Crimes Against Humanity, Past and Present
In Water on the Moon, Frederick M. “Skip” Burkle, Jr., MD recounts his life from childhood up to 2024, when he was 83. Having been drafted during the Vietnam War, his first overseas assignment was as a combat physician on the frontlines. There he also treated Vietnamese civilians (dealing with bubonic plague) in the surrounding area as well as wounded North Vietnamese Army soldiers. While treating one such soldier, Marines entered the triage bunker and ordered him and the other medical personnel out. Burkle objected that under the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military was obligated to treat the wounded who are out of combat. The Marines forced him out at gunpoint. When he re-entered the bunker, the Marines were waterboarding his patient. Burkle radioed base headquarters and objected to a commanding officer that torture was a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When he returned to the triage bunker, the Marines were gone, and his patient was dead.
Burkle’s account led me to think that I should remind myself of the what the Vietnam War was about. I finally read a couple of books that I had been planning to read for some time. Firstly, I read Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a book-length recounting of the sustained, mechanized, industrial-scale, criminal assault on the Vietnamese people. I was struck by how the methods of killing in Vietnam were, in many ways, similar to those employed in the current genocidal assault on the Palestinian people. The dehumanization of the victims is the same. The torture is the same. The air assaults and search and destroy missions are the same. The weaponry has been upgraded, but the profiteering by the arms corporations is the same. The destruction of infrastructure and the environment by bulldozer is the same. In 1995, the Vietnamese government estimated that more than 3 million Vietnamese, including 2 million civilians were killed in what they call the American War.
Also, going backward in history, there are many parallels to the Philippine-American War: the same waterboarding, the same intent to turn the countryside into a “howling wilderness.”
In what way was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam not a genocide? The United Nation’s definition of genocide “means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
1) Killing members of the group;
2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The U.S. architects of the Vietnam War cited the need to stop Communism or support democracy as the reasons for the war. Nonetheless, as Turse points out, the metric for success was the body count – supposedly the number of enemy combatants killed, but in reality, “anything that moves.” Perhaps the only way in which the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam was not a genocide was the success of its architects in portraying it as 
something else. The stated intent of the war was not the destruction of the Vietnamese people. So, let us call the Vietnam War a series of crimes against humanity. Generally, crimes against humanity are considered worse than mere war crimes, since they are systematic and large-scale.
But, getting back to Skip Burkle’s memoirs . . . in 2003, during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Burkle served as the Interim Health Minister. While Donald Rumsfeld declared that the U.S. had come as “liberators and not occupiers” – Burkle argued that Iraq was undergoing a “public health emergency,” with the implication that the U.S. needed to take responsibility for mitigating it. Burkle was quickly replaced.
How many Iraqis died during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq (2003-2011)? Over a million. (Of course, such estimates depend on the methodology, who is and who is not counted as a casualty, etc.)
Throughout his career, Burkle has thus stood up for the position that there are actually rules of war. Just because you’re at war doesn’t mean that all rules get thrown out the window. You can’t just kill civilians willy-nilly. In the end, it’s not all that different from the Pottery Barn motto: “If you break it” (destroy the infrastructure, destroy the governing authority) “you own it.”
Subsequent to Vietnam, the destruction of Fallujah or Mosul seems very much on par with the destruction of Hue in the Tet counteroffensive – or going further forward in history, the destruction of Marawi in Mindanao. The sorts of torture and war crimes perpetrated in Vietnam continued apace in Afghanistan and Iraq.
That is to say, empire depends on being able to conduct mechanized genocidal assaults whenever necessary. The empire managers were not accused of genocide in Vietnam because it was an “anticommunist” crusade. They were not accused of genocide in Afghanistan or Iraq because those assaults were part of the “Global War on Terror.”
The Democrats f****d up their handling of the genocide of Palestinians because the U.S. empire allowed its enforcers in the Levant to outright declare that they were going to genocide the Amaleks.
. . . which made it obvious to everybody that that is what the real genocidaires, Biden (to the extent that he was of sound mind), Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, Miller, Kamala, all of them, have been up to.
As Chomsky would often say about the U.S. political system, “We have only one political party – it’s the business party.” When the A team of the imperialist uniparty f***s it up, the empire managers have to call in the B team to put a new face on the genocide. Right now, that happens to be the Republicans.
Burkle always took the moral and ethical path throughout his career, while helping to found the field of humanitarian assistance and disaster medicine. He notes that, “everything I experienced in war was preventable. It need not have happened. War is not the answer.” But given that the warmongers continue to take us to war, we need the Skip Burkles who blunt the worst effects. Water on the Moon is an indispensable account of the life and work of this paragon of medicine and public health.
Full disclosure, Skip Burkle has been a mentor and a friend for more than a couple of decades. We expressed our outrage about the current genocide here: (PDF) Children in Gaza: Desperate crisis must end
The other book about the Vietnam War that I got around to reading was Dang Thuy Tram’s Last Night I Dreamed of Peace. Dang Thuy Tram was a battlefield surgeon for the National Liberation Forces. Originally from Hanoi, she went to the South in 1966 and worked in clandestine field hospitals until she was killed by the U.S. military in 1970. The book consists of diary entries from this 25- to 27-year-old revolutionary doctor. She was essentially Burkle’s counterpart on the opposing side. For Dang Thuy Tram, the U.S. military’s air assaults and search and destroy missions generated the casualties that she treated. She fervently wished for the defeat and departure of the U.S. military from her country.
Unfortunately for Dang Thuy Tram, her only reward was the peace of the grave. Through her revolutionary efforts, however, her country freed itself from the empire.
