Wikipedia

Dennis Stout

Staff Sergeant Dennis Stout was among the first U.S. soldiers to report atrocities committed by American troops during the Vietnam War.[1][2][3][4]

Staff Sergeant Dennis Stout
CitizenshipUnited States of America (birthplace)
Military Career
Branch
United States Army
Rank
Staff Sergeant E6
Unit1st Battalion / 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Division
Conflicts
Vietnam War

He arrived in Vietnam in September 1966 to join the 1st Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, which had deployed to the Quảng Ngãi province in the Central Highlands.[5] After being wounded three times, he became the battalion's press officer.[6]: 551  For months in the spring of 1967, he observed systematic and coordinated atrocities committed by soldiers in both the Tiger Force, a special long-range reconnaissance unit, and in the larger 101st Airborne Division in the Central Highlands. While still in the Army, Stout reported the crimes to his superiors, but was instructed to ignore them.[7][8]

Within days of being discharged from the Army in 1969, he called reporters from several Arizona newspapers and told his story again. Immediately he was visited by agents from the Army's Criminal Investigation Division (CID). Once more, he turned over evidence of war crimes. He then spoke at an anti-Vietnam War rally on June 8, 1969 in Phoenix, AZ, during which he publicly disclosed what he had witnessed for the first time. Two days before the planned speech, he was visited again by agents from CID and threatened.[9]: 81 

The Army led an internal investigation called the "Stout Allegation".[8]: 338  They investigated his allegations for four and a half years "substantiating 20 war crimes involving 18 soldiers", but no one was ever charged or punished.[7] It wasn't until 2003 that two reporters for the Toledo Blade, Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss, published the first in a four-day series of Pulitzer Prize winning reports on the Tiger Force atrocities called Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths, that the story finally became well known.[10][11]

Background

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In the early days of the Vietnam War, even before the Mỹ Lai massacre occurred in March 1968, reports were surfacing of war crimes committed by U.S. troops. Perhaps the most well known and earliest came from Master Sergeant Donald W. Duncan, a highly decorated U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Beret) soldier, who appeared on the cover of the February 1966 issue of Ramparts magazine announcing "I quit!".[12] He exposed numerous atrocities in the American conduct of the war, including training in the use of torture in interrogations and the use of Vietnamese proxies for the summary execution of prisoners.[9]: 8–10  On June 30 of the same year, three United States Army soldiers, who came to be called the Fort Hood Three, refused to be deployed to Vietnam.[13] This was the first public refusal of orders to Vietnam.[14] One of the soldiers, Private Dennis Mora, defended the right of the Vietnamese people to national self-defense and explicitly stated he would not participate in "exterminating a whole people".[15] In early 1967, U.S. Army doctor Captain Howard Levy refused to train Green Beret medics on their way to Vietnam saying it "became clear to me that the Army [was using medics] to 'win hearts and minds' in Vietnamese villages - while still burning them to the ground in search-and-destroy missions."[9]: 15  Dennis Stout's attempts to report the war crimes he witnessed while still in the Army in 1967 was one these early efforts. He appears to have been the second U.S. soldier, after Donald Duncan, to have personally witnessed and then internally and publicly reported systematic atrocities committed by American troops during the Vietnam War.[4]

Vietnam

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Stout volunteered for the Army right out of high school, starting out as a regular infantry soldier with the 101st Airborne. Once he received orders to Vietnam he decided he wanted to learn the Vietnamese language and taught himself about two hundred words and a few phrases. He explained, "I didn't want to be shooting people I couldn't talk to." More, he said, "I always saw them as human." In his unit, however, the word "human" was never used, or the word "people." To the Army they were "just gooks, or filthy gooks, or slopes, or dinks," he told an audience memorializing the 50th anniversary of the Mỹ Lai massacre. They were to "be exterminated".[16]

War crimes

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On his first operation in combat he was assigned to stick with "an old-timer" and to "[d]o what he does." They went into a small village where the old-timer threw a grenade into a nearby shelter and had Stout throw in a second grenade. When the grenades exploded, Stout heard kids screaming. The old timer threw in another grenade and the screaming stopped. Once the smoke had cleared, they went to count the bodies and found the hut filled with dead "mothers, small children, and old people."[9]: 79 

On another patrol, his unit "rounded up about forty civilians in a field." They all bunched together, hoping, Stout thought, they wouldn't be killed all at once. He was wrong: "Our lieutenant ordered them shot."[9]: 79  When his unit went into large valley they were told to "kill everything in the valley." As Stout described it,

We killed every animal, every person, burned all the houses, chopped down the fruit trees, and put a box of poison down the wells. And so we came in sweeping through the valley killing absolutely everyone, no matter what age.[4]

