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One of the last major underreported stories of the Vietnam War — a six-month campaign by U.S. troops that killed thousands of Vietnamese civilians — may now get the attention it deserves, thanks to a superb Dutch documentary that premiered in the Movies That Matter Festival in the Hague in March.
The movie, called “Soldier’s Bones,” explores the military operation Speedy Express, carried out by the U.S. Army’s 9th Infantry Division in South Vietnam’s Mekong Delta from December 1968 to May 1969. Speedy Express was intended to eliminate a Viet Cong stronghold in the Mekong Delta, but of the nearly 11,000 people killed whom the U.S. claimed were Viet Cong, it’s likely that 5,000 to 7,000 were civilians, including thousands of women and children. Whatever the number, the operation was many times bloodier than the 1968 My Lai massacre, which killed nearly 500 villagers and is usually regarded as the most egregious commission of American war crimes in Vietnam.
Even worse, while My Lai was a single action carried out by an Army captain and his company who collectively succumbed to a vengeful bloodlust, Speedy Express was a long-running operation led by a high-ranking officer, Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell, who was decorated and promoted for his performance. Equally distressing, editors of a mainstream news organization, Newsweek, suppressed the story, ostensibly out of fear of offending President Nixon.
Given President Trump’s expressed openness to bombing Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and the shrinking of independent news outlets in the Trump era, the film has a contemporary ring. It has not yet found an American distributor.
Speedy Express focused a massive amount of firepower from infantry, artillery, helicopter gunships, fighter-bombers and even B-52s on three Delta provinces. Kevin Buckley, Newsweek’s Saigon bureau chief who wrote the story in January 1972 only to have it kept out of print, then truncated into insignificance by his New York editors, called the operation a “super My Lai.” The only extensive article about it, headlined “A My Lai a Month,” appeared in the Nation in 2008, nearly four decades later. That article uncovered three letters in the National Archives that had been written to Pentagon officials by a “concerned sergeant” who described how helicopter gunships mowed down Vietnamese farmers in their fields and even forced civilians to walk in front of Army units’ point men in order to trip Viet Cong booby traps before the soldiers did. The Nation reported that the sergeant’s letters reached the desk of Gen. William Westmoreland, then the Army chief of staff, but Westmoreland quashed an investigation.
Speedy Express’ horrors almost certainly would have remained unknown outside military circles if not for Alexander D. Shimkin, a young Newsweek stringer in Saigon who made a habit of intently studying military statistics. In 1971, two years after the operation ended, he came across a musty U.S. military document in the Newsweek office that said Speedy Express killed 10,883 Viet Cong soldiers while recovering only 748 enemy weapons. Because Viet Cong soldiers were usually armed, this huge discrepancy suggested that many of the dead were not soldiers at all.
Shimkin and Buckley spent months talking to residents in areas hardest hit by Speedy Express, interviewed U.S. officials and participants in the operation, and studied military documents and hospital records. Buckley’s 4,700-word story found that the U.S. Army had turned the three Delta provinces into a “free-fire zone,” where U.S. soldiers were told they could shoot anything that moved. Vietnamese peasants who ran when Army helicopters hovered over them were presumed to be enemy soldiers and became targets. Children as young as 5 herding buffalo were killed and were added to the count of Viet Cong casualties, sometimes along with the buffalo. “Soldier’s Bones” contains archival footage from Speedy Express showing helicopter gunners shooting indiscriminately into villages. (I knew both Buckley, who died in 2021, and Shimkin, who was killed in Vietnam in 1972, and I appear briefly in the film.)
Among the movie’s revelations is the discovery of a U.S. military study carried out immediately after the operation that was classified until 1981. It shows that Viet Cong troop strength in the Delta declined only slightly as a result of Speedy Express, from 10,475 soldiers before the operation to 9,520 afterward — this despite claims of 11,000 Viet Cong deaths. Nevertheless, Gen. Creighton Abrams, commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, declared in the 9th Division’s official publication that the division’s performance in Speedy Express “has been magnificent.”
The absence of a large drop in Viet Cong troop strength most likely indicates that recruitment soared as villagers grew angry with the death and destruction that U.S. forces rained upon them.
“I came to Vietnam to wage war on other soldiers, not on their parents, wives or children,” a senior U.S. military advisor quoted in the film said. “The idea that you can terrorize a people out of supporting your enemy never leads to victory — not in Vietnam, not anywhere.”
It’s that same thinking, of course, behind Trump’s devastating air attacks in Iran, intended to topple the Iranian regime, and in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s determination to level Gaza as a way of eliminating Hamas. More than half a century later, the lesson of Speedy Express remains highly relevant, and it still hasn’t been learned.
Jacques Leslie covered the Vietnam War for the Los Angeles Times for two years and is the author of “The Mark: A War Correspondent’s Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia.”
