This scene is taken almost verbatim from a passage in Michael Herr's Dispatches. Herr worked as a freelance journalist writing primarily for Esquire magazine (and later served as an adviser for Kubrick). Whether or not this event actually occurred is unclear, as Herr himself has admitted that portions of Dispatches are apocryphal rather than strictly factual.

Such events did, however, occur, and with more regularity than the U.S. would like to admit. Deborah Nelson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, cataloged hundreds of such events in her book The War Behind Me, which was based on U.S. military documents which were accidentally declassified and then hastily reclassified.

There were also two significant citizen/veteran organizations that presented testimony describing wartime atrocities. These are Wikipedia entries, but both are well-sourced (the latter, for example, provides a link to the full testimony given by veterans), and offer several avenues for further online reading:

Citizens Commission of Inquiry

The Winter Soldier Investigation

Lest my post become an accidental indictment of American helicopter crews of the Vietnam War (which was a very dangerous job - the U.S. lost thousands of helicopters during that war), I would note that it was a helicopter crew that prevented the My Lai Massacre from being bloodier than it already was.

Hello everyone,

Unfortunately, we have already had to remove a number of poor quality responses in this thread, including many asking about the deleted comments, which merely compound the issue. In this thread, there have been a large number of incorrect, speculative, or otherwise disallowed comments, and as such, they were removed by the mod-team. Please, before you attempt answer the question, keep in mind our rules concerning in-depth and comprehensive responses. Answers that do not meet the standards we ask for will be removed.

Additionally, it is unfair to the OP to further derail this thread with off topic conversation, so if anyone has further questions or concerns, I would ask that they be directed to modmail, or a META thread. Thank you!

Unfortunately I have to head out shortly, so I'm just going to hit on your direct question, and have to leave the background of causation for a later time or another question.

The short answer is: Yes.

The long answer is: Yes, and it was often encouraged by military policies which promoted kill counts and attrition over strategic results. It is important to note however, that Americans were not the only ones killing civilians; both North and South Vietnamese forces waged a fairly brutal war, the previous occupations by France and Japan were often just as brutish. So on to the sources.

The first to examine, as is often the case when Vietnam atrocities arise is the events of My Lai. The following is an excerpt from official testimony given during the investigation into those events:

These were mainly women and children and a few old men. They weren't trying to escape or attack or anything. It was murder.
A woman came out of a hut with a baby in her arms and she was crying. She was cryin because her little boy had been in front of her hut ... and someone had killed the child by shooting it ... [Radio Operator Frank] Widmer shot her with an M16 and she fell. When she fell, she dropped the baby and then Widmer opened up on the baby with his M16 and killed the baby, too.

-Herbert L. Carver 06NOV1969

One would hope the massacre of 503 civilians would be an isolated incident, but unfortunately this was not the case. In December of 1968 Operation Speedy Express took off in the Mekong Delta under the leadership of General Julian Ewell, resulting in an impressive 10,889 Vietcong killed to 242 Americans. Yet the final tallies only showed 748 enemy weapons as being recovered, attributing it to the often chaotic nature of an air mobile campaign, the enemy recovering these weapons, or simply that these units had not been armed.

Colonel David Hackworth, who had been a battalion commander at the time, later stated that "a lot of innocent Vietnamese civilians got slaughtered because of the Ewell-Hunt drive to have the highest count in the land." (I've read that the scene from FMJ which you reference is actually derived from an event in which Ewell was present, but I can't confirm it.)

Going further still, the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation - which was an independent inquiry sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War - in which discharged veterans reported on the moral state of the Vietnamese conflict and the atrocities they either took part in or were present for. Repeatedly the theme arose of inflicting harm on civilian populations, often simply for the sake of doing so, with no military benefit from those actions.

Finally, after My Lai the Pentagon set up a panel tasked with with investigating allegations of war crimes. The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group found that over 300 such reports were based on factual evidence, and an additional 500 they had not been able to verify. Among these seven massacres with over 100 civilians killed, over 70 cases of civilians being killed, wounded, or raped; and multiple accounts of torture on prisoners. There has been a good deal of investigative journalism done on this by Turse and Nelson, but unfortunately the reports themselves have not been published to my knowledge.

While outside of the scope of your question, I do want to note that rape and sexual assault were another harsh reality of the war which needs to be examined. All too often we get focused on the killing and ignore some of the other, just as brutal, aspects.

Ultimately, the harsh reality is that violence on civilians was and is a common facet of any military conflict. In a guerilla conflict in which the expected enemy is so tightly interwoven into civilian populace, this violence can only increase dramatically. This is a lesson that has often remained ignored by military and political leaders, and societies in which the public is removed (such as America) from the atrocities of war itself.

If you want to learn more on My Lai, PBS has done some great work documenting it. For more on the war itself, Vietnam A Television History does a very good job of covering the big picture, and is available on youtube.

This is also a good time to remind people that we have a FAQ in which you might find answers to questions that you might have.

We recently updated the Vietnam War FAQ and we now have a section on atrocities. You will find several answers on there from yours truly, but that should not discourage anyone from writing an in-depth post on this very question. :)

This is a graveyard. I am sorry to see this. The question of atrocities upon Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam war by both Americans and Viet Cong soldiers was a major cause of debate since the 1970s and even a factor in the rise (and fall) of John Kerry's political career. Obviously, many if not most Americans are averse to admitting war crimes, and the issue has become an unpopular political one.

I hate to be an accuser, because I was not there, but under the rigors of historical analysis that most similar studies are based on, it seems that yes, there are recorded instances of similar sniping and strafing of civilians.

During Vietnam, America was was held to a far higher standard of conduct during the war by dissident Western critics than were their Viet Cong counterparts, who also waged a brutal campaign. Postwar reconstruction of events however, then led to the equally wrong view that the communists alone engaged in systematic atrocities. In either case, it seems that the burden of proof was never objective, and that questions of atrocities became political issues.

To focus on your question, yes. There are at least 320 substantiated war crimes during the war, and while only several of which were similar to Apocalypse Now's infamous scene, it's obviously hard for many Americans to accept that their fellow citizens engaged in such actions. However, I personally believe it would have been a hard war for America to have waged cleanly. In duration, scale and violence, the war was very brutal.

American tactics were partly to blame. While it is unlikely that My Lai was replicated in scale, America's official and questionable practice of counting mission success based on body counts, the pressures of guerrilla warfare and the obvious presence of residual racism contributed to an atmosphere of stress and alienation from the native populace. Of additional note was the controversial status and behavior of our own allied regime under Ngo Dienh Diem, a man so unpopular that he was assassinated in a coup sanctioned by the US.

Books Cited: Turse, Nick. Kill Everything That Moves. Uhl, Michael. Vietnam Awakening: My Journey from Combat to the Citizens' Commission of Inquiry.