Unfortunately, however, that’s not the problem.  The problem is that almost no one has tried.  Vietnamese are bit characters in American histories of the war, Vietnamese civilians most of all.  Americans who tromped, humped, and slogged through Vietnam on one-year tours of duty are invariably the focus of those histories, while Vietnamese who endured a decade or even decades of war remain, at best, in the background or almost totally missing.  (And by the way, it’s no less true for most of the major movies about the war.  Remember the Vietnamese main characters in Apocalypse Now?  Platoon? Full Metal Jacket? Hamburger Hill?  Me neither.)

The reasons for this are many and varied, ranging from racism and ethnocentrism to pure financial calculation.  Few Americans want to read real stories about foreign civilians caught up in America’s wars.  Almost no one wants to read an encyclopedia of atrocities or a tome-like chronology of suffering.  And most Americans, above all, have never wanted to know the grotesque truths of their wars.  Luckily for them, most veterans have been willing to oblige — keeping the darkest secrets of that war hidden (even while complaining that no one can really know what they went through).

The truth is, we don’t even know the full story of that war’s obscenity when it comes to the American experience.  This, too, has been sanitized and swapped out for tales of combat horror or “realistic” accounts of the war in the boonies that focus on repulsive realities like soldiers stepping on shit-smeared punji sticks, suffering from crotch rot, or keeling over from dehydration.  Such accounts, we’ve been assured, offer a more honest depiction of the horrors of war and the men who nobly bore them.

Don’t believe it.

As the narrator of Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” puts it:

“A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil.”

Which brings us back to that rape on August 31, 1969.

Aside from Daniel Lang’s Casualties of War, a brilliantly-compact and harrowing account of the kidnap, gang-rape, and murder of a young Vietnamese girl (a New Yorker article-turned-book-turned-movie), you’re not likely to encounter the story of the rape of a Vietnamese woman by Americans in “the literature.”  And yet the sexual assault of civilians by GIs was far from uncommon, even if you can read thousands of books on the Vietnam War and have little inkling that it ever happened.  Hints about the harassment or sexual assault of American women – nurses, enlisted women, and so-called Donut Dollies – also rarely make it into the histories.  And you can read most, perhaps all, of those 30,000 books without ever coming across a case of GI-on-GI rape in Vietnam.

But that’s just what happened on that August 31st at a U.S. base in Vietnam’s far south, when three GI’s attacked a fellow American, a fellow soldier.  For the purposes of this piece, we’ll call him Specialist Curtis.  We know his story because the court martial records of one of his assailants, who was found guilty of and sentenced to prison time, made it to the National Archives where I found the document.  But really, we know it because, according to the military judge presiding over the case, Curtis delivered “clear, strong, convincing, not halting, not hesitant, not reluctant, straight-forward, direct, willing, sincere, and not evasive” testimony.  He and others told a brutal story, an obscene story — that is, a true war story.

What Veterans Won’t Tell You 

Curtis was feeling sick that late summer day and wouldn’t drink with his hootch-mates, so they pounced on him, held his mouth open, and poured whisky down his throat.  When he began to retch, they let him go and he ran outside to throw up.   He returned to his bunk and they attacked him again.  The cycle repeated itself twice more.

The last attempt to force Curtis to drink began with a threat.  If he didn’t imbibe with them — “them” being a fellow specialist, a private first class, and a private — they swore they would anally rape him.

Curtis resisted.

In a flash, the three tore off his bed sheets and flipped him onto his stomach.  They leaned on him to hold him down as he thrashed and bucked, while they ripped off his underwear.  Then they smeared hand lotion all over his buttocks.  As Curtis cried out for help, the private mounted him.  He began to rape him and was heard to exclaim that it was “really good, it was tight.”  After the private was finished, the private first class raped Curtis. The specialist followed.  “I know you enjoy it,” Curtis heard one of them say before he blacked out from the pain.  Across the hootch, another private watched the entire episode.  Curtis had protested, he’d later say, but this soldier did nothing to intervene.  He was, he later testified, “very scared” of the three attackers.

After Curtis regained consciousness, he retreated to the showers.  When he finally returned to the hootch, the fellow specialist who raped him issued a threat.  If he reported the attack, they would swear that he had paid them $20 each to have sex with him.

That’s a true war story.

And that’s a Vietnam War story that’s absent from our histories of the conflict — all 30,000 of them.

Given the stigma attached to rape, especially decades ago, and the added stigma attached to male rape victims, it’s shocking that the case ever became public, no less that it went to trial in a military court, or that the victim gave clear, graphic, painful testimony.  The truth was out there, but no one ever told this story to the wider world — neither the victim, the perpetrators, the witnesses, the lawyers, the judge, the commanders at the base, nor a historian.  You could read thousands of books on the Vietnam War — even books devoted to hidden histories, secrets, and the like — and never know that, in addition to rifles and rice paddies, war is also about rape, even male-on-male rape, even GI-on-GI rape.  Just how many such rapes occurred, we’ll never know, because such acts were and generally still are kept secret.

Veterans don’t tell these stories.  They almost never offer up accounts of murder, assault, torture, or rape unsolicited.  They don’t want you to know. Such realities need to be mined out of them.  I’ve done it for the last 10 years, and believe me, it can be exhausting.

Veterans, their advocates, and their defenders often tell us it’s never okay to ask if a soldier or marine killed somebody “over there.”  But if veterans refuse to offer up unsanitized accounts of their wartime experiences and it’s improper for us to ask what they did, how can civilians be faulted for failing to understand war?

To set the historical record straight, I’ve traveled across the globe, walked into people’s homes, and asked them questions to which, in a better world than ours, no one should have to know the answers.  I’ve asked elderly Vietnamese to recount the most horrific traumas imaginable.  I’ve induced rivers of tears.  I’ve sat impassively, taking notes as an older woman, bouncing her grandchild on her knee, told me what it was like to be raped with an American weapon.

As I said, war is obscene.

I also asked these questions of American veterans because — some notable and iconic exceptions aside — too few have had the courage of that Vietnamese grandmother.  After all, some American raped her with that weapon, but as far as I know — and if anybody knew, it would probably be me — he never leveled with the American public about the true nature of his war.  He never told the truth, publicly apologized, voiced regret, or even for that matter boasted about it, nor did he ever make a case for why raping a woman with a weapon was warranted in wartime.  He kept it a secret and, if he’s still alive, continues to do so today.  We all suffer for his silence.

On a single day in August 1969, on one base, three GIs raped a fellow American soldier.  Three rapes.  One day.  What does that mean?  What does it say about men?  About the military?  About war?  We can’t know for sure because we’ll never know the whole truth of sexual assault in Vietnam.  The men involved in wartime sex crimes — in raping Vietnamese women, in sodomizing them, in violating them with bottles and rifle muzzles, in sexually assaulting American women, in raping American men — have mostly remained silent about it.

One of the rapists in this case may have passed away, but at least one is still apparently alive in the United States.  Maybe even on your street.  For decades we knew nothing of their crimes, so we know less than we should about the Vietnam War and about war in general.

Maybe it’s time to start asking questions of our veterans. Hard questions. They shouldn’t be the only ones with the knowledge of what goes on in armies and in war zones.  They didn’t get to Vietnam (or Iraq or Afghanistan) on their own and they shouldn’t shoulder the blame or the truth alone and in silence.  We all bear it.  We all need to hear it.  The sooner, the better.