Yes, it's true ... there was much, much more ...

The Scream (Edvard Munch - 1893)

What is it about civil wars wherein we manage to get involved between the "sides"? Whether they be the VC and the SVG (which we overthrew twice along the way) -- before the NVA even became involved, or between Sunnis and Shiites (and yes, we supported the secular Saddam while he was attacking Iran, and turned our backs while he was massacring the Kurds and then finally overthrew him when we realized that he was standing on "our" oil).

One of my daughters suggested that I might think about cutting back on terrible images of war and its effects, so when I read today's Los Angeles Times account of the disclosure of 9,000 (as in nine thousand!) pages from the archives detailing atrocities committed by the US Military to which we were not exposed during the Vietnam War, I thought that Munch's most famous painting, The Scream, was appropriate.

Most Americans were totally unaware of the atrocities that took place during the Vietnam War, and many atrocities are still buried in the clay and rice paddies ... somewhere. But we were pretty much oblivious to that aspect of the war.

Well, most of us anyway. It's been almost twenty years since I destroyed all of the terrible pictures that I brought back with me more than 35 years ago, and about which I was only recently reminded by one of my children. My duties involved photo recon and getting the BDA (body damage assessment) figures into computerized databases ... and to maintain numbers that were as high as possible -- which meant that every dot on an aerial photograph (and some, sadly, were a lot closer than just "specks" on a grainy photograph!) was either VC (Vietcong) or NVA (North Vietnamese Army -- a "regular") -- whether it looked a little like a cow, pig, or other unidentifiable animal ... or a child or a possible "civilian." Black pajamas and NVA uniforms were pretty hard to distinguish in aerial photos taken back in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The stories and photographs that were casually passed around among the junior-grade troopers (and the one civilian in their midst -- me) were/are so terribly similar to what we are reading of the alleged war crimes committed recently by our young servicemen (no women other than possibly one at Abu Ghraib involved -- of which I am aware) in Iraq. Of course, simple still photos of bodies in grotesque "poses" do not indicate necessarily that a "war crime" had been committed somewhere, but thinking back ... it was an indication of something very dark.

The 9,000 pages under review by the Los Angeles Times do not include My Lai, of course (roughly 500 massacred ... thank you, Seymour Hersh, for being patriotic enough to speak out), nor do they include the use of napalm on civilians (not deliberately, I don't believe) or cluster bombs or gunship ammo on small hamlets to which we were unable to get ground forces to estimate the damage.

Still, according to what CBS News published online today, the Los Angeles Times review has uncovered 320 wartime atrocities that were authenticated by the Army. To make it worse, every Army division on the ground there was involved, according to the LA Times review. Only 10% of the soldiers involved were ever court-martialed and convicted.

We will never know the true count ... and yes, atrocities were committed by both the VC and the NVA upon our young men in uniform too. War is a two-way street named "Carnage."

Just thinking about war, for me anyway ... is a reflection of the painting by Munch, above. ... Or is the painting the reflection?

For most of us who were there and saw one thing or another, our hands were not just on our ears; they were on our ears, eyes ... and most important, our mouths.

Brig. Gen. John H. Johns (Retired) was one of the persons involved in this study and he said that he "no longer thought the atrocities should remain in the dark." Yeh, we all wanted Vietnam to go away, but as General Johns, now 78, said, "We can't change current practices unless we acknowledge the past."

But realistically ... will we ever really learn?