Published at: 22/10/2025 09:00 PM

600 MARINES RECOGNIZE THE ATROCITIES COMMITTED AND THE FAILURE OF THE WAR

(LIFE, November 1966)

• To describe the so-called Operation Prairie, you have to see both sides of the same coin. One is that of those Vietnamese farming families subjected to all kinds of harassment, portrayed on their knees, begging for mercy, terrified at the mere presence of a marine who interrogates them. The other is that of the Law of Cause and Effect, when all evil and all action is returned to the house that generates it.
• During the American invasion of North Vietnam, known as “Operation Prairie”, carried out exactly 59 years ago, in October 1966, more than 600 marines confessed to having committed atrocities and war crimes, which destroyed their lives forever. Two out of every three Vietnam veterans were tied to addictions for life or were shipwrecked by suicide.
• The marines found only “civilians, men, old people, women and small children on the grasslands of the Demilitarized Zone (ZDM)... a three-year-old boy who was chasing them with his arms raised was massacred by unloading a truck of stones on top of him (confession of: William Hatton of the 3rd Marine Division, 1968-69).
• Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Herbert, 23 years in the U.S. Army, stated that he had doubts about the true principles of that war and the unpleasant experiences in the well-known cases of mass murders, torture and rape committed by GIs (soldiers) against women and defenceless populations.
• Upon returning home, psychiatrist Robert Lifton was hired to treat the tormented marines, and treated them clinically. The result of the interviews resulted in hundreds of Marines who publicly confessed to their war crimes, acknowledging that they had chronic insomnia, were confused and oversaturated with feelings of guilt.
• The incessant images of peasants used for target shooting, villages razed to the ground and children massacred for no reason became recurring nightmares, making any attempt to achieve a brief dream impossible.
• The war reporter, Larry Burrows, for his part, captured the other side of the double moral and war defeat, reflected in the face of the casualties suffered by the United States on the front lines. The graphics of Burrows captured for LIFE, in his mission as a photojournalist, are perhaps the most eloquent document of this American tragedy.
• In this single action, the U.S. lost 226 marines, at least 5 helicopters were shot down and 7 pilots captured by the Vietcong Red Army.
• On February 10, 1971, Burrows was shot down in a helicopter during a mission in Laos, on the border with Vietnam. In the exercise of his profession, he did not hide the truth about the horrors of war and the crimes committed by the United States. Rather, he highlighted them to lift LIFE's readers out of ignorance.

Mazo News Team