Diplomat and Warrior Masthead Jan 30, 1967

Within less than a year, Stout had been wounded three times: twice grazed by bullets and then buried alive in June 1967 "when a mortar round hit an ammunition dump" near him. Once rescued, while being treated for a "concussion and temporary deafness", his superiors found out he had wanted to be a writer before joining the Army. They made him the battalion's public information officer, responsible for writing and photographing for the Diplomat and Warrior, the 101st Airborne Divisions' official newspaper.[8]: 70 [6]: 551  Stout was under orders to cover "the positive side of the war" with "feel good" stories. Soon he was bored to tears as he filed story after story, all basically the same with different names. He was elated when he was finally assigned to cover the Tiger Force.[8]: 71 

Tiger Force

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On his first mission with Tiger Force, he watched as the patrol unit gunned down two unarmed Vietnamese men who "looked like civilians" and were shouting "No shoot, GI, no shoot, GI!" When some of the men in the unit questioned the shooting, Stout could hear the team leader explaining, "It's a damn free-fire zone, and you don't question that."[8]: 77  A free-fire zone is "a combat area in which any moving thing is a legitimate target".[17] Free-fire zones are considered war crimes.[18] In the field, officers translated free-fire literally. "'There are no friendlies,' one team leader told his men. 'Shoot anything that moves.'"[6]: 552 

During another patrol, one of the men in his unit "decided he wanted to skin someone." He grabbed an old man, tied him to a tree and "began skinning him at the top of his left shoulder and down his chest." Once the man passed out from the pain, the soldier woke him up by throwing water at him and slapping him. He then tried to skin him some more but the man passed out again. So the soldier shot him and said, "Well, he’s no fun anymore."[19]

Stout also witnessed the gang rape of a captured "teenage Vietnamese girl." He described how everyone in the platoon, other than himself, the medic and one other man, repeatedly raped the girl "over a two-day period." Then they killed her. When Stout reported this to his battalion sergeant major he was told to forget it. Stout then went to the Army chaplain who went with him to talk to the sergeant major once more. The sergeant major dismissed the chaplain and told him "to stick to religion". He then turned to Stout and said, "If I hear another word about this, you're going to go out on the next operation and you're not coming back."[6]: 552 [9]: 79 

Even though Stout was the battalion's public information officer he was not allowed to write about any of the atrocities he had witnessed.[20]

Accusations confirmed

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All of Stout's accusations remained hidden by the Army for years. It wasn't until the 2003 Toledo Blade investigation mentioned above that his story was documented and fully confirmed. The Blade found that between 1971 and 1975, the Army's Criminal Investigation Command had investigated the Tiger Force unit for alleged war crimes committed between May and November 1967.[8]: 264–306  The documents included sworn statements from many Tiger Force veterans, which detailed war crimes allegedly committed by Tiger Force members during the Song Ve Valley and Wheeler military campaigns. The statements, from both individuals who allegedly participated in the war crimes and those that did not, described war crimes such as the routine torture and execution of prisoners[8]: 337, 344–5, 349, 353, 370–2 , the routine practice of intentionally killing unarmed Vietnamese villagers including men, women, children, and elderly people[8]: 335, 339–346, 350–2, 354–5, 359, 361–2, 367–9, 374–5, 376 , the routine practice of cutting off and collecting the ears of victims[8]: 335–6, 371 [21], the practice of wearing necklaces composed of human ears[8]: 371 [21], the practice of cutting off and collecting the scalps of victims[8]: 346, 374 [21], incidents where soldiers planted weapons on murdered Vietnamese villagers[22][21], an incident where a young mother was drugged, raped, and then executed[8]: 361–2, 377–8 , and an incident where a soldier killed a baby and cut off the baby's head after the baby's mother was killed[8]: 360, 363–4, 372–3 

Even with all this, the investigative journalist and historian, Nick Turse, has said that military records prove that "the 'Tiger Force' atrocities are only the tip of a vast submerged history of atrocities in Vietnam."[22]

Going public

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After getting out of the Army in February of 1969, Stout became "the first combat soldier to join the antiwar movement at Arizona State." He wanted to stop the war and he was prepared to go public.[4] He had saved the identification cards of a number of the murdered Vietnamese, and documented the "names and unit numbers of the people who committed the crimes."[19] He had already unsuccessfully tried to use official Army channels to report the atrocities he had witnessed, and decided instead to approach the media.[20] As mentioned above, He called reporters from several local newspapers and told his story. He described the dehumanization of the Vietnamese people, the torture and murder of prisoners, as well as the mutilation and scalping of the dead. He related how an Army medic had murdered "an elderly Vietnamese man and his wife" by injecting them with "a combination of swamp water, rubbing alcohol and merthiolate".[3] He blamed Army policy, not the individuals involved, and he described his failed efforts to get the Army to investigate.[1][2]

He was unaware that the Army had, in fact, opened an internal investigation they called the "Stout Allegation".[8]: 338  They investigated his allegations for four and a half years substantiating all of his claims, but refused to charge anyone and kept the results hidden.[7]

