Casualties Of War – Daniel Lang, 1969 ★★★★½

Blood Brothers

Truth was called the first casualty of war way back in 1918, but other losses also factor into this real-life account of one U.S. soldier’s experience confronting atrocity and silence during the Vietnam War.

The most immediate and devastating was that of Phan Thi Mao, a young woman raped and murdered by four U. S. soldiers on a recon mission in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in November 1966. Casualties Of War details how killers and bystanders become war’s victims, too.

The killers are brutalized by war or nature or simply wanting to prove themselves one of the guys. Then there is the one bystander, who refused to participate but saw it all go down and must live with the guilt of not doing enough, even after he reports the crime.

“I knew I wouldn’t rest until something was done about Mao’s murder,” he would later say. “It was the least I could do – I had failed her in so many ways.”

An Army patrol in Vietnam's Central Highlands, 1968. In the book, Lang notes the tall grass and stifling humidity of this location added to the American soldiers' feelings of alienation.
Image from https://pixels.com/featured/out-on-patrol-4th-infantry-division-central-highlands-of-vietnam-1968-mr-pat-hathaway-archives.html.  

Casualties Of War is about the crime, and also its cover-up, one that the bystander, here called “Sven Eriksson” out of concern for his safety, managed to shred by being a persistent whistleblower for justice. His superiors recognized the wanton nature of the crime, but they also saw a threat to unit cohesion and a scandal that could undermine the war effort which made them too willing to shrug off what had happened to Mao.

Author Daniel Lang observes plenty of blame to go around, including the war itself. He quotes an Army chaplain:

“In a war – at least, the war we were in – it was nothing unusual to hear shots that were unexplained, to find a body that might or might not have been shot in combat. Where we were, it was a time and place for thousands of men to play for keeps…”

A short book, Casualties Of War was first published in 1969 as a New Yorker magazine article, with all names changed to protect the innocent (and guilty.) Today their real names can be found on Wikipedia in an article about what would become known as “the incident on Hill 192,” in other words, the abduction, rape, and murder of Mao.

The October 18, 1969 issue of The New Yorker, where "Casualties Of War" first appeared. A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Lang dedicated the book to its editor, William Shawn. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/3659243425170283/

Sgt. David Gervase (called “Meserve” in the book) announced before leading his men out that they were going to kidnap a girl from a village and rape her. “He said it would be good for the morale of the squad,” recalled Robert Storeby, a private under Gervase’s command renamed “Sven Eriksson” in the book. At first he took his sergeant’s words for a bad joke, but his cold manner, and the eager reaction of another soldier in the unit, here renamed “Ralph Clark,” clued Storeby into the gravity of the situation.

I don’t know why Lang changed all the names. The convictions are a matter of record. Maybe he wanted the onus of guilt to fall not on individuals but rather the collective war effort, though to be fair, Lang isn’t writing in the same angry vein of more overtly anti-war reporters from his era. The great strength of Casualties Of War is its passionless stolidity in letting facts speak for themselves:

…if the men could spot any Vietcong in the open, that would be all to the good, but the patrol’s orders – and these had been spelled out in no uncertain terms by the battalion command – were to avoid any shooting matches with the enemy except in self-defense; as a so-called pony patrol, he said, they were out to collect “early-warning” information concerning enemy intentions.

It was ironic that actually finding enemy Vietcong, hidden in a cave network near Hill 192, may have been what saved Storeby’s life. Calling in reinforcements – and using up most of their ammunition in a firefight – curtailed the other soldiers from eliminating the troublemaker who wouldn’t take part in the rape.

A quote from the book: "Day after day, out on patrol, we’d come to a narrow dirt path leading through some shabby village, and the elders would welcome us and the children come running with smiles on their faces, waiting for the candy we’d give them. But at the other end of the path, just as we were leaving the village behind, the enemy would open up on us, and there was bitterness among us that the villagers hadn’t given us warning."
Image from https://alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/vietnam-war-soldiers/

But the skirmish also hurried the killing of Mao, already weakened and coughing from her ordeal. Encouraged by the sergeant, the soldier called “Clark” in the book (PFC Steven Thomas in life) first tried to stab Mao to death, then shot her as she staggered away.

Later, in a courtroom, one of the other defendants would recall Thomas’s words as he stood over her body, carrying a chilling echo from some 20 years before: “You want her gold tooth?”

That war creates monsters is a theme of this book, but Casualties Of War is as much a cautionary tale of peer pressure and groupthink. In fact, the war machine does eventually pause to take stock of the crime, and attempts to punish the wrongdoers. It’s the way those wrongdoers are so gingerly handled that causes grief.