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that Operation Speedy Express was a large-scale but largely forgotten atrocity of the Vietnam War, a six‑month U.S. campaign in the Mekong Delta that killed thousands of civilians and in sheer scale surpassed the better‑known My Lai massacre.[1][2][3][6]
It contends that Speedy Express was not an isolated breakdown of discipline but the logical result of a command culture that rewarded high body counts, turning whole provinces into de facto free‑fire zones where “anything that moved” could be treated as a target.[1][2][5][6]
The column stresses that official U.S. figures – nearly 11,000 “enemy” killed but only a few hundred weapons recovered – strongly suggest that a large share of those counted as Viet Cong were unarmed civilians, a conclusion later echoed by a Newsweek investigation and an internal Army study estimating several thousand civilian deaths.[2][3][6]
The article highlights that, despite early reporting by Newsweek’s Saigon bureau, top editors drastically cut and subdued the story, while senior Army leaders, including Gen. William Westmoreland, suppressed whistleblower complaints and blocked serious investigations, turning Speedy Express into a case study in institutional cover‑up.[1][2][3]
It notes that the new documentary “Soldier’s Bones” and the declassified military study reinforce how little the operation accomplished militarily: Viet Cong troop strength in the region barely declined despite claims of massive enemy losses, suggesting that the devastation of villages fueled local anger and recruitment rather than pacification.[3][5][6]
The piece maintains that the moral and strategic lesson from Speedy Express is that trying to terrorize a population into abandoning an enemy is both wrong and self‑defeating; killing parents, spouses and children in the name of counterinsurgency only entrenches resistance and guarantees long‑term failure.[3][5][6]
Drawing a direct line to the present, the column warns that this same logic underlies President Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and policies, including support for devastating air campaigns aimed at regime change, and it links those choices to Israeli operations in Gaza that pursue the destruction of Hamas through overwhelming force against a densely populated territory.
The article further argues that a weakened, more politically pressured media ecosystem in the Trump era heightens the danger that similar abuses could again be obscured or minimized, just as Speedy Express was once downplayed by mainstream outlets despite extensive on‑the‑ground reporting.[1][2][3]
Finally, the piece suggests that revisiting Speedy Express is not only an act of historical reckoning for Vietnamese victims and the few journalists who tried to tell their story, but also a warning that the United States still has not internalized the basic lesson that wars waged through the mass killing of civilians cannot produce just or lasting outcomes.[3][5][6]
Different views on the topic
Some U.S. commanders and chroniclers of the 9th Infantry Division’s record in Vietnam portray its operations, including those in the Mekong Delta, as hard‑fought campaigns that inflicted serious damage on communist forces, emphasizing high enemy body counts and combat achievements while omitting or downplaying allegations of systematic civilian slaughter and cover‑up.[4][6]
In the internal Army review launched after critical reporting on Speedy Express, investigators acknowledged that civilian casualties were “substantial” and likely numbered in the thousands, yet also emphasized that the precise toll could not be determined, stopped short of labeling the operation a war crime, and effectively framed the deaths as tragic consequences of intense combat rather than the result of deliberate policy.[3]
Drawing on the reality that insurgents often fought from within villages, some veterans and commentators argue that the intermingling of Viet Cong and noncombatants made it extremely difficult to distinguish civilians from fighters, and therefore see the high civilian toll as a brutal but not uniquely criminal feature of guerrilla war in the Mekong Delta rather than proof that U.S. policy consciously targeted civilians as such.[1][2][5]
In contrast to the article’s sharp focus on American misconduct, other historians and participants in the war stress that Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces also committed serious abuses, including assassinations, kidnappings and attacks on civilians, and contend that concentrating primarily on U.S. operations like Speedy Express risks presenting a one‑sided moral narrative that obscures the full complexity of violence in Vietnam.[5]
With respect to present‑day implications, some foreign‑policy analysts who favor a robust use of American military power argue that modern U.S. operations, even under hawkish leaders, are constrained by more elaborate rules of engagement, precision weaponry and legal oversight than existed in Vietnam, and therefore view direct analogies between Speedy Express and recent air campaigns as overstated or analytically misleading.
Others who defend strong U.S. and allied military action in places such as the Middle East contend that, despite the risk of civilian casualties, decisive force can shorten conflicts and deter adversaries, and that equating these contemporary operations with Vietnam‑era free‑fire zones undercuts the perceived legitimacy of efforts to confront hostile regimes or armed groups that themselves show little regard for civilian life.
Finally, media critics who are skeptical of the article’s press‑freedom framing argue that today’s fragmented digital landscape, despite economic pressures on traditional outlets, makes it harder – not easier – to bury major military scandals, since leaks, veterans’ testimonies and independent investigations can quickly circulate beyond the gatekeeping power of any single magazine or news organization.[3]
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