Did You Say, "Vietnam?"

Cretinous ignernt subhuman homunculus Louie Gohmert, whose Congressional district should be carpet-bombed (W/ carpets, ha ha!) because it has sent this fool to Congress, mentions Vietnamese atrocities.You want atrocities, you fuck? Read this:

An archivist at the U.S. National Archives asked Turse whether he thought witnessing war crimes could cause PTSD. He steered Turse to yellowing reports amassed by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. The group, set up in the wake of the My Lai massacre, was designed to investigate the hundreds of reports of torture, rape, kidnapping, forced displacement, beatings, arson, mutilation, executions and massacres carried out by U.S. troops. But the object of the group was not to discipline or to halt the abuses. It was, as Turse writes, “to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” War crimes, for army investigators, were “an image management” problem. Those charged with war crimes were rarely punished. The numerous reports of atrocities collected by the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group were kept secret, and the eyewitnesses who reported war crimes were usually ignored, discredited or cowed into silence.

"Trigger warnings" are for the weak, but it gets gory from here. We'd read it earlier & decided it was just too awful to do anything w/ it (Even potential spree-killing madmen have a limit to atrocity descriptions.) but Gohmert changed our mind.

Turse, in one of many accounts, describes a string of atrocities committed in the Duc Pho/Mo Duc border region in spring 1967 by Charlie Company, 2nd Battalion, 35th Infantry under the command of Capt. James Lanning. A wounded detainee, Turse writes, was dumped into a boat and pushed into a rice paddy where he was riddled with bullets and finished off with a grenade. A wounded woman was covered with a straw mat and set on fire. Paul Halverson, a soldier and military combat correspondent who accompanied the unit, when asked about the total number of civilians killed by Lanning’s force, stated in the book: “The entire time I was over there—just by Charlie Company—I’d say it would be in the hundreds.”

Maj. Gordon Livingston, a regimental surgeon with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, in 1971 testified before Congress that he witnessed “a helicopter pilot who swooped down on two Vietnamese women riding bicycles and killed them with the helicopter skids.” The pilot, after being grounded briefly and investigated, was soon exonerated and allowed back in the air.

Soldiers and Marines, as is common in all wars, collected body parts of dead Vietnamese—heads, noses, scalps, breasts, teeth, ears, fingers, genitals—and displayed them or wore them in necklaces. “There was people in all the platoons with ears on cords,” Jimmie Busby, a member of the 75th Rangers during 1970-1971, told an Army criminal investigator. Corpses were dressed up and twisted into comic poses for photographs or gruesomely mutilated. Severed heads of Vietnamese were mounted on pikes or poles in Army camps. The dead were lashed onto Army vehicles—which at times ran over Vietnamese civilians for sport—and driven through villages.

[...]

Reports of Bumgarner’s indiscriminate killing sprees, excessive even by the standards of Vietnam, filtered back to the high command. In March 1968 Pvt. Arthur Williams, a sniper on Bumgarner’s scout team, informed military authorities that on “at least four occasions” he had seen Bumgarner kill unarmed Vietnamese civilians, Turse writes. Bumgarner, Turse reports, often planted Chinese communist grenades on the bodies of his victims—including children—so they could be called in as dead enemy troops. Charles Boss, who was on the sergeant’s wildcat team, is quoted as telling an Army criminal investigator “only a couple of weeks ago I heard Bumgarner had killed a Vietnamese girl and two younger kids (boys), who didn’t have any weapons.” Bumgarner was eventually court-martialed after numerous eyewitness reports of his propensity for murder. He was convicted of unpremeditated murder, reduced in rank and fined. But he never did any prison time. He continued his career in the military, soon regaining his old rank. The military was not about to lose his services. He spent seven years in Vietnam.

Turse also profiles Col. John Donaldson, a West Point graduate and former Olympian who organized “gook” hunts from helicopters. One officer is quoted in the book as saying that Donaldson and his chief intelligence officer “flew around in the colonel’s chopper with a crate of grenades, ‘frags’ they were called, and popped them in the rice fields over the ‘dinks’ who would attempt to run for cover when the chopper swooped down to chase them.” When enough reports of the colonel’s killing made it up the chain of command, his fellow officers, including Colin Powell who had served with him for eight months in Vietnam, made sure the charges were ignored or dismissed. Two of the key witnesses willing to testify against him, apparently under pressure, changed their testimony. The colonel was never reprimanded.

[...]

Lt. Col. Anthony Herbert reported to his superiors “descriptions of torture at the 172nd Military Intelligence Detachment compound, as well as other horrific stories.” Maj. Carl Hensley was assigned to investigate. He soon found that the charges were accurate. But, according to his wife, Dolores, the more Hensley dug and the more he prodded the military to respond to the war crimes, the more despondent and depressed he became at home. “Carl withdrew into a shell,” she is quoted as saying, “stopped eating, did not talk to the children and did not or would not talk to me.” Hensley used a shotgun to commit suicide. The Army’s official response to the Herbert charges was to produce “a fifty-three page catalog of alleged discrepancies in Herbert’s public accounts of his time in the military” to discredit him. “The scores of atrocities that the army uncovered as a result of Herbert’s charges,” Turse writes, “would remain secret for decades.”

It is this reporter's desire to try out many of these torture & murder methods directly on Rep. Gohmert. Over & over & over. And let's let's throw that fucking piece of shit war criminal liar Colin Powell into the tiger cage for few yrs. too. Poke 'em w/ sticks through the bars!!