not just jungles whisperings three thousand one hundred and eighty one villages and as many as fifteen million people were also directly sprayed this spring continued long after the in the east and american doctors began reporting the destructive effects on the roads and for nearly two years after american scientists proved the agent orange connection to birth defects general william westmoreland was picked to run the war. i can say categorically that never and the history of warfare certainly never in this trail of the use of american arms as more attention than given to the avoidance a civilian casualty is way did it not. from the top down the orders came and then the body count became the most important statistic of the war and search and destroy became the operational method for increasing it. if

a battalion commander or a company and their failures paid we're told that everybody's enemy and we can get this big body count which was the number one career enhanced meant statistic in vietnam. for example we get this report of a v.c. . or we don't have any evidence that it was at the scene no weapon no equipment no nothing you know just a suspicious situation if it's just counted which it is counted and condoned then there are elements of people down at that level that would figure hey that's an easy way to get a body can. testimony at the winter soldier hearing in one thousand nine hundred

seventy one revealed some of the atrocities this policy led to. some testimony here on the burning of villages cutting off coming up with fair colleen artillery on villages for games women raped napalm on villages could you go into just a few of these to let the people know how you treat the vietnamese civilians. the calling of artillery for games the way it was work would be the mortar forward observers would call in art with big out certain houses and villages fairly quickly and the border forward observers would call in order to until the point that house and then. artillery forward observer would call it artillery until he destroyed another house and whoever used the least amount of artillery they won when we got back someone would have to buy some real fear. in this video we used testimony from many sources to bring home the ground truths of the war in vietnam this is what it

was like on the receiving end of an artillery game. i'm safe how they directed artillery fire into the area where i live. naturally that really need. all the houses and trees were destroyed and that. i am. not also from. pounds of. peace kerosene and gasoline and so their homes first into flames when they were hit by the rockets. you know but some. do not. yet. old folks children and pregnant women who could not sleep in their home. heating pad two. us

tax dollars went directly to increasing the body count to the be a to me and became the currency of the kill ok king so most emaciated scary looking individual i think i've ever seen in my life. he was a mercenary and. they got paid by the years that they produced pairs of ears as a navy seal p.r. you advisor makes clear these rules were set from the top p.r. you was the in forstmann of the phoenix program and the phoenix program was the cia organized program of assassination and terror in vietnam among other things americans on these teams would often carry out operations while dressed to look like the viet cong they brought back

a gun they got paid for it if they brought back a prisoner they got paid for that they didn't bring back the whole prisoner they used to get paid for bringing back identifiable parts ok i didn't set these rules up this is the rules that they're that they played by when you try to change those rules you mean you meet resistance i didn't want people bringing me back years and me having to pay for it. i don't want people dead people on top. here's a story from a cia agent in vain long. again there we had an old french villa we. were these irregulars came in with the district girl as she just you know. just come back from a battle they had five or six weapons and they threw the weapons down and they were just discussing with the whole situation they were going to prove something came up through a bag on the table and the bag had eleven ears on it and he said

you don't need to. the winter soldier hearings looked into the treatment of the. prisoners. i've never seen him. since. we had a couple of guys. from philadelphia. used to blindfold the guys with safety wire and pull. out the light. and bite. and i used a contest to see if they could throw the bodies out of the airplane and throw on a strike against. the american soldiers they took care of p.o.w.'s in

vietnam like to take pictures so the winter soldier hearings involved a few slides. ok there is an interrogation going on here it's a big production and these are all the marines sitting around giving the various. this man here is a warrant officer. typical. these are national field police this man came over. and put a. i can spoon it's a vietnamese spoon and he put it in my fire and he's burning the skin off the back of the man's neck. and finally the man in fear of his life method that one time he had given tex to the v.c. but you can't prove that i heard earlier today that they used the swill marines used about a c.s. this particular man wouldn't come out of the hole and they threw to c.s.

going to aids and i personally scored in this man back to division and he died of gas doesn't kill i don't know it killing. the judicial thing to you that you really want to show. the first slide you can see. he shows a prisoner of war and the way that they try to get him to talk. is by making him stand in front of a pile of combine that we picked out the same p.o.w. was forced to set. for probably from six to eight hours by the pile of bodies in the house. the shadow of five or six g.i.'s going through the body looking for souvenirs in the stretcher there's a lieutenant in a captain overlooking what's going on at. all first there's were present at all

