Marines’ Actions Upset Americans

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30827, 12 August 1965, Page 13

Marines ’ Actions Upset Americans

(By

FRANK OLIVER. N. Z.P.A.

I Dy rn.n.«n • • - Special Correspondent.J WASHINGTON. August 11. I find many Americans horrified by the reports and by the television films they have seen of recent incidents in which whole Vietnam villages have been sent up in smoke by United States Marines, and women and children killed because thev did not understand orders in English to get out and move to places of safety. Reports of such events get printed but there has been very little editorial comment, perhaps because of a wish not to rock the boat during a time admittedly difficult for the Administration. Rut the average American does not hesitate, in mv experience. to show and exnress his concern about and his detestation of such events.

This, however, does not mean that people do not understand and appreciate the position of Marines sniped at from village after village.

There are too many Army veterans still around who know what that means and what it can do to men in strange surroundings and unfamiliar terrain with no language link between themselves and the civilian population

What worries a lot of thoughtful people is that if this is a conflict for men’s minds—as official statements of policy indicate—then such events mav turn some Vietnamese minds in a very undesirable direction. A “New York Times” correspondent has worried a lot of people, I find, by his quotation from Da Nang of a Vietnamese observer with the Marines. He said: “The 10-year-old children who saw their village burned are the ones who. at 15. will take up rifles for the Viet Gong and fight to the death." This, plus movies of such

events on the television, have struck home hard.

As one newspaper has commented, though in another connexion: “The unique quality of the Vietnamese war lies in its complex of moral and political factors, as well as the military aspect.”

I chanced to hear one man say that if the Americans were in Vietnam originally as advisers it was perhaps advisable now that, as the President said, this is really war for the American forces, to have a few Vietnamese advisers with them. One of the newspapers which have commented on tactics in South Vietnam is the “Washington Post.” It says that Major-General Lewis Walt’s compassion and sorrow over civilian casualties do him and his service credit, but “his well-expressed regrets have not directly refuted the reports that the Marines made a reprisal attack on a civilianoccupied village. “In an ugly civil war of this kind there are bound to be civilian casualties ... We may harden our hearts to this

kind of calamity but opinion in this country will not long countenance indiscriminate reprisal or retaliatory action against civilian - occupied places.” Some Marines, in Vietnam aie upset by this sort of thing, according to their remarks arriving in reports of newspaper correspondents. They obey orders but do not like them. They tell correspondents that huts are destroyed because they have fortifications.

Then says one Marine: “Don’t they know that practically everybody in this country digs a hole near his house because of air strikes and artillery?” The “Washington Post” is also critical of massive 852 raids because “they have an aspect of undiscriminating and indiscriminate destruction that is disquieting. “Is the strategic bomber really a weapon of sufficient target selectivity to recommend it for searching out small bodies of rebels who mingle with a civilian population?”

Such employment of such aircraft, it goes on, would have had a very low priority in any World War II operations and it does not think it has earned any higher priority now. There is everywhere acute appreciation of the difficulties that face American forces unused to guerrilla warfare, but there seems to be a growing feeling that the civilian in the paddy fields of South Vietnam is bearing the brunt of the battle. The “Washington Post” winds up its comment by saying: “Americans in overwhelming numbers seem sadly reconciled to the ugly fact that we must fight this war. “They will not be reconciled to fighting it by methods and tactics that needlessly involve Vietnamese civilian men, women and children in the worst cruelties of military action.”

Turkey Visit— The Soviet Prime Minister, Mr Alexei Kosygin, yesterday accepted an invitation to visit Turkey, Moscow Radio reported.— Moscow, August 11.