Rape cases during Vietnam War

 

Numerous books about Vietnam have been written, but none of them mention the pervasive sexual assault.

In Vietnam, a rape was carried out on August 31, 1969. There may have been many rapes there that day, but only this one involving American GIs was reported to the military justice system. And it wasn't just that that made it unique. War is vulgar. In every sense, I really do mean that. Some veterans will tell you that you can’t know war if you haven’t served in one, if you haven’t seen combat. These are frequently the same men who refuse to inform you of the truths they have learned about war and who never consider taking any responsibility for our society's ignorance. The truth is that you can learn a lot about war without actually participating in one. It's just not the kind of information that's simple to find. More than 30,000 books about the Vietnam War are currently in print. Volumes have been written about the decisions made by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. HD sex movies

There are also extensive biographies of the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a vast number of American soldier memoirs, some of which are incredibly well-written and others which are not, and a large number of disposable paperbacks about snipers, medics, and field Marines. You can get a pretty good idea of what that war was really like, I can tell you from experience, if you read a few dozen of the best of them. Possibly incomplete knowledge, but at least a plausible picture. Alternatively, if you pay close attention to the few real truths tucked away in all the clichéd war stories, you can read hundreds of average to subpar books and still get a sense of how war is fought in America. The absence of any Vietnamese voices in the majority of those books is their main flaw.

In total, more than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam War. That is a sizable number of people and heartache. It merits consideration. However, it resulted in the deaths of several million Vietnamese and severely—and I do mean severely—affected the lives of many millions more. That requires much more attention. Disappeared in Action (From Our Histories) You might assume from American histories that combat was the main aspect of the Vietnam War. Not at all. The Southeast Asian war was characterized primarily by suffering. Injuries and fatalities, loss, privation, hunger, dislocation, house fires, detention, imprisonment, and torture were all experienced by millions of Vietnamese people. Some people went through at least one of these every day for years.

Even the most talented writers among us could not possibly capture that suffering in a single book. But regrettably, that's not the issue. The issue is that hardly anyone has made an attempt. Vietnamese people, particularly Vietnamese civilians, are minor characters in American war histories. Invariably, the focus of those histories is on the Americans who served one-year tours of duty in Vietnam, while the Vietnamese who endured a decade or more of war are, at best, barely mentioned or absent entirely. (And, incidentally, this is also true for the majority of significant war films.

Do you recall the main Vietnamese characters from Apocalypse Now? Platoon? Metal Jacket in full? Hill of Hamburger? No, not me.) This is due to a variety of factors, including racism, ethnocentrism, and simple financial calculations. Few Americans are interested in reading true accounts of foreign civilians who were entangled in American wars. Almost nobody wants to read a chronology of suffering or an encyclopedia of atrocities. Above all, the majority of Americans have never been interested in learning the horrific details of their wars.

Fortunately for them, the majority of veterans have been willing to comply, keeping the most sinister details of that war a secret (even while complaining that no one can really know what they went through). The truth is that, in terms of the American experience, we don't even fully understand the obscenity of that war. This has also been cleaned up and replaced with stories of combat horror or "realistic" accounts of the war in the backwoods that emphasize disgusting realities like soldiers stepping on punji sticks covered in shit, getting crotch rot, or collapsing from dehydration. We've been told that these accounts give a more accurate picture of the horrors of war and the men who bravely endured them.

A true war story never has a message. It doesn't give advice, promote virtue, offer examples of acceptable human conduct, or stop men from acting in ways that they always have. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. You have been the victim of a very old and terrible lie if, after reading a war story, you feel inspired or as though a sliver of morality has been preserved from the greater waste. There is absolutely no decorum. Virtue does not exist. Therefore, a true war story can be identified by its complete and unwavering adherence to obscenity and evil. Thus, we return to the rape that occurred on August 31, 1969. You won't find the account of a Vietnamese woman being raped by Americans in "the literature" besides Daniel Lang's brilliantly concise and horrifying Casualties of War, a New Yorker article-turned-book-turned-movie about the kidnapping, gang-rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese girl.

And yet the sexual assault of civilians by GIs was far from uncommon, even if you can read thousands of books on the Vietnam War and have little inkling that it ever happened. Also infrequently mentioned in the histories are hints about the sexual harassment or assault of American women, including nurses, enlistees, and so-called "Donut Dollies." You can read the majority of those 30,000 books—possibly even all of them—without ever coming across a report of GI-on-GI rape in Vietnam. But on August 31st, at a US base in the far south of Vietnam, exactly that happened when three GIs attacked a fellow American, a fellow soldier. He will be referred to in this essay as Specialist Curtis. The court martial records of one of his attackers, who was convicted and given a prison sentence, made it to the National Archives, where I discovered the document, so we are aware of his story. But really, we know it because Curtis gave "clear, strong, convincing, not halting, not hesitant, not reluctant, straight-forward, direct, willing, sincere, and not evasive" testimony, according to the military judge presiding over the case

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