times yes the other great officers were present were present. and the next slide is a slide of myself. i'm streaming shameful of and i'm showing and hope the new people never been involved ever let this happen to you don't let ever let your government do this to you come. to my mind if i want to didn't hear. the slaughter was organized from the top you can't defend a place like that by setting on your daddy box you've got to get out and aggressively patrol and that's what our people are doing and the one thing i am precise to them while i was out there was to find these the common carrier. one time i went there to the headquarters for some reason and they had all these boards drawn up showing the kill ratios in each brigade and it seemed to me like it

was. kind of like one hundred percent. search terms people watching were going to territory and he was trying to find them. listen to. me from the train from our lifestyle or i. was the first big helicopter. and that's how much of the killing was done i was a helicopter. gunship pilot. i worked with another aircraft at all times in what is called a hundred killer t. . i was told. by the other pilots in the unit how to tell a v.c. from a civilian. if they were running their v.c. . because they were standing there they were well just well just b.c. shooting many. still still told me that when we were flying over

a village or your village if people started to leave civilians. it was a good sign if there were a v.c. in the area. that they were expecting a fight. all speaking with us with my future me she says when american helicopters come through people run they think they're going to be killed. so you put these two things together and you see you know civilians are in kind of a bad spot. the offices double the helicopter support. the temperatures ninety five inside to the air conditioned the music is always to. be a. november of sixty eight in an area called the wagon wheel which is northwest

of saigon when a routine search and destroy mission gunships were to be providing security and cover for us in case we had any contact or circling overhead no contact was made and the gunships got bored. so they made a gun run on it which with many guns and rockets out when they left the area we found. one dead baby which was a young child. very young in his mother's arms and we thought. we found a baby girl about three years old they were dead. some people fell in love with the technomage. the prisoners that. we captured are having as you say this is the most feared weapon out shot if it is

. out of ammunition we carry a. weapon a little bit out of time we can say association. as many u.s. soldiers in vietnam were infantry their main mission was search and destroy we were given orders whenever we moved into a builders to reconnoitre by prior this means to them or we step into ability to fire upon our houses anything to our discretion it looks like there may be someone hiding behind behind or under well sometimes when we come to a village. or be it means we're going out of the bomb shelter you know we're being caught so consequently this to prize would start getting individual and they would automatically turn to pirates thereby uselessly killing civilians but i'll give an image before he opposed the iraq war in the u.s. senate jim webb was

a combat marine in vietnam people would flash you have really good people and one individual who was a terrific marine who. we were in one operation and his best friend was killed and we made this week two days later through a village and this guy. a civilian was paid back and in his own mind he was sort of justifying it and one village we won't. women and kids going into the villages and we got in there simply walls and we got in the village i mean another guy we were treating two unconscious babies babies like five six year old kid and a woman lying in a hammock and i totaled ten of these people have to be evacuated because it's not evacuated of this lady had shrapnel in and the kids had shrapnel in them they were in contests they've been evacuated in to die for get a doctor have time to stay and wait we went up on the hill right above this same village and we fired down on this village the next day while people trying to bury

the dead we fired down on the village at the people while they were doing their a burial ceremony and we and they killed another face they ran obviously but another of perth in the village. also on we went down that same that same day to get some water and there were two little boys playing on the dice and one sergeant of hundred and sixteen the shop where the other boy tried to run. by this other. he shot this little boy up. and like going to ground kicking so he shot him again mitchell is dead. many of the refugees created ended up in the squalor of saigon where morny safer open the c.b.s. news bureau in one nine hundred sixty five. it first appeared that the marines had been sniped at and that a few houses were made to pay shortly after an officer told me he had orders to go

in and leveled a string of hamlets that surrounds them need village and all around the common paddy field that feeds these hamlets a range of five hundred fifty homes were leveled in retaliation for a burst of gunfire. on the first operation that i was on in country we went into a village called five fingers and it was a typical koran and search which is you surround a village and then you sweep through it and hopefully when you're sweeping if anybody's running from you they're going to run into the of course the surrounding troops on the other side and they get wiped out but we received fire as we walked into the village and we took no casualties but we did end up with a body count no weapons were found so apparently they were civilians the next

day in the morning should i say they rounded up the entire village all of them and marched them out you were all prisoners of war all of them men women children made no difference we built to do some haps they were just relocated man just moved away. i have hardly ever heard the term vietnamese they were always. there is no difference between a good one and a bad one except the good one at the time is no weapon but he still fair game. the games that some of the marines in my outfit played myself included would be to find the older papa sound with the long whiskers and which i guess was a symbol of his identity in their culture and they would just be cut they would brutalized anybody who complained. we would move into a village and we would just step down we own the village while we're here these

people would do what we told them or they wouldn't be allowed to stay in their own how are they would be beaten inside the house we were on our first operation and it was there was an operation so it just followed this procedure they were used to it and we were just shown how you destroy a village and they just cried and carried on we don't know what happened to them that was the only bill. in immediate vicinity so we cleared the area more or less everything was set on fire my squad leader personally ignited the first two chairs and then just told us to take care of the rest. when we went out i would say fifty percent at least of the villages we passed through would be permanent to the ground there was no difference between someone we burned and the ones we didn't burn it just put some we had time and we burn that.

