The Ambiguity of Limited War

Twenty years after the bombing of Nagasaki, US Marines were dispatched to Vietnam - the first contingent of US combat forces to what was to become America's worst military and political disaster.

At the time, the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 provided the core of the law of war. The Geneva Conventions expanded upon the principles of the Lieber Code: only combatants were lawful targets; civilians were entitled to protection from violence. More restrictive rules of engagement (ROE) embellished the law of war with changing and often irrational limitations on the use of force. The result was confusion and frustration, sometimes accompanied by tragic results.

One of the Marines who arrived in Vietnam in 1965 was Second Lieutenant Philip Caputo. His book, A Rumor of War, recounts the ambiguities that undermined military legitimacy in that violent and unforgiving environment. Caputo arrived in Vietnam a highly motivated Marine officer. His collective values were typical of other young officers: he was serving his country, and wanted more than anything else to please the authorities who judged him. Caputo cited the story of Jesus and the centurion in Matthew 8:9 to illustrate the timeless nature of military authority. He recalled an incident when he was chewed out for smoking during a tactical operation. After that traumatic experience, he 'turned into a regular little martinet'. Looking back, Caputo felt that experience shaped his attitude in Vietnam:

Napoleon once said that he could make men die for little pieces of ribbon. By the time the battalion left for Vietnam, I was ready to die for considerably less, for a few favorable remarks in a fitness report.³⁵

As motivated as he was, it did not take long for the ambiguities of Vietnam to cause Caputo to question the infallibility of military authority.

The day before a rifleman in B company had shot a farmer, apparently mistaking him for a VC. To avoid similar incidents in the future, brigade again ordered that chambers be kept clear except when contact was imminent, and in guerrilla-controlled areas, no fire be directed at unarmed Vietnamese unless they were running. A running Vietnamese was a fair target. This left us bewildered and uneasy. No one was eager to shoot civilians.

After many questions from his men, 'the skipper finally said, "Look, I don't know what this is supposed to mean, but I talked to battalion and they said as far as they're concerned, if he's dead and Vietnamese, he's VC." And on that note we left to brief the squad leaders.'³⁶

The convoluted logic of ROE created moral and ethical dilemmas for Caputo and his fellow Marines:

It was morally right to shoot an unarmed Vietnamese who was running, but wrong to shoot one who was standing or walking; it was wrong to shoot an enemy prisoner at close range, but right for a sniper at long range to kill an enemy soldier who was no more able than a prisoner to defend himself; it was wrong for an infantryman to destroy a village with white-phosphorus grenades, but right for a fighter pilot to drop napalm on it.³⁷

Caputo recalled the ethical issues of bombing civilian targets in the Second World War when he talked of the hypocrisy of condoning high-tech massacres in Vietnam. To him and his cohorts it appeared distance from the target reduced the culpability of those who delivered lethal force:

Ethics seemed to be a matter of distance and technology. You could never go wrong if you killed people at long range with sophisticated weapons.³⁸

But even with his doubts Caputo remained the quintessential Marine who asked few questions and accepted whatever answers authority gave him.

In the patriotic fervor of the Kennedy years, we had asked, 'What can we do for our country?' and our country had answered, 'Kill VC'. That was the strategy, the best our military minds could come up with: organized butchery. But organized or not, butchery was butchery, so who was to speak of rules and ethics in a war that had none?³⁹

The ambiguity and illegitimacy of Vietnam got personal for Caputo when he had a month still to go on his tour. Stung by criticism that his men had mistakenly released two VC during a raid, Caputo directed his men on a manhunt for them. Two Vietnamese were captured, but both were killed en route to headquarters. When the bodies were examined it was determined that they were not VC but innocent civilians. For this mistaken identity Caputo and his men were to be tried by general court-martial.⁴⁰

Thanks to an aggressive Marine Corps defense counsel, the first defendant to be tried was acquitted and charges dropped against the others. Caputo had his own explanation for the result, which illustrated the injustice of an ambiguous war:

The killings had occurred in war. They had occurred, moreover, in a war whose sole aim was to kill Viet Cong, a war in which those ordered to do the killing often could not distinguish the Viet Cong from civilians, a war in which civilians in 'free-fire zones' were killed every day by weapons far more horrible than pistols or shotguns. The deaths... could not be divorced from the nature and conduct of the war. They were an inevitable product of the war. As I had come to see it, America could not intervene in a people's war without killing some of the people.⁴¹

The ambiguity of the Vietnam conflict made it difficult, if not impossible, to make a distinction between combatant and non-combatant - the distinction upon which the legitimate use of lethal force depends. And its ROE illustrated a double standard for killing civilians that was left over from the Second World War: it was right to kill large concentrations of civilians with strategic bombing, but wrong to kill them individually with tactical weapons. Ultimately these and other moral and political issues eroded the public support required to sustain US involvement in Vietnam, resulting in an ignoble withdrawal in 1975.