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In
the mid-1960s, when I was covering the war in Vietnam for the Associated
Press, U.S. commanders were issued wallet-size cards bearing the
warning to “use your firepower with care and discrimination,
particularly in populated areas.” Often, these cards ended
up in a pocket of a pair of tropical fatigues, where they remained,
ignored, for the duration of the bearer’s tour of duty.
The intention of the Department of Defense in issuing the cards
was to help prevent jittery U.S. soldiers from mistakenly, or intentionally,
declaring a suspect village a “free fire zone,” then destroying
it and its residents. All too often, postmortem investigations revealed
that such zones had been peaceful and should not have been assaulted.
This type of incident with its attendant hostile publicity—My
Lai was perhaps the most infamous, if not necessarily the most egregious—was
a recurring nightmare of the military high command and a succession
of U.S. administrations.
But the cards only served to accent official naiveté. In
reality, U.S. troops in Vietnam seldom knew with any certainty which
villages were friendly, siding with the Americans and their Saigon-based
allies, and which supported the Hanoi-backed Viet Cong Communist
guerrillas.
The practice of establishing free fire zones was instituted because
many villages in what was then South Vietnam willingly provided
safe haven to Viet Cong fighters. Some, by contrast, were forcibly
occupied by marauding bands of guerrillas, who used the villages
for cover. Many more were devotedly anti-Communist. Yet, the American
forces often had fundamental difficulty in distinguishing among
any of these villagers. The fact that the guerrillas commonly dressed
in black cotton pajama-style outfits, like those worn by most Vietnamese
peasants, served only to heighten the confusion.
But despite the GIs’ confusion, international law enjoins armies
to avoid targeting any but military objectives and assures protection
to civilians, in almost any circumstance. Free fire zones as defined
by Department of Defense doctrine and the rules of engagement are
a severe violation of the laws of war for two reasons. First, they
violate the rule against direct attack of civilians by presuming
that after civilians are warned to vacate a zone, then anyone still
present may lawfully be attacked. The rule prohibiting direct attacks
on civilians provides no basis for a party to a conflict to shift
the burden by declaring a whole zone to be “civilian free.”
And second, they violate the rule against indiscriminate
attack by presuming without justification in the law that warning
civilians to leave eliminates the legal requirements to discriminate
in targeting its weapons.
Where the protection of the Geneva Conventions does not provide
a mantle to civilians is when they take “a direct part in hostilities.”
There were, of course, occasions when Vietnamese civilians directly
attacked U.S. troops, but those which drew the attention of news
reporters were overwhelmingly those in which a village was labeled
a free fire zone and innocent lives were taken in outbursts of indiscriminate
fire and brutality.
Faced with this negative coverage and with severe difficulty in
enforcing international laws limiting the imposition of free fire
zones, as well as other elements of the rules of engagement, the
Pentagon over time added more directives to its pocket cards: a
village could not be bombed without warning even if American troops
had received fire from within it; a village known to be Communist
could be attacked only if its inhabitants were warned in advance;
only once civilians had been removed could a village be declared
a free fire zone and shelled at will.
According to an article by Maj. Mark S. Martens of the U.S. Army’s
Judge Advocate-General’s Corps and a distinguished graduate
of the U.S. Military Academy, Oxford University, and Harvard Law
School, all these rules were “radically ineffective.”
Often they were simply ignored. In some cases, illiterate peasants
couldn’t understand leaflets dropped to warn them that their
villages would soon become a free fire zone. In other cases, hurried,
forcible evacuations left large numbers of defenseless civilians
behind, to be killed by bombing, shelling, small arms assaults,
or burning. “The only good village,” went one bit of cynical
GI wisdom, “is a burned village.”
Ineffective efforts to rein in the GIs’ propensity to create
free fire zones in Vietnam resulted in a sense among many Vietnamese
as well as Americans that U.S. forces were undisciplined. More important,
perhaps, the widely touted grand plan to capture the “hearts
and minds” of the Vietnamese was immeasurably diminished by
the perception—let alone the outbreaks of reality—that
Americans did not value Vietnamese lives.
Toward the end of the 1960s, the term free fire zone itself was
dropped from the U.S. military lexicon in no small part because
that doctrine embraced actions that the United States today would
regard as illegal. Subsequent U.S. military manuals and rules of
engagement, whether for ground, air, or naval forces, tend to track
quite closely with the central principle of international humanitarian
law on civilian immunity and
the prohibition on the targeting of civilians.
(See
civilians, illegal targeting
of; immunity.)
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