The honest truth is that we need to investigate even further in some cases.

The "Winter Soldier" documentary has been a highly sensitive issue since it was first released. The Anti-War side lauded it while those who supported the war (and, many years after the war, had a political agenda to 'debunk' it) found it to be exaggerated or downright false.

The nature of the Vietnam War also made it very difficult to investigate. Most engagements were done in places which were unmarked on a map and when it came to atrocities in hamlets, these hamlets could have the same name as a hamlet nearby - additionally confusing anyone who wants to properly investigate it. There is only one post-war investigation into a claim of a massacre which I know of have actually confirmed a soldier's story and I will get to it in a moment.

The Army's Criminal Investigative Division considered 46 out of 109 testimonies to warrant an investigation. Out of these 46, only one individual was found to have sufficient evidence to continue the investigation and confirmed it. The official CID reports on the other 45 individuals state that a good deal of them refused to answer any questions or cooperate (for different reasons, personal and not) while some men changed their initial testimonies.

At the same time, we also have to understand the difficult nature of the war and their service. The human memory is a fickle thing and it can be very difficult for a group of people to agree on details - even directly after the event itself. To make it even worse, an American soldier out 'humpin' the boonies' could possibly have had nothing more than 3 or 4 hours sleep which clouded the mind even further.

Nonetheless, this is not to say or deny that there were no American atrocities in South Vietnam because that would be downright false. Historians have investigated and brought to light countless of confirmed cases of war crimes - many actually found in the first place by the CID (the best book on this topic is in my opinion Bernd Greiner's War Without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam) In other cases, historians or journalists were only armed with the testimony of a single soldier.

One such case is Terry Whitmore.

November 1967. An African-American Marine by the name of Terry Whitmore participates in a search and destroy patrol in Hai Lang forest, south west of Quang Tri. 37 years later, Terry Whitmore writes the following in the guestbook of the Song My memorial museum: "I'm so glad that I did, what I did, STOPED [sic], and went to Sweden." It was the things that he saw during that search and destroy patrol that made him desert the Marine Corps. What happened in Hai Lang forest that day gives us an image to what could happen to a child in the way of a search and destroy patrol. To truly understand why these things happen, we would need to look at the objective of such an operation. The official objectives for the operation was to "locate and destroy NVA/VC-forces. To interdict enemy lines of communications. To deny enemy access to populated and food producing coastal areas". This could mean relocation for some, but mostly, it meant destruction. Cattle was shot and killed, rice fields were destroyed and entire villages razed to the ground. Terry Whitemore's company had been fired upon from a nearby village. It was during the subsequent search of the village that the villagers were massacred by the soldiers. It was justified by the soldiers as being completely infiltrated by the VC and every woman, man and child in the village was considered to be part of the enemy. "We turned around to return to our company when we heard an explosion. It was my grenade [belonging to Whitmore's M79 which he had just fired but turned out to be a dud due to the distance it was shot from], the one that hadn't exploded. The kid must've taken up the grenade and he and the woman was gone. For the first time in 'Nam, I felt really sick."

Whitmore would later on be injured in action (and personally being awarded the Purple Heart by President Johnson), deserted while being in hospital in Japan and made his way to Sweden (through the USSR) where he would remain. While there, he participated in plenty of interviews and even wrote a book (Memphis-Nam-Sweden: The Story of a Black Deserter) on his experiences. Both the book and the interview with Terry Whitmore in Mark Lane's Conversations with Americans were heavily criticized and said to be nothing but falsehoods. It wasn't until the Swedish journalist Johan Romin released his book on Terry Whitmore (Desertören och Vietnamkriget) and the alleged war crime that a conclusion was reached (backed up by facts and detective work) that Whitmore was telling the truth. It took 40 years for his story to be validated.