Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (23 page)

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U.S. Army court-martial statistics for rape and related charges

in Vietnam from January
1, 1965,
to January
31, 1973,
are as follows:

tried

convicted 24

RAPE AND AssAULT (Combined Charge) tried
5

convicted 3

ASSAULT WITH INTENT TO COMMIT RAPE

tried
8

convicted
4

tried
18

convicted 10

tried
11

convicted 5

tried 5

convicted
3

CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (Statutory Rape) tried 1

convicted 1

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i
99

Total tried: 86. Total convicted: 50. Conviction rate: 58 percent.

To avoid redundancy and overkill I have spared my readers a stopover in Korea during this long march through the history of rape in war. However, partial figures for Army court-martial convic tions from May 31, 1951, to May 30, 1953, are available. Rape: 23; assault with intent to commit rape: 9. Thus, in a two-year period in Korea there were more convictions in these two categories than there were during eight years of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
It
also should be kept in mind that the United States had a peak troop strength in Korea of 394,000 men while the peak troop strength in Vietnam reached 543,400.
It
is possible to conclude from this limited comparison that the rape rate was higher per soldier in Korea ( unlikely ) or that investigatory and court-martial procedures for rape-related charges were more lax in Vietnam.

Court-martial statistics for other branches of the service in Vietnam were more difficult to obtain. In my many inquiries to the different branches of the military I found the Army Judiciary to be the most open and most cooperative of all, and this despite the Army's recognition that in a sense there was little to gain from cooperation. As a retired colonel in the Judge Advocate General's office told me, "Whatever we give you, some people will say the Army is a bunch of criminals and the rest will say we run kangaroo courts."

Air Force court-martial statistics for rape and related charges in Vietnam, Thailand and the Philippines from 1965 to 1973 were:

lOC
I
AGAINST OUR WILL RAPE

tried
2

convicted
i
rape;
i
lesser offense

ARTICLE
134 ("lewd, lascivious and indecent acts") * tried
12

convicted 8

The Air Force also released to me their world-wide figures for this time span, including offenses traceable to base camps in the conti nental United States:

Because of a conversion to computerized information retrieval,

I
was told, court-martial statistics for the Navy and the Marine

* Article
134
of the Uniform Code of Military Justice is a general catchall charge that includes the following specifications: indecent assault; assault with intent to commit sodomy; assault with intent to commit rape; indecent acts with a child under sixteen; indecent exposure; indecent, obscene lan guage; and indecent, lewd acts, in addition to many nonsexual specifications including nonpayment of debts; tampering with the mail; drunk and disor derly; driving infractions; and straggling. Article
120
of the UCMJ is the rape and carnal knowledge statute. Article
12
5 defines sodomy and Article
12
8 defines assault. On the books, a conviction for rape under Article
120
could bring a death sentence ( the military has executed no one under court-martial law since
1962 )
or any number of years at hard labor. Carnal knowledge carries a maximum sentence of fifteen years. A conviction for forcible sodomy under Article
125
carries a maximum of ten years; if committed on a person under sixteen the maximum is twenty years. The heaviest specification under Article
134
is assault with intent to commit rape, carrying a maximum of twenty years. Indecent assault under Article
134
( which would include all "attempts") carries a maximum of five years. The growing popularity of. Article
134
as the vehicle for trying sex offenses deserves comment; clearly it is preferred because it carries lesser maximum penalties. Under pressure from watchdog liberals inside and outside the Armed Forces, since the days of World War II the military has grown cautious about its court-martial proce dures for all offenses, not just those of a sexual nature. In
1954,
for example,

8.2
percent of all servicemen faced a court-martial proceeding; in
1971
the percentage had dropped to
3.5.

i
.

WAR 101

Corps in Vietnam were available only for the period from 1970 to 1973 and were limited to convictions for rape, carnal knowledge and "lesser offenses." The Navy man explained the paucity of figures from his branch with the astute comment, "Remember, we didn't live there."

VIETNAM COURT-MARTIAL CONVICTIONS,
1
970--1973

l
Navy Marine Corps

'

1
973 Rape: 1; lesser offense: 1 Rape: 2

What meaning can be read into all of these figures? As an indicator of the actual number of rapes committed by the Ameri can military in Vietnam they are practically worthless.
If
in the United States a mere one in five rapes is reported, what percentage might have been reported in Vietnam, where a victim who survived the assault knew no English, had little or no recourse to the law, and was considered an enemy, a gook, a slope, a slant, or a "female Oriental" in the legal language of the courts-martial briefs?

A Clerk of the Court in the U.S. Army Judiciary could provide me with no raw arrest figures to compare with actual courts martial, nor could he give me an official breakdown on the length of sentence imposed. My cursory examination of a handful of convictions led me to believe that a sentence of two to eight years at hard labor might be typical for rape, even in cases in which the victim had been murdered; that sodomy, attempted rape and at tempted sodomy were preferred as charges because they carried lesser penalties; and that sentences were routinely cut in half by a board of review.

New
Yorker writer Daniel Lang detailed one specific incident of GI gang rape in Vietnam. In November, 1966, a squad of five men on reconnaissance patrol approached the tiny hamlet of Cat Tuong, in the Central Highlands. Their five-day mission was to have been a general search for VC in the area, but when they entered the village they searched instead for a young girl to take along with them for five days of "boom boom."
It
was understood by the men that at the end of the patrol they would have to kill her

102
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

and hide her body. Lang used pseudonyms for the five soldiers and the real name of the victim, Phan Thi Mao, a name that the soldiers never learned until their court-martial proceedings.

