‘Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam’ By Nick Turse
(Metropolitan) - ’Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam’ by Nick Turse
As his title suggests, Turse is plunging into dark waters of the American way of war. It was a bloody affair, and estimates of Vietnamese deaths vary widely, but they were probably in excess of 2 million — a large number, he notes, for a country of just 19 million at the time. A policy of village destruction, heavy bombardment, free-fire zones, “relocation” of peasants and other indignities created millions of displaced people and millions of wounded. This useless bloodbath is a resilient, if vaguely understood, lesson of Vietnam.
With his urgent but highly readable style, Turse takes us through this landscape of failed policies, government mendacity and Vietnamese anguish, a familiar topography for those steeped in the many histories — the best ones by journalists — of this 1964-75 debacle. But Turse is up to something different and even more provocative: He 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?
For the atrocities — many murders of civilians in South Vietnam — were known to the Pentagon brass and the likes of Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Army Secretary Stanley Resor. Letters were written by soldiers and Marines, investigations were conducted and reports filed. Almost all were suppressed, hidden from public view. My Laiwas atypical in scale (400 killed) but not in kind, and the military knew it. Turse takes us through many of these atrocities, large and small, to document the malignancy growing inside the U.S. armed forces.
Particularly striking is Operation Speedy Express, conducted in the Mekong Delta by the 9th Infantry Division under the command of Maj. Gen. Julian Ewell. Turse documents the savagery of Speedy Express, the gratuitous execution of thousands of civilians in pursuit of high body counts and career advancement. Thousands of dead Vietnamese, claimed by Ewell and his cohort to be Viet Cong guerrillas, were found with very few weapons. The Army was fully aware of what Ewell was doing, and rewarded him with a third star and a prestigious place at the Paris peace negotiations.
Turse poignantly asks, “Where have all the war crimes gone?” But his answers are not commensurate with his research. He spends several pages on the case of Newsweek correspondents Kevin Buckley and Alexander Shimkin and the evisceration of their long expose of Ewell by feckless editors in New York. “Had Buckley and Shimskin’s investigation been published in full form in January or February 1972,” he writes, “it might have proven to be the crest of the wave of interest in war crimes allegations, resulting in irresistible public pressure for high-level inquires.” But the My Lai massacre had already been aired and had stirred only a very brief public outrage before subsiding into indifference or, indeed, a defense of Lt. William Calley. The Winter Soldier hearings, in which Vietnam veterans told their stories of grisly atrocities in a public forum, were covered by only one major newspaper, in nearby Detroit.
Turse has the journalist’s faith that exposure will result in justice, but in the case of war, there’s little evidence that the public wants to know more about atrocities, much less act upon them. British scholar Kendrick Oliver made this argument brilliantly in his book on My Lai, showing how reactions to revealed atrocities follow a pattern that ultimately leads to a rally-round-the-troops phenomenon. One could contend that war, by its very nature — and not just in Vietnam and Cambodia, but in Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan — similarly leads to indifference to civilian suffering or even to blaming the victims.
Turse forcefully argues the narrower question of how the government failed to prosecute crimes committed in Vietnam or Cambodia (apart from Calley, who got 31 / 2 years of house arrest for hundreds of murders). He provides revealing details about the years-long Pentagon coverup, such as Laird’s taking tighter control of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, “which allowed key Defense Department officials to take an even more active role in suppressing war crimes cases. Investigations could now be quashed at the highest levels — and evidence suggests that, indeed, they were.”
“As I came to see,” Turse writes, “the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants — the endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year throughout the Vietnam War — was neither accidental nor unforeseeable.”
Will we ever come to terms with this shameful aspect of war? Turse has given us, at least, one step forward.
John Tirman is executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies and the author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”
KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES
The Real American War in Vietnam
By Nick Turse
Also, I did not see anything in the review that explained why so many were intent on killing civilians, with the exception of Julian Ewell's desire for promotion. A lot of the soldiers who would have been involved would have been draftees who were just doing their time until they got out, who would not have cared much about a promotion.
I would just have been interested to learn why so many committed these atrocities. Might be in the book, but it wasn't in the review.
Far from a vet bashing diatribe, Kill Anything That Moves, more than any of the 30,000 volumes written on the Vietnam War, offers the complete picture of the policies strategies and results from all quarters.
The authors humane treatment of a very inhumane time in our history is a testament not only to his research skill by his engaging narrative style. I was blow away by the book.
As an American, I totally understand and support the decision that the United States needed to cut the loss and get out of the quagmire that more than 58,000 young men and women had given their lives and financial resources in a civil war over 10 years. My attitude would have been if those Vietnamese wanted Viet Cong, let’s them have it, period.
The sad thing is that American leaders committed troops in harm ways without clear strategy of victory and exit. American leaders denied Vietnam American soldiers (Veterans) of their victory and denied the Vietnamese people (South) of their chance to fight a real war against the invasion of North Vietnamese Communists by vetoeing South Vietnamese military to take the fight in North Vietnam during the long years of war.
The Paris Peace Accords represented a shameful act of international community for having abandonned South Vietnam when North Vietnam broke the agreement by invading militarily South Vietnam.
The sacrifices of Americans, Allied Forces and ARVN soldiers should always be remembered and thanked for defending the freedom of Vietnamese people.
http://eyedrd.org/2013/01/40th-anniversary-of-paris-peace-accords-south-vietnam-was-betrayed-by-america-and-vietnamese-communists-deceived-the-world.html#more-19445