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War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam. By Bernd Greiner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-300-154511. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 518. $35.00.
This is a difficult book to review because, while the author gathered much accurate information about war crimes committed by American soldiers and Marines in Vietnam, the conclusions he draws about why these war crimes occurred-and the responsibility for them-are utterly wrong.
In writing War Without Fronts, author Bernd Greiner, a professor at the University of Hamburg, Germany, relied on an impressive variety of primary sources at the National Archives in College Park, Md. He also considered a wide range of secondary sources in English and German on warfare, psychiatry and psychology, political theory, gender, culture, and identity. Greiner relies chiefly, however, on the records of the Army's Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (VWCWG) and the Peers Report. Both are excellent sources-and reliable-and the author is to be commended for his use of them. The VWCWG was a Pentagon-based working group that operated in the early 1970s and compiled some 10,000 pages of allegations of war crimes committed by U.S. forces during the Vietnam war; the VWCWG documented more than 300 war crimes incidents, including murder, rape, and torture. The Peers Report, so named because its senior member was Lt. Gen. William R. Peers, thoroughly investigated the My Lai murders, the subsequent cover-up, and the causes of the war crime.
Greiner should have concluded-as have virtually all professional historians who have studied the American experience in Vietnam-that the VWCWG files and the Peers inquiry prove that some American soldiers and Marines committed horrific acts of brutality against Vietnamese civilians (including murder and rape) and that more than a few escaped punishment. Greiner also should have concluded that the massacre of more than 300 innocent men, women, and children by 2nd Lt. William L. Calley and his men at My Lai was a unique event in American military history. He also should have concluded that the atrocity occurred because a low-level commander (of below-average ability) was in charge of poorly disciplined troops and then not only failed to control his men but joined them in committing war crimes.
War Without Fronts, however, reaches an entirely different conclusion. According to Greiner, the My...