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

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If KATM were a prescription drug, it would have this warning on its label: Do not read before going to bed, if you’re depressed, or if you’re under the influence of alcohol or any controlled substance. If you suffer from PTSD, be it from war or another traumatic event in your life, read it in measured doses. Yes, really; it’s that graphic and potentially traumatic. According to whom? What Turse tells his fellow US 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 US policy du jour.

Indeed, an astonishing number of marine court-martial records of the era have apparently been destroyed or gone missing. Most air force and navy criminal investigation files that may have existed seem to have met the same fate. Even before this, the formal investigation records were an incomplete sample at best; as one veteran of the secret Pentagon task force told me, knowledge of most cases never left the battlefield. Still, the War Crimes Working Group files alone demonstrated that atrocities were committed by members of every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate brigade that deployed without the rest of its division—that is, every major army unit in Vietnam. Hieu, Trung (2007-12-29). "The Christmas bombings of Hanoi in retrospect". Voice of Vietnam (VOV) . Retrieved 7 May 2018. No book I have read in decades has so shaken me, as an American. Turse lays open the ground-level reality of a war that was far more atrocious than Americans at home have ever been allowed to know. He exposes official policies that encouraged ordinary American soldiers and airmen to inflict almost unimaginable horror and suffering on ordinary Vietnamese, followed by official cover-up as tenacious as Turse's own decade of investigative effort against it. Kill Anything That Moves is obligatory reading for Americans, because its implications for the likely scale of atrocities and civilian casualties inflicted and covered up in our latest wars are inescapable and staggering. author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Daniel EllsbergA 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 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 Meticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune Ridenhour's efforts were helped by the painstaking investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh, who published newspaper articles about the massacre; by the appearance in Life magazine of grisly full-color images that army photographer Ron Haeberle captured in My Lai as the slaughter was unfolding; and by a confessional interview that a soldier from Charlie Company gave to CBS News. The Pentagon, for its part, consistently fought to minimize what had happened, claiming that reports by Vietnamese survivors were wildly exaggerated. At the same time, the military focused its attention on the lowest-ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame for such a nightmare: Charlie Company's Lieutenant William Calley.8 Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-09 11:06:34 Boxid IA40257412 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” ―San Francisco Chronicle Lccn 2012020903 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200057 Openlibrary_edition Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water.4 One veteran told me that his training made it clear that the "enemy is anything with slant eyes who lives in the village. It doesn't make any difference if it's a woman or child." An officer summarized the prevailing mind-set: "So a few women and children get killed ... Teach 'em a damned good lesson. They're all VC or at least helping them ... You can't convert them, only kill them."A powerful case…With his urgent but highly readable style, Turse delves into the secret history of U.S.-led atrocities. He has brought to his book an impressive trove of new research--archives explored and eyewitnesses interviewed in the United States and Vietnam. With superb narrative skill, he spotlights a troubling question: Why, with all the evidence collected by the military at the time of the war, were atrocities not prosecuted?” — Washington Post 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

Yet even the available flawed figures are startling, especially given that the total population of South Vietnam was only about 19 million people. Using fragmentary data and questionable extrapolations that, for instance, relied heavily on hospital data yet all but ignored the immense number of Vietnamese treated by the revolutionary forces (and also failed to take into account the many civilians killed by U.S. forces and claimed as enemies), one Department of Defense statistical analyst came up with a postwar estimate of 1.2 million civilian casualties, including 195,000 killed.33 In 1975, a U.S. Senate subcommittee on refugees and war victims offered an estimate of 1.4 million civilian casualties in South Vietnam, including 415,000 killed.34 Or take the figures proffered by the political scientist Guenter Lewy, the progenitor of a revisionist school of Vietnam War history that invariably shines the best possible light on the U.S. war effort. Even he posits that there were more than 1.1 million South Vietnamese civilian casualties, including almost 250,000 killed, as a result of the conflict.35 Tom Renner Award for Outstanding Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., Finalist [62] A powerful case…With his urgent but highly readable style, Turse delves into the secret history of U.S.-led atrocities. He has brought to his book an impressive trove of new research—archives explored and eyewitnesses interviewed in the United States and Vietnam. With superb narrative skill, he spotlights a troubling question: Why, with all the evidence collected by the military at the time of the war, were atrocities not prosecuted?”— Washington PostIn Military Review, journalist and Vietnam war correspondent Arnold R. Isaacs states, "it would be a mistake to dismiss the facts set out in this book just because one dislikes the author's political slant. His conclusions may be overstated, but Turse makes a strong case that the dark side of America's war in Vietnam was a good deal darker than is commonly remembered. If the American war was not a crime against humanity, Turse confronts us with convincing evidence that there was an American war that it is hard to call anything else—and that we should not scrub this out of our history." [43] The public response generally followed the official one. Twenty-five years later, Ridenhour would sum it up this way.

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.In recent years, careful surveys, analyses, and official estimates have consistently pointed toward a significantly higher number of civilian deaths.36 The most sophisticated analysis yet of wartime mortality in Vietnam, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, suggested that a reasonable estimate might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combatant and civilian.37 Given the limitations of the study's methodology, there are good reasons to believe that even this staggering figure may be an underestimate.38 Still, the findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than 3 million deaths in total—including 2 million civilian deaths—for the years when the Americans were involved in the conflict.39 Recruits were also indoctrinated into a culture of violence and brutality, which emphasized above all a readiness to kill without compunction. Like many soldiers, the Vietnam-era draftee Peter Milord told Appy that at first he only mouthed the violent chants during his army training—"Kill! Kill! Kill! To kill without mercy is the spirit of the bayonet!"—but later found himself being overtaken by the ethos. "I didn't become a robot," Milord said, "but you can get so close to being one it's frightening." Another veteran put it this way: "For eleven months I was trained to kill. For eight weeks, during basic training, I screamed 'kill,' 'kill.' So when I got to Vietnam I was ready to kill." Still another told me that after having chanted "kill, kill, kill" through basic training, advanced infantry training, and long-range reconnaissance patrol instruction, he felt absolutely "brainwashed."