Los Angeles Times Articles & Book
Nick Turse collaborated with Deborah Nelson, a former staff writer and current Washington D.C. investigative editor for The Los Angeles Times, to employ these documents to form the core of a series of articles. They were augmented by Army Inspector-General records in the National Archives; FBI and Army Criminal Investigation Division *(CID) records; documents shared by military veterans; and case files and related records in the Col. Henry Tufts Archive at the University of Michigan; as well as interviews with participants, witnesses, survivors and former Army officials in both the United States and Vietnam.
While the archive contains 320 substantiated incidents, the records also contain allegations of more than 500 atrocities that investigators could not prove or were otherwise discounted. At 9,000 pages, the archive is the largest collection of such documents to have surfaced to date. It includes investigation files, sworn statements by witnesses and status reports for senior military officers.
In total the documents describe a seemingly endemic violent minority within U.S. Army units throughout the Southeast Asian theater during this period, in contrast to the official picture of "rogue units", with widespread duplicity at various levels of the command structure. This official documentation lends considerable credence to widespread anecdotal evidence as presented by unofficial investigations of the time, such as the Russell Tribunal, the National Veterans Inquiry, the Citizens Commission of Inquiry, and the Winter Soldier Investigation.
Scott Swett of Frontpage Magazine critiques the LA Times series, calls it 'slanted', and claims that the files did not, in general, verify specific charges put forward by VVAW. He claims the articles' purpose was to "persuade the public to view the US military with distrust and contempt."
They also were used for a book by Nelson entitled "The War Behind Them", which includes stories about how the interviews were conducted, transcripts, and descriptions of travels to Vietnam for further investigations. One interviewee was Lawrence Wilkerson, who described the situation surrounding 'free fire zones'.
Read more about this topic: Vietnam War Crimes Working Group
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