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The media continued to observe and discuss atrocities blandly, not considering them as controversial or as raising any moral issue—in fact, not regarding them as atrocities at all, although we detect no such reserve with regard to the violence of official enemies. The respected columnist Joseph Harsch describes the frustrations of an American pilot dropping bombs “into a leafy jungle” with “no visible result” and without “the satisfaction of knowing what he achieved”:

A hit on a big hydroelectric dam is another matter. There is a huge explosion visible from anywhere above. The dam can be seen to fall. The water can be seen to pour through the breach and drown out huge areas of farm land, and villages, in its path. The pilot who takes out a hydroelectric dam gets back home with a feeling of accomplishment. Novels are written and films are made of such exploits . . . The bombing which takes out the dam will flood villages, drown people, destroy crops, and knock out some electric power . . . Bombing the dam would hurt people.75

Nevertheless, it is better to bomb trucks, he concludes, although there would plainly be no moral barrier to the much more satisfying alternative rejected on tactical grounds.

In the South, bombing of dikes and virtually limitless destruction was an uncontroversial tactic, as in the Batangan Peninsula, where 12,000 peasants (including, it appears, the remnants of the My Lai massacre) were forced from their homes in an American ground sweep in January 1969 and shipped off to a waterless camp near Quang Ngai over which floated a banner saying: “We thank you for liberating us from Communist terror.” The Times reported that the refugees had lived “in caves and bunkers for many months” because “heavy American bombing and artillery and naval shelling” had destroyed their homes, as well as a dike that was “blasted by American jets to deprive the North Vietnamese [sic] of a food supply.” It was left unrepaired, so that two years later “the salt water of the South China Sea continues to submerge the fields where rice once grew.” The reason, according to an American official, is that the people “were written off as communists,” and for the same reason the region was left in ruins: “the hills that overlook the flooded paddies, once scattered with huts, are . . . filled with bomb fragments, mines and unexploded artillery shells,” and “B-52 craters nearly 20 feet deep pock the hills.”76

Bombing of dikes in the North, occasionally reported,77 was controversial, as was the bombing of North Vietnam generally. The reason is that the cost to the United States might be high because of a potential Chinese or Soviet response, regarded as a serious and dangerous possibility, or because of the impact on international opinion.78 But these questions did not arise in the case of U.S. terror against the South Vietnamese, which therefore proceeded without notable concern or, it seems, much in the way of planning. In the Pentagon Papers, we find extensive discussion and debate over the escalation of the bombing against the North, while there is virtually nothing about the far more destructive bombing, defoliation, destruction of vast areas by Rome plows, etc., in South Vietnam, where we were “saving” the population from “aggression.” With regard to South Vietnam, the planning record is limited to the question of deployment of U.S. troops, which again raised potential costs to the United States.79

The most notable exception to the easy tolerance of atrocities perpetrated against South Vietnamese was the My Lai massacre, in March 1968, reported at once by the NLF among other massacres that are still not acknowledged or discussed. Details were disclosed in Paris in June 1968, but neglected by the media until November 1969 despite extensive efforts by helicopter gunner Ronald Ridenhour to publicize the story, which finally broke through to the general public, thanks to the persistence of Seymour Hersh, at the time of a massive demonstration in Washington,