He was immediately and "repeatedly harassed and threatened by the FBI and interrogated by the CIA." He said they were very "blatant". They tried to get his employer to fire him, they disrupted his G.I. Bill student benefits for months and they forced his bank manager to bounce his checks. His mail and phone calls were monitored and they questioned his high school classmates. They even had an unknown woman call his wife to say he was having an affair.[23] He was so harassed he decided to leave the country. When he applied for a passport he discovered he had been placed on a list of foreign agents. He was unable to obtain a passport for eight more years.[4]

Stout continues to speak out about what he witnessed and participated in, and he has argued that if he had been listened to in 1967, "the My Lai Massacre may never have happened."[24]

References

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  1. 1 2 "ASU Student Tells of 3 Atrocities". Arizona Daily Star. Tucson, AZ: Gannett (USA TODAY Co.). December 12, 1969. p. 1. Retrieved May 3, 2026.
  2. 1 2 "Student tells of atrocity". Arizona Republic. Phoenix, AZ: Gannett (USA TODAY Co.). December 13, 1969. p. 15. Retrieved May 3, 2026.
  3. 1 2 "Tempe Vet Relates Atrocity Killings". Tucson Daily Citizen. Tucson, AZ: Citizen Publishing Co. Associated Press. December 11, 1969. p. 6. Retrieved May 22, 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 "We killed every animal, every person". couragetoresist.org. Oakland, CA: Church of Conscious Objection (CCO). February 18, 2020. Retrieved May 3, 2026.
  5. ↑ "101 Airborne, Continuation of History". 327th Infantry Veterans. n.d. Retrieved May 11, 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Ward, Geoffrey; Burns, Ken (2017). The Vietnam War: An Intimate History. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9780307700254. Retrieved May 16, 2026.
  7. 1 2 3 Sallah, Michael D.; Weiss, Mitch (November 30, 2003). "Witness to Vietnam atrocities never knew about investigation". The Blade. Toledo, OH: Block Communications Inc. p. 1. Retrieved May 5, 2006.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Sallah, Michael; Weiss, Mitch (2007). Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 9780316066358.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Carver, Ron; Cortright, David; Doherty, Barbara, eds. (2019). Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. ISBN 9781613321072.
  10. ↑ Sallah, Michael D.; Weiss, Mitch (October 19, 2003). "Rogue GIs unleashed wave of terror in Central Highlands (Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths, Part 1)". The Blade. Toledo, OH: Block Communications Inc. pp. 6–10. Retrieved May 5, 2006.
  11. ↑ Frogameni, Bill (May 24, 2006). "Revealing a 40-year-old horror". Salon. saloon.com: find.co.
  12. ↑ Duncan, Donald (February 1966). "I quit!" (PDF). Ramparts. digitalcollections.uwyo.edu: Edward Michael Keating Sr.
  13. ↑ Arnold, Martin (July 1, 1966). "3 Soldiers Hold News Conference to Announce They Won't Go to Vietnam". The New York Times.
  14. ↑ Cortright, David (2005). Soldiers In Revolt. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. p. 52. ISBN 1931859272.
  15. ↑ Fort Hood Three Defense Committee (May 12, 2017). "The Fort Hood Three: The Case of Three G.I.s Who Said "No" to the War in Vietnam". GI Press Collection. Wisconsin Historical Society.[dead link]
  16. ↑ Stout, Dennis (March 2018). I Always Saw Them As Human. San Diego, CA: My Lai Memorial Exhibit. Event occurs at 1:11. Retrieved May 20, 2026.
  17. ↑ "free-fire zone". Merriam-Webster. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, Inc. n.d. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  18. ↑ "Rule 1. The Principle of Distinction between Civilians and Combatants". International Humanitarian Law Databases. Geneva, Switzerland: International Committee of the Red Cross. n.d. Retrieved May 17, 2026.
  19. 1 2 Stout, Dennis (August 25, 2004). "Beyond the Swift Boat Controversy: Exposing Vietnam War Atrocities". Democracy Now! (Interview). Interviewed by Goodman, Amy. New York, NY: Democracy Now! Productions. Retrieved May 18, 2026.
  20. 1 2 Levesque, James (2014). Not Just Following Orders: Avoiding and Reporting Atrocities During the Vietnam War (Doctor of Philosophy thesis). University of Alabama: University of Alabama. Retrieved May 20, 2026.
  21. 1 2 3 4 "Rule 113. Treatment of the Dead". International Humanitarian Law Databases. n.d. Retrieved May 24, 2026.
  22. 1 2 "The Vietnam War Crimes You Never Heard Of". hnn.us. Retrieved October 4, 2017.
  23. ↑ Stout, Dennis (May 27, 2026). "War is Hell: In Country Resistance, Part 2". amatterofconscience.com (Podcast). Willa Seidenberg & Bill Short. Event occurs at 39:47. Retrieved May 28, 2026.
  24. ↑ Neal Conan (May 15, 2006). "Book Recounts 'Tiger Force' Crimes in Vietnam". NPR. Washington, DC: National Public Radio. Retrieved May 22, 2026.

See also

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