Mao was
·
picked out by the men because for some reason a gold tooth in her mouth amused them. She was perhaps twenty years old. As the soldiers knew precisely the intent of their action, so, too, did the women of the village, who cowered, wept and clung to one another as Mao's hands were bound efficiently behind her back before she was marched down the road. In one of the most pathetic incidents of the entire affair, Mao's mother ran af ter the soldiers with her daughter's scarf, the only act of protection she could think of. One of the men took it and tied it around their captive's mouth.

Of the five men in the patrol only one, Private First Class Sven Eriksson, did not participate in Mao's rape and murder. As Lang described the ordeal, individual acts of superfluous cruelty practiced on Mao appeared to be a competition for a masculinity pecking order. Eriksson, for refusing to take his turn in Mao's gang rape, was derided by the patrol leader, Sergeant Tony Meserve, as a queer and a chicken. One of the followers, Manuel Diaz, later haltingly told the military prosecutor that fear of ridicule had made him decide to go along with the rest: "Okay, let's say you are on a patrol. These guys right here are going to start laughing you out. Pretty soon you're going to be an outcast from the platoon."

Af ter her murder, Phan Thi Mao was reported as "one VC, killed in action." Eriksson's resolve that the crime would not go unpunished met with a curious wall of resistance from his superiors back in the base camp, and the men in his platoon who heard the story began to view him as a whistle-blowing troublemaker. He became half convinced that he narrowly escaped a fragging. "Whatever I could do depended on finding someone with both the rank and the conscience to help me," he told Daniel Lang. "Other wise I'd stay boxed in by the chain of command."

Summarily transferred to another camp one day after the alleged fragging, Eriksson finally managed to tell his story to a sympathetic Mormon chaplain who alerted the Criminal Investiga tion Division. Mao's decomposing body was found on the hill where Eriksson said it would be and her sister was located and was carefully interrogated. A·separate court-martial was held for each of the four men in the winter of the following year. In each of the

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I
103

trials Eriksson's manhood was brought into question by the de fense. "It was just that he was less than average as far as being one of the guys," a sergeant in his old platoon testified, while Sergeant Tony Meserve was depicted by his superior officer as "one of the best combat soldiers I have known." With one exception the defendants went through their courts-martial convinced they were guilty of no wrongdoing. The man who drew the heaviest penalty, life imprisonment, had his sentence cut on review to eight years.

Rape played a role during the most infamous atrocity of the Vietnam war, the My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968. Thanks to Seymour M. Hersh, who broke the story of the Army investigation of My Lai and the subsequent court-martial of Lieutenant William

L.
Calley, and who later wrote a meticulous account of My Lai's

destruction, we are able to glimpse the casual, continuing war against women contained within a larger assault.

According to Hersh and others, including New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld, members of Charlie Company, Captain Ernest Medina's unit within the America} Division, had begun abusing women near their base camp in Quang Ngai Province a month before the destruction of My Lai. Although these rapes were common knowledge in the unit, there were no official repri mands. One gang rape and murder of a peasant woman, set upon while she labored in a field with her baby at her side, had even been photographed step by step by one of the participants with his Instamatic camera.

Charlie Company was a "grunt" unit. "As always," Hersh wrote, "the men assigned to infantry units were those who upon entering service performed poorly on the various Army qualifica tion and aptitude examinations." Most of the men in C Company had volunteered for the draf t; most were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two; nearly half were black.

The systematic shooting of old men, women and children at My Lai began at breakfast time. By
10:30 A.M.
most of the wanton destruction of unarmed human beings ( accounts vary between 109 and 567 lives; the Army's Criminal Investigation Division settled on 347) had already been accomplished and the soldiers were cooling themselves out-loafing, smoking, methodically setting fire to whatever huts and houses remained standing, and shooting stragglers and wounded survivors with short bursts of fire.
It
was at this time that enlisted men Jay Roberts and Ron Haeberle, a

104 AGAINST OUR. WILL

reporter-photographer team assigned by the Department of De fense to officially record the My Lai "operation," witnessed their first attempted rape of the day. Hersh transcribed their impres sions: "A few men now singled out a slender Vietnamese girl of about fif teen. They tore her from the group and started to pull at her blouse. They attempted to fondle her breasts. The women and children were screaming and crying. One G.I. yelled, 'Let's see what she's made of.' Another said, 'V
.
C. Boom Boom,' meaning she was a Viet Cong whore. . . . An old lady began fighting with fanatical fury, trying to protect the girl. Roberts said, 'She was fighting off two or three guys at once. She was fantastic. Usually they're pretty passive . . . . They hadn't even gotten that chick's blouse off when Haeberle came along.' One of the G.I.s finally smacked the old woman with his ri.fle butt; another booted her in the rear."

Aware of the presence of an Army photographer, a GI abruptly resolved the incident by shooting both women. Haeberle's photograph, a shot taken seconds before the double murder, was published in
Life
magazine twenty-one months later when the story of My Lai was made public. Back in Vietnam, Senator Tran Van Don, a leader of the "loyal opposition" to the Thieu-Ky government, was conducting his own investigation into the My Lai affair. He routinely showed the Life photograph to Do Tan Nhon, a hamlet chief who had survived the massacre. Nhon identified the two women in the picture as his wife and daughter.

Senator Don's investigation turned up further accounts of rape, attempted rape and rape-m urder during the assault on My Lai. A rice farmer named Le Tong saw a woman raped af ter the GI's had killed her children. A peasant named Khoa witnessed the rape and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl. The same attackers then turned on Khoa's wife, but before they could rape her, Khoa's small son, riddled with bullets, fell on his mother's body, covering her with blood. The soldiers lost interest in the woman and moved away.