MarkPavlick and CarolineLuft, editors, The United States, Southeast Asia, and Historical Memory, Second Edition. Chicago

“Have you heard of My Lai?” When I ask this question to students, only a sprinkling of hands go up. It is surprising, since decades ago, the photos of dead civilians, lying in a ditch, were plastered all over the news media. Of all the horrors inflicted on the Vietnamese people from that time, this is the one “war crime” that elicited significant public attention and outrage. There was reason to expect that news of this 1968 massacre would be handed down. Throughout the years of American military involvement in Southeast Asia, violations of international law abounded. Yet, for a host of reasons, mainstream media was reluctant to cover these occurrences. Even My Lai might have gone unreported, absent the commitment of “whistle-blower” Ron Ridenhour, the investigative zealotry of young Seymour Hersh, and the surprise appearance of the incriminating pictures, taken by Army photographer Ron Haeberle. For the most part, the stream of news about American war crimes was confined to left publications, the underground press, and some specialized books. Once the “American war” in Southeast Asia was over, these under-recognized transgressions sank beneath the surface. The US leaders neither had the desire to resurrect them nor was there a mechanism for calling anyone to account. Those individuals who chose to raise the subject were even more marginal than before. As Fred Branfman, witness to the trauma of the bombed-out Laotians, later reflected, “America has never engaged in the kind of soul-searching that might have cleansed the country's conscience, allowed for national healing and led to national policy-making that did not repeat the mistakes of the Indochina wars” (9). Given the crashing silence, the volume of essays and interviews, The United States, Southeast Asia, and Historical Memory, edited by Mark Pavlick and Caroline Luft, performs a valuable service for educating, especially, younger readers, about the array of crimes committed by the United States in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam itself. The book contains major articles and transcribed interviews on a range of neglected topics, including Agent Orange in Vietnam, cluster bombs in Laos, and unrelenting air strikes in Cambodia. It is a reminder that all three nations in Southeast Asia were swept into the American project, with harsh consequences that persist into the present. Pavlick and Luft have reproduced some previously published writing, while including other entries especially written for this volume. A central theme running across several of these essays is that the many acts of violence against civilians were not accidental byproducts of military action, but a direct consequence of deliberate US strategy. “The American way of war crimes was necessary to US military strategy,” argues historian Gareth Porter in his analysis here of the connection between the My Lai massacre and the US war as a whole. In the large enemy base areas of the Mekong Delta and the northern provinces, south of the demilitarized zone, “the US military command knew that the population strongly supported the revolutionary movement...and therefore that defeating it would be impossible without attacking the civilian society itself.” The goal was to make it impossible for civilians to live there. To cover this cynical conclusion, “war planners simply redefined the civilian population out of existence by categorizing and treating them as combatants, and thus as legitimate targets of military operations” (87). As elaborated by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in “Bloodbaths in Indochina: Constructive, Nefarious and Mythical,” it was the broad US approach—the policy of search-and-destroy, the napalming, the Phoenix program, the high-level bombing in densely populated areas—that was responsible for the needless slaughter of innocent people and the devastation of South Vietnamese land. The content of this book is unavoidably grim, and it can be tempting to turn away. Yet the individual essays, clear and carefully researched, are especially useful for classroom purposes. Most compelling, perhaps, is an extended interview by Mark Pavlick of Fred Branfman. In this personal account, Branfman relates his experience as a resident of a small Laotian village, working under the aegis of the International Voluntary Services. Living in a peaceful area of the country, Branfman developed a network of close friendships and an appreciation of the lifestyle and culture of the people. Having completed his term of service, Branfman was recruited by a New York Times reporter to serve as a translator for Laotian refugees in a camp north of Vientiane. To his horror, he learned of the secret air war conducted by Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the Plain of Jars. “They murdered tens of thousands of subsistence-level Lao civilians who did not even know where America was and certainly never committed any offense against it. The populations bombed by the United States consisted almost entirely of innocent peasants, mainly old people and children who could not survive by hiding in the forest, as others did” (221). Through the anguished narrative of Fred Branfman, we can see, with a kind of renewed innocence, the tragic consequence of US policy. Of course, there has been no trial or punishment for the crimes of that era. And in the absence of that reckoning, many of the illegal practices of the Vietnam era have been recycled with devastating effect elsewhere—notably in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is ironic to read this book at a moment in time when the American news media is providing almost daily accounts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. In considering these reprehensible acts, one is left wondering what has happened to international law, and why there is no mechanism for penalizing egregious violations

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