we came here today to begin an operation aimed clearing this area and mopping up the hidden viet cong to bring security to all of you. we understand that among you there are some who have naively listened to the vietcong propaganda and have joined the rebels among them are some of your husband's your brothers so please advise them to come back we are ready. during this pacification program to admit them back to society and to assist them. in ninety one children around as did conk suspects. and a lieutenant around him up as call the caps on the radio and he asked what should be done with them the captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning the order came down the colonel that morning was killing the moves which you can take any way you want to take it and when the captain told

lieutenant this then i rang up i got up and i started walking over to the captain thinking that the lieutenant just might do it because i'd served in this button for a long time. as i started over there the captain i think the captain panicky thousand and ten might do it too and this was a little more. atrocious and the other executions that our company participated in only because of the numbers. but to get them tried to call him up try to get him back on the horn and it wouldn't he couldn't get a hold of him and i was walking over to my turn i looked in the area i looked to where the v.c.s. were supposed to be c.s. . and two men were leading a young girl broccoli one thousand years old very pretty out of a hoot she had no clothes on so i assumed she had been raped which was pretty s.o.b . and there that's their operating procedure for civilians. and she was thrown

around the pile of the one thousand women children and five men around the circle open up on full automatic with them sixteen. for a breakthrough only we're still here for a real interesting illusion refrain it's our right there's no currently really traitor to late the people who are really really inside really just really really like the newspaper said operations through a quote or two movie theater where we just set up their way to move. to a need a new crew. or the americans when they burned and destroyed and killed. i didn't see anything really. only believe. that out of one hundred seven villages in this area hundred and six were burned to

the ground some of them many times over. this area was a free fire zone. anything that moves could be shot. these are standing ten feet away we got if. these people are aware of one of our soldiers doing so not sure if they try to hide the young girls . we found one night in a bombshell or in sort of the basement ever house. she was taken out raped by six or seven people in front of her family. everybody most of the villagers. are deceased this wasn't just one instance this is just the first one i can remember i know of thirteen or so strangers instances at least i just really i mean for goodness. oh. we didn't just call it

a serial. all vietnamese and our slant eyes eps there are analysts now are they were inferior to us were markets where we were a civilized. and out it we don't give a shit about those people. sadly most americans are not aware of how many of the in these were killed in the us in series men you put numbers at less than a hundred thousand the shameful facts are that between three and five million vietnamese were killed in that war and the vast majority of them were civilians. after the first gulf war george bush sr announced that vietnam syndrome was buried in the desert sands of the arabian peninsula. to help us get over the vietnam

syndrome presidents reagan and bush. quick military victories against small countries in which thousands of civilians died in grenada panama nicaragua. and el salvador. in reality the vietnam syndrome is a code for the need to induce a kind of national amnesia about the true history and facts of the vietnam. as witnessed in the buckle of the iraq war has become consumed that they have been largely successful. and especially around the results. in iraq as most of them civilians have been killed in another started with law school and motivated by greed. and the policy that created continue. those who refuse to remember their history are condemned to repeat.

just one must in. this timeless you must inform the time must not forget. we must learn from it and proceeds. damn.

renewed violence on the streets of cairo as western powers call for an orderly transition. in the u.k. pro transfer evoked by the turmoil in egypt the means by move lamas donghae they should now include in many nations as cover to promote its own cause a step. back to gauge just how russia's president the identity of the suicide bomber who killed thirty six in a blast of last days busiest airport long but the damage that it says there's still work to do to find the monster by.

a very warm welcome to you this is our seed live from moscow with me analysts have that egypt's vice president has addressed the nation as clashes and heavy gunfire continued in another day of our people he says a roadmap for political reform is being put together and presidential elections could take place as early as august well there's been an ongoing wave of violence between opponents and supporters of president hosni mubarak five people were reportedly shot dead in cairo's tahrir square before dawn thursday the total number killed in over a week of rights is estimated at around three hundred well it's that now thought that the egyptian army which is previously not soon to be in the clashes has made some attempt to divide demonstrators glossies up with liras keeping across developments in cairo for us and joins me now live up what's going on right now.