MEKONG TOLL

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 32941, 13 June 1972, Page 17

MEKONG TOLL

View of U.S. writer (NJ.P-A -Reuter—Copyright) NEW YORK, June 12. The .American magazine, “Newsweek," says that as many as 5000 non-combatant civilians were killed by the United States immense firepower during a 1968 “pacification” campaign in the Mekong Delta, in South Vietnam.

“It was a toll which makes the My Lai massacre look trifling by comparison," the magazine says in a report by Kevin Buckley, who recently returned after spending four years in Vietnam. Mr Buckley casts serious doubts on American claims that the six-months operation, code-named “Speedy Express,” was a great success. Among other things, Mr Buckley points out that while the United States Ninth Division claimed that 10,899 "enemy” were killed, only 748 weapons were captured. “There is overwhelming evidence that virtually all the Viet Cor.g were well armed,” Mr Buckly writes, “and the enormous discrepancy between the body-count and the number of captured weapons is hard to explain—except by the conclusion that many victims were unarmed, innocent civilians”

A senior officer in the division, asked to account for the discrepancy, said that helicopter gunships often caught unarmed “enemy” in open fields. Mr Buckley says that Vietnamese told him these were farners working in their ricefields.

Mr Buckley adds that General Creighton Abrams, the United States commander in Vietnam, has refused to discuss the operation, but has said: ‘The United States command knew that a divisionsize operation in the delta made heavy civilian casualties inevitable.”