selling washers at Sears.
On Mon, 7 May 2001 19:22:20 EDT William Shannon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
writes:
> <A
>
HREF="http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=corn20010502";>http:/
/www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=corn20010502</A>
>
>
>
> Colin Powell's Vietnam Fog
>
> by DAVID CORN
>
> Bob Kerrey is lost in the haze of Vietnam. As he has contended with
> the
> public revelation that the Navy SEAL team he led killed a dozen or
> so
> civilians during a nighttime mission in 1969 (accidentally, he and
> five
> colleagues maintain; not-so-accidentally, says one team member), his
> recollections have shifted. "Please understand," he told journalist
> Gregory
> Vistica, who uncovered this story, "that my memory of this event is
> clouded
> by the fog of the evening, age and desire."
>
> His is not an uncommon fog, as attested to by other vets. The hell
> of
> Vietnam--an unpopular war that involved hard-to-discern guerrilla
> combatants,
> brutal depopulation strategies, indiscriminate bombing and much
> "collateral
> damage," as military bureaucrats called civilian kills--offers its
> distinct
> challenges to memory, the individual memories of many who served
> there and
> the collective memory of the nation that sent them and sponsored a
> dirty war
> of free-fire zones and destroy-the-village-to-save-the-village
> tactics. In
> reviewing Colin Powell's military service recently, I found that
> Powell had
> his own trouble in setting the record straight on his
> involvement--tangential
> as it was--in one of the war's more traumatic episodes.
>
> As Powell notes in his 1995 autobiography, My American Journal, in
> 1969 he
> was an Army major, the deputy operations officer of the Americal
> Division,
> stationed at division headquarters in Chu Lai. He says that in March
> of that
> year, an investigator from the inspector general's office of
> Military
> Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) paid a call. In a "Joe Friday
> monotone,"
> the investigator shot questions at Powell about Powell's position at
> the
> division and the division's operational journals, of which Powell
> was the
> custodian. The inspector then asked Powell to produce the journals
> for March
> 1968. Powell started to explain that he had not been with the
> division at
> that time. "Just get the journal," the IG man snapped, "and go
> through that
> month's entries. Let me know if you find an unusual number of enemy
> killed on
> any day."
>
> Powell flipped through the records and came upon an entry from March
> 16,
> 1968. The journal noted that a unit of the division had reported a
> body count
> of 128 enemy dead on the Batangan Peninsula. "In this grinding,
> grim, but
> usually unspectacular warfare," Powell writes, "that was a high
> number." The
> investigator requested that Powell read the number into the tape
> recorder he
> had brought, and that was essentially the end of the interview. "He
> left,"
> Powell recalls, "leaving me as mystified as to his purpose as when
> he
> arrived."
>
> It would not be until two years later (according to the orginal
> version of
> Powell's book) or six months later (according to the paperbck
> version of the
> book) that Powell figured out that the IG official had been probing
> what was
> then a secret, the My Lai massacre. Not until the fall of 1969 did
> the world
> learned that on March 16, 1968, troops from the Americal Division,
> under the
> command of Lieut. William Calley, killed scores of men, women and
> children in
> that hamlet. "Subsequent investigation revealed that Calley and his
> men
> killed 347 people," Powell writes. "The 128 enemy 'kills' I had
> found in the
> journal formed part of the total."
>
> Though he does not say so expressly, Powell leaves the impression
> that the IG
> investigation, using information provided by Powell, uncovered the
> massacre,
> for which Calley was later court-martialed. That is not accurate.
>
> The transcript of the tape-recorded interview between the IG
> man--Lieut. Col.
> William Sheehan--and Powell tells a different story. During that
> session--which actually happened on May 23, 1969--the IG
> investigator did
> request that Powell take out the division's operations journals
> covering the
> first three weeks of March. (The IG inquiry had been triggered by
> letters
> written to the Pentagon, the White House and twenty-four members of
> Congress
> by Ron Ridenhour, a former serviceman who had learned about the mass
> murders.) Sheehan examined the records. Then he asked Powell to say
> for the
> record what activity had transpired in "grid square BS 7178" in this
> period.
