Remembering Robert McNamara

ZINA SAUNDERS

I first met Robert McNamara in the summer of 1967.

The meeting had been arranged by Jerome Weisner, then the provost of MIT. I had just returned from a trip to South Vietnam, where, as a reporter for The New Yorker, I had witnessed the substantial destruction by American air power of two provinces, Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh. Flying in the back seat of Forward Air Control planes--small Cessnas that coordinated the bombing and strafing runs by radio contact with ground forces and the bomber pilots--I measured the destruction that had already occurred and witnessed at first hand the destruction of villages as it transpired. The policies were clear. Leaflets dropped on villages had announced, "The Vietcong hide among innocent women and children in your villages.... If the Vietcong in this area use you or your village for this purpose, you can expect death from the sky." Death from the sky came. After it had, more leaflets were dropped, saying, "Your village was bombed because you harbored Vietcong.... Your village will be bombed again if you harbor the Vietcong in any way."

The results were also clear. As I could see from the air, in Quang Ngai province some 70 percent of the villages had been destroyed. All this, in one of the euphemisms that were the lingua franca of the Vietnam War, was called "the air war." Actually, it was one-sided air slaughter, mostly of civilians. I was 23 years old at the time and had no notion what a war crime was; but it became clear to me later that that was what I had been witnessing, day after day. (Six months after I left, in March 1968, American troops committed the massacre at My Lai, in which some 350 people were killed.)

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