Not only was the war in Vietnam not moral, it was also very controversial. One of the events that led to much controversy took place in the village of Cam Ne. Cam Ne was a small village that consisted of over 400 houses and huts. According to the article "Assault in Cam Ne", "Cam Ne like so many other Villages in Vietnam, was actually made up of several inter connecting smaller hamlets, connected by a commonly farmed rice field" (Neener). The housing was made mainly from wood and the tops of the houses were covered with straw. All around the village there were rice paddies that were shared by the different hamlets. This was everything to those villagers as Vietnam reporter Morley Safer stated in the article "What really Happened at Cam Ne.", "'In Vietnam like everywhere else in Asia, property, a home, is everything. A man lives with his family on ancestral land'"(Brush).
The villages were composed mainly of children, women, and old men. One of the signs of disturbance was that there were no young men. According to the article, this meant that the men of the village supported the Viet Cong (Neener). The Viet Cong were a guerilla group that supported the communist movement in South Vietnam. They attacked both the American and South Vietnamese military. From Cam Ne the Viet Cong attacked incoming American patrols. After receiving fire and getting nothing but trouble from the village the Marines decided to take action. This led to the burning of the village.
The Burning of Cam Ne
The Vietnam War was as many would have said, a war we should not have been involved in. There were so many anti-war demonstrations here in the United States, no one was really behind it. There was one event that took place in Vietnam that enraged the public, this took place in the village of Cam Ne. The story of Cam Ne and the US started on August 3rd, 1965. That is the day the US Marines began their operation to take out the Viet Cong in Cam Ne. My veteran Lieutenant Roy Snyder was a part of that operation. He served as a rifle platoon commander of the first Marine regiment deployed there. According to Snyder, the operations objective was to clear the Viet Cong from the village (Snyder 1).
Snyder's regiment rode to the village on Amtracs, which were the amphibious assault vehicles used during the Vietnam War. However, within one-hundred meters, the rice paddies stopped them from going any further. This caused the regiment to have to deploy before reaching the village. This was not in their plans, it slowed them down and put them in the line of fire. Shortly after deploying, their fears were realized, the platoon was under attack. They had no choice but to fire back, their life depended on it. Lieutenant Roy Snyder describes this experience; "It took approximately, I would say, ten minutes to cross that one-hundred meters of rice paddies, first by pinning them down with the organic weapons we had, and then moving out in firing maneuver-type movements" (Snyder 2).
Once in the village the danger was still not over, there was shooting from within the houses. When the soldiers checked the houses there was no sign of the Viet Cong, but after further investigation they found a very large tunnel system. Snyder was shocked by this and exclaimed "I hadn't seen anything like it before or since actually; that operation" (Snyder 3). Due to the tunnels the Viet Cong could go from house to house without being seen. One of the casualties resulted from the fact that the Viet Cong were practically invisible from inside the tunnels. This allowed them to shoot one of the Marines in the back from one of the tunnels (Snyder3).
Another factor the Marines had to worry about was civilians. The Marines attempted to warn the civilians, but they were either not allowed to leave, or simply did not want to leave their home. These civilians consisted mainly of women, children and old men. It is possible the Viet Cong were using them to stop the American troops from firing. According to Snyder, even though they did have the trouble with civilians there was only one person killed, a twelve-year old boy (Snyder 4).
The operation was not one hundred percent successful in the eyes of Lieutenant Roy Snyder. The tunnels caused them to do what exactly what they were criticized by the media for- burning huts and haystacks. Their reasoning for this, "They'd leave because the fire would burn the entrances or their cover" (Snyder 5). Not all houses were burned. They were only concerned with burning the ones that were connected to the tunneling system.
The tunnels were not the only thing Snyder was worried about. They also had trouble with the amount of booby traps the Viet Cong had set up. The booby traps were mostly non-explosive, but did consist of bamboo stakes, logs with spikes called deadfalls and traps called Malayan whips (Snyder 7). The traps and the tunnels caused plenty of frustration, Snyder said, "You always had the feeling that you're giving them the first punch and that you hope that it's not a good one and you can get in a permanent second punch for yourself" (Snyder 13). They had to be extremely cautious, and that slowed them down a little. At the end of the day despite the unforeseen complications his regiment suffered only four casualties and no US Marines were killed in action. There was some damage in the village, a civilian that was killed, and many more that were injured. However, it was a successful operation. When Lieutenant Roy Snyder was asked about the damage inflicted upon the village, he said, "We tried to avoid it as much as possible, but I can't help but think that the safety of our Marines came first" (Snyder 15).
The Media
While reading about this event one question I couldn't get out of my head. What was the reaction from the media and the Vietnamese people? In the interview with Lieutenant Roy Snyder the interviewer Sergeant Arnie Holkins mentioned that plenty of publicity was given to the burning of the village (Snyder 1). I found that the Vietnam War was actually the first televised war and journalists were able to witness the operations first hand.
At the time of the attack Morley Safer, a journalist for CBS who was assigned to cover the events in Vietnam, and his crew witnessed the operation. According to Safer, "Cam Ne was a shock… I think [viewers] saw American troops acting in a way people had never seen American troops act before, and couldn't imagine" (Safer). The burning of the village made national news. I saw the images from the report and saw our soldiers setting the huts on fire. They were setting them on fire with Zippo lighters, matches, and flamethrowers. According to Safer, "Those guys, by the way, called themselves "the Zippo Brigade" after that picture was published" (Safer). There were some pictures in which you could see Safer was reporting and in the background you had civilians in anguish. The pictures and video taken from that day were aired on CBS a mere two days later and this sparked what appeared to be a war between the media and the military. The Military even went as far as saying that the village that was burned was just a training village, that none of the footage was real; it was just troops practicing how to get around a Vietnamese village (Safer). Safer was even banned temporarily from any Corps operations due to the report he sent about the Cam Ne burning. As a result the events changed both how the media portrayed Vietnam and how the military conducted their operations. This action further convinced people we should not have been involved in that war.
I try to think back and imagine what I would have done if I was one of the people involved, but it is hard to image I could be a part of something I feel so strongly against. I close my eyes and try to picture myself in this situation, I see the children crying because I am taking everything from them, mothers in anguish because I killed their child. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. It's no wonder some soldiers coming back from the war have problems. While I understand these men fight to keep us safe, it's hard to understand the implications of it. If I were to burn someone's house at this moment regardless of the reason, I would go to jail for coming arson. If I were to kill another human being, I would go to jail and be brought up with murder charges. However, If I commit these acts while I am serving in a war, I might even get a pat in the back. War is immoral there is no question about that and as O'Brien stated, "If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue" (O'Brien 68).