Storeby tells Lang how he tried to bring up the crime several times to the captain in charge of his company: “Three times I saw the C. O. about Mao, and three times he [said] it – ‘I’ll handle everything,’ ‘I’ll handle everything,’ ‘I’ll handle everything.’ Maybe he did, but not in a way that had anything to do with anyone’s making amends.”

A mock military court martial today. In the book, Lang reports "the legal consideration of the crime was a field day of fencing and distortion, of quibbling and traps."
Image from https://www.army.mil/article/209797/mock_court_martial_in_alabama_sets_the_bar_for_training

A lieutenant to whom Lang first reports the crime passes on the report but adds there is no use trying to beat the system, something this officer discovered when an Alabama hospital refused to admit his pregnant wife. The hospital was “whites only” and the lieutenant and his wife weren’t:

“I was saying to myself, ‘What’s happened is the way things are, so why try to buck the system?’ And take it from me, Eriksson, it’s even more hopeless to try to buck it in the middle of a war – there is more of a system then than ever. Better relax about that Vietnamese girl, Eriksson. The kind of thing that happened to her – what else can you expect in a combat zone?”

Passages like the above make me wish Lang hadn’t employed pseudonyms – it blurs the reality even when facts are correctly presented.

Blurring the reality was what happened with Casualties Of War when it was made into a movie by director Brian De Palma in 1989. Actually, the book inspired two prior movies, first a 1970 German anti-war film titled o. k., then Elia Kazan’s The Visitors in 1972, co-starring James Woods in his first film role.

In a scene from the 1989 movie, Sean Penn's character Meserve (at left) threatens Michael J. Fox's Eriksson. Between them, Don Patrick Harvey interjects as Clark, the film's other heavy. No such confrontation occurs in the book.
Image from https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/casualties-war-review/ 

De Palma’s Casualties Of War is an involving suspense film in the mold of other De Palma films like Blow Out, with a memorable if fictional sequence of a Vietcong soldier tunneling his way to attack the protagonist “Eriksson,” played here by Michael J. Fox. Other action sequences occur after the patrol has returned and Mao has been murdered, when Eriksson survives multiple attempts on his life by the other soldiers.

There is little of that in the book, just a vague friendly fire incident which leaves Storeby suspecting but not knowing a former comrade instigated it. The book instead focuses on Storeby’s quiet recollections over coffee with his wife and Lang, as well as trial testimony when the murder case was finally brought to court by the Army:

Q: Why did you want other members of the squad to think you were a rapist?

A: Better to go into the hooch, sir, and keep contentment in the squad, and keep a better – well, how can I explain it? – keep the thing running smooth. It makes for an easier mission and no problems.

Once exposed, the Army did an effective job of investigating the crime and bringing those responsible to court. They did retrieve Mao’s body for a full autopsy, which in turn gave the guilty nowhere to hide.

A military chaplain in Vietnam. A Mormon chaplain helped Storeby get action taken about Mao's murder, while a Catholic chaplain helped persuade one of her attackers to testify against the others in court.
Image from https://vvaveteran.org/36-6/36-6_chaplains.html

Punishment, though, would be another matter. After their convictions, the four soldiers served a total of less than 10 years. According to Wikipedia, one of them, Thomas, would go on in 1992 to be implicated in another murder, the racially-motivated killing of a sailor. Suffice it to say the system failed that sailor, as it did Mao.

I do wish Lang had broadened his approach. Admittedly, he wrote this as a long magazine article, but it was never expanded on before Lang’s death in 1981.

You wonder what happened to “Eriksson”/Storeby after 1969. Elia Kazan did, too; that was the focus of his movie The Visitors, in which someone like him is confronted Stateside by former comrades-in-arms he helped put away.

Author Daniel Lang at work. His editor William Shawn called Lang "a student of the conscience." Lang died on November 17, 1981 at 68.
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Lang_(writer)

Lang’s laser focus is nevertheless a strength of the book. Mao’s case is never allowed to slide away from the center of our view. “Eriksson” often lacerates himself verbally about not doing more, particularly when he found himself alone with Mao and thought of getting her back to her village. Much time is spent exploring the bonds of brotherhood in combat, and how much a soldier is bound to service a cause he finds abhorrent, whether that be a single wanton rape or a larger enterprise of greater violence.

Lang leaves it to the reader to decide what it all means, a signature strength of the book in my view. While it is never clear here if blowing the whistle was worth it for anyone, it ends on an unambiguous note of moral clarity from Eriksson/Storeby:

“Another man might have called it something else, but the idea was simply that we had to answer for what we did. We had to answer to something, to someone – maybe just to ourselves.”