Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (American Empire Project)

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They did it, too! Whenever I hear this sophomoric comment, the first thought that comes to mind is that the Americans and their allies, including the Australians, South Koreans and others, had no right to be there in the first place. This is not an issue of moral equivalence. The "other side" was fighting against yet another foreign invader and its collaborators in the name of national liberation. It's that simple. Turse earned an MA in history from Rutgers University–Newark in 1999 [6] and his doctorate in sociomedical sciences from the Columbia University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) in 2005. [7] As a graduate student, Turse was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2010-2011 [8] and at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He also worked as an associate research scientist at the Mailman School's of Public Health Center for the History and Ethics at Columbia University. [9] This ethnic cleansing operation was not limited to the local unit command structure. In Operation Speedy Express duing the late 1960s in a command that covered the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's most densely populated area, the general in charge exerted huge pressure on those below him to get the body county up, and in this was quite successful: On average in the county, US troops suffered one casualty for every eight inflicted on the enemy. In the Mekong they got the ratio up to 1:134. This statistical anomoly didn't raise an eyebrow at the Pentagon. "Running" was considered to be a killing offense. As one helicopter machine gunner related, if hovering over some Vietnamese did not cause them to run, a short burst put near their feet would, and then they could be mowed down. One general in charge of a more northern command was more creative: He'd go out daily in a helicopter with a good supply of grenades, spot farmers working in their fields and you can guess the rest. Horrendous as these numbers may be, they pale in comparison to the estimated civilian death toll during the war years. At least 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed, mainly from U.S. air raids.30 No one will ever know the exact number of South Vietnamese civilians killed as a result of the American War. While the U.S. military attempted to quantify almost every other aspect of the conflict—from the number of helicopter sorties flown to the number of propaganda leaflets dispersed—it quite deliberately never conducted a comprehensive study of Vietnamese noncombatant casualties.31 Whatever civilian casualty statistics the United States did tally were generally kept secret, and when released piecemeal they were invariably radical undercounts.32

Meticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.” — Minneapolis Star TribuneDuring the American war in Vietnam, between 3 to 7 million were killed in a country of 19 million. No one knows the number with any greater precision because records of civilian deaths were purposely avoided, or as proportionately underestimated as military body counts for enemy troops were over-estimated. While many of these were ‘collateral damage’ in American military operations, most were intentional killing of unarmed and non-threatening civilians, mostly women and children, or the result of military policy decisions like ‘free fire zones,’ irresponsible aerial bombardment, and an almost complete absence of training in either the Geneva Conventions or local culture. A masterpiece... Kill Anything That Moves is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare....Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did.” ―Chris Hedges, Truthdig This was, and remains, the American military's official position. In many ways, it remains the popular understanding in the United States as a whole. Today, histories of the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre cited by McDuff. Even as that one event has become the subject of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by U.S. soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory.

According to whom? What Turse tells his fellow Americans and the rest of the world is breaking news to most of them. Most are not Vietnam scholars who have read hundreds of books and thousands of primary source documents. I am more familiar than most with the information Turse presents yet KATM fills in many gaps and connects a lot of dots that - collectively - form a damning indictment of the U.S. policy du jour. It's fairly easy to dispense with this old canard. Since I have many friends and acquaintances, both in Vietnam and the U.S., who are veterans, I know that many have welcomed KATM. While the truth sometimes hurts, it can also be liberating. Those who were there, whether they participated in the acts Turse describes, observed them or heard stories about them, know the score, as do the survivors. KATM is not an indictment of all veterans who served in Vietnam only of those who were involved in the abuse, torture and murder of civilians and the "kill anything that moves" policy of the U.S. military and their superiors who oversaw the implementation of this brutal policy. Why do you think so many veterans are so troubled, dysfunctional and worse? What do you think many of them see and hear at night when the demons come?

CounterPunch

By the early twentieth century, anger at the French had developed into a nationalist movement for independence. Its leaders found inspiration in communism, specifically the example of Russian Bolshevism and Lenin's call for national revolutions in the colonial world. During World War II, when Vietnam was occupied by the imperial Japanese, the country's main anticolonial organization—officially called the League for the Independence of Vietnam, but far better known as the Viet Minh—launched a guerrilla war against the Japanese forces and the French administrators running the country. Under the leadership of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese guerrillas aided the American war effort. In return they received arms, training, and support from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Rape was as common as murder. A veteran from the 198th Light Infantry Brigade is quoted by Turse as saying that he knew of 10 to 15 rapes of young girls by soldiers from his unit “within a span of just six or seven months.” A Vietnamese woman in an Army report Turse quotes said she was detained by troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and “then raped by approximately ten soldiers.”“In another incident,” Turse writes, “eleven members of one squad from the 23rd Infantry Division raped a Vietnamese girl. As word spread, another squad traveled to the scene to join in. In a third incident, an American GI recalled seeing a Vietnamese woman who was hardly able to walk after she had been gang-raped by thirteen soldiers.” A Marine in the book spoke about a nine-man squad that entered a village to hunt for “a Viet Cong whore.” The squad found a woman, raped her and then shot her through the head. Most every one of us has been ingrained with the notion that the massacre of innocent, defenseless women, children, and old people at My Lai at the hands of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley and the men in his unit was an aberration. U.S. officials were outraged by the massacre, we have repeatedly been told, and that's why they went after Calley in a criminal prosecution. Kill Anything That Moves argues, persuasively and chillingly, that the mass rape, torture, mutilation and slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was not an aberration--not a one-off atrocity called My Lai--but rather the systematized policy of the American war machine. These are devastating charges, and they demand answers because Turse has framed his case with deeply researched, relentless authority...There is no doubt in my mind that Kill Anything That Moves belongs on the very highest shelf of books on the Vietnam War.” — The Millions In January 2016 Turse agreed to remove defamatory statements in the book that Thomas K. Equels and his unit the 48th Assault Helicopter Company knowingly killed civilians in a mission on 4 April 1972. [46] U.S. military operations in Africa [ edit ]The sheer number of civilian war wounded, too, has long been a point of contention. The best numbers currently available, though, begin to give some sense of the suffering. A brief accounting shows 8,000 to 16,000 South Vietnamese paraplegics; 30,000 to 60,000 South Vietnamese left blind; and some 83,000 to 166,000 South Vietnamese amputees.40 As far as the total number of the civilian war wounded goes, Guenter Lewy approaches the question by using a ratio derived from South Vietnamese data on military casualties, which shows 2.65 soldiers seriously wounded for every one killed. Such a proportion is distinctly low when applied to the civilian population; still, even this multiplier, if applied to the Vietnamese government estimate of 2 million civilian dead, yields a figure of 5.3 million civilian wounded, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall.41 Notably, official South Vietnamese hospital records indicate that approximately one-third of those wounded were women and about one-quarter were children under thirteen years of age.42 At the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, they would say: "Oh yeah, isn't that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those people?" No, that was not what happened. Lieutenant Calley was one of the people who went crazy and killed a lot of people at My Lai, but this was an operation, not an aberration.11 As Turse documents, that was the standard mindset among the soldiers who were doing precisely what Calley was doing. In fact, the title of the book is based on what many U.S. soldiers believed was their mission -- to kill anything that moves, including unarmed women, children, and old people. Turse's detailed research, which is footnoted throughout the book, is based on court-martial records, official investigative reports, and personal interviews with soldiers and Vietnamese citizens. In fact, when I finished the book on my Kindle, there was still somewhere like 30 or 40 percent left to read. It turned out that most of the balance consisted of the footnotes in the book.