Law at War

The American people have a special relationship with their law. While they themselves loudly criticize it as too slow, often archaic, and usually inadequate, they are at the same time devoted to its extraordinarily high legal principles-principles of fairness, openness, and justice frequently talked about by other peoples but rarely observed in actual daily practice to the extent that they are in America. The American people take their law with them, insofar as they are able, and they find it difficult to accept when other nations do not see justice in the same light they do. That war affects law is not apparent to many Americans, who are so used to peace at home, where their courts continuously function, that it is very hard for them to visualize how combat interferes with the legal process. It will surprise no serious student of American affairs to learn that from the beginning of American participation in the Vietnam War- there was a substantial presence of American law and legal institutions in the company of U.S. forces there. This presence of U.S. law had effects during American participation and after, some of them only dimly seen at this time because we are so close to the event. The purpose of this monograph is to describe the presence of law at a particular time and in a particular American command in Vietnam.