> "The most significant of these occurred on 16, March, 1968," Powell
> replied,
> "beginning at 0740 when C Company, 1st of the 20th, then under Task
> Force
> Barker, and the 11th Infantry Brigade, conducted a combat assault
> into a hot
> LZ [landing zone]." He noted that C Company, after arriving in the
> landing
> zone, killed one Vietcong. About fifteen minutes later, the same
> company,
> backed up by helicopter gunships, killed three VC. In the following
> hour, the
> gunships killed three more VC, while C Company "located documents
> and
> equipment" and killed fourteen Vietcong. "There is no indication of
> the
> nature of the action which caused these fourteen VC KIA," Powell
> said. Later
> that morning, C Company, according to the journal, captured a
> shortwave radio
> and detained twenty-three VC suspects for questioning, while two
> other
> companies that were also part of Task Force Barker were active in
> the same
> area without registering any enemy kills.
>
> Powell did not find in the journals any evidence suggesting
> something
> terribly amiss had happened in My Lai. No suspicious numbers of
> enemy killed,
> such as the 128 figure he recounts in his memoirs. The official
> records
> merely reflected what Powell had referred to as "a hot combat
> assault" during
> the IG interview. Seven weeks later, the MACV IG recommended that
> the case be
> closed, but a Pentagon IG investigation was already under way, and
> the Army's
> Criminal Investigation Division was soon pursuing an inquiry. The
> matter
> could not be smothered, and in November of 1969, journalist Seymour
> Hersh
> exposed C Company's massacre of civilians at My Lai.
>
> There had been attempts at cover-up. Prior to Ridenhour's letter,
> the Army
> promoted the story that C Company had killed 128 VC and captured
> three
> weapons in the March 16 action. (Note the 128 figure--which Powell,
> in his
> memoirs, uses in describing the number of enemy kills he supposedly
> found in
> the journals. In his book, he is repeating the cover story, not
> recalling
> what was actually in the journal.) And information pertaining to My
> Lai
> disappeared from the Americal Division's files. A military review
> panel--convened after the Hersh stories to determine why the initial
> investigations did not uncover the truth of My Lai--found that
> senior
> officers of the Americal Division had destroyed evidence to protect
> their
> comrades. Powell keeps that out of his account.
>
> Powell has never been implicated in any of the wrongdoing involving
> My Lai.
> No evidence ties him to the attempted cover-up. But he was part of
> an
> institution (and a division) that tried hard to keep the story of My
> Lai
> hidden--a point unacknowledged in his autobiography. Moreover,
> several months
> before he was interviewed by Sheehan, Powell was ordered to look
> into
> allegations made by another former GI that US troops had "without
> provocation
> or justification" killed civilians. (These charges did not mention
> My Lai
> specifically.) Powell mounted a most cursory examination. He did not
> ask the
> accuser for more specific information. He interviewed a few officers
> and
> reported to his superiors that there was nothing to the allegations
> [see
> "Questions for Powell," The Nation, January 8/15, 2001]. This
> exercise is not
> mentioned in his memoirs.
>
> Powell notes that "My Lai was an appalling example of much that had
> gone
> wrong in Vietnam.... The involvement of so many unprepared officers
> and
> non-coms led to breakdowns in morale, discipline, and professional
> judgment--and to horrors like My Lai--as the troops became numb to
> what
> appeared to be endless and mindless slaughter." Yet he is silent on
> how the
> military brass (including himself) responded to the horrors. Too
> often,
> in-the-field warriors who witnessed or engaged in tragedies or
> atrocities
> involving civilians--men like Bob Kerrey and his fellow SEALs--kept
> their
> secrets. Too often, their superiors--men like Powell--were not
> interested in
> unearthing these awful truths (which usually were the results of
> their orders
> and demands), and certainly they had no desire to share that side of
> the war
> with the public. The willful denial of the war's managers is as much
> a part
> of the dark memory of Vietnam as the lethal misdeeds and mistakes of
> the
> soldiers.
>
>
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