Phoenix and the Birds of Prey by Mark Moyar

Author:Mark Moyar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bison Books
Published: 2021-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Investigations by independent researchers, as well as a belated investigation by the book's publisher, revealed that the Navy has no records of a SEAL named Joel Hutchins. The publisher subsequently divulged that Hutchins said that he had graduated from a “modified” SEAL training course in Maryland and that he considered himself to be a SEAL because he had accompanied SEAL teams during combat tactical patrols in Vietnam.45 According to Capt. Larry Bailey, a highly respected SEAL who served in Vietnam and subsequently became commanding officer of the SEAL training school in Coronado. California, no SEAL training has ever taken place in Maryland. B. G. Burkett obtained Hutchins's military records and discovered that he had served in Vietnam for only eleven months, not as a SEAL but as a Navy hospital corpsman. In addition, according to his records. Hutchins did not even receive the Combat Action Ribbon, which was awarded to any member of the U.S. Navy or Marine Corps who came under hostile fire.46

Some people have sought to discredit the Phoenix program by blaming it, incorrectly, for causing the infamous My Lai massacre of March 1968. during which U.S. soldiers, under the guidance of Lt. William Calley, slaughtered several hundred defenseless villagers in a hamlet called My Lai 4. Author Douglas Valentine tries hard to substantiate this accusation. He points out that Task Force Barker, the battalion to which the American forces involved in the My Lai killings belonged, received a Phoenix blacklist for My Lai 4. Valentine also notes that, after the massacre, province Phoenix coordinator Robert Ramsdell of the CIA said that he had thought only VC guerrillas and VC sympathizers lived in the village and only the guerrillas would be there that morning.47 This information is accurate. Taken alone, it suggests that Calley and the other American soldiers killed all of the people in My Lai 4 because of information received from the Phoenix coordinator.

To determine the actual role of Phoenix and the CIA, however, it is necessary to look at details that Valentine omits. All of the people who were killed in My Lai 4 could not have been on a Phoenix blacklist, as Valentine implies. Certainly, the infants who died at My Lai were not on the blacklist. The Allies also did not include “VC sympathizers” on their blacklists. None of the Americans who participated in the massacre, moreover, ever said that they used a blacklist, from Phoenix or anyone else, to identify people before killing them. Whatever intelligence Calley and his men had received, it was obvious to them after they entered My Lai 4 that the villagers were not Communist soldiers but unarmed, overtly passive civilians. Once they recognized this fact. Phoenix guidelines, as well as U.S. Army regulations, required that they treat the villagers as the civilians they were, not as the armed combatants they had been reported to be. They could have arrested all but the young children as VCI suspects, but they were strictly forbidden to kill anyone. Finally, Task Force Barker was a military unit under the command of Lt.

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