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

This is one of the most shocking books which, as a historian, one has ever read.In the sixties many people and most students were against the war. Everybody knew some of the nasty things that were reported about the Vietnam war but no one knew that the weekly body count was surprisingly generated by the intentional and almost universal killings of civilians, kids and the elderly year after year to boost the body count which, in turn, was used to maximize military promotion and rest and relaxation time and awards and recognition, etc.This book is so shocking that one thinks Turse may be some sort of extremist and obsessed with defaming the military. But his sources, listed in 85 pages, are solid and easily verified and involve hundreds of personal interviews of vets and victims and massive research here and there and in Vietnam extending over ten years. He was a Harvard Fellow and is associated with the Nation Institute. The passion, energy, drive and absolute honesty and moral crusading he exhibits is really puzzling.The reviews are listed at the beginning of the book and they are quite favorable, coming from both the left and right, from The American Conservatives, from West Point grad, soldier, scholar, patriot Andrew Bacevich, Seymour Hersh, etc. The San Francisco Chronicle terms the book a "paradigm changer" and with that I agree insofar as it will cause future historians to re-assess all of our foreign wars and connect it with the nasty things our soldiers did in France while liberating as presented in Marie Louise Robert's book "What Soldiers Do" and what European TV recently started to touch in its program "The Crimes of the Liberators" and what European historians have written when they exposed the fact that the Allies killed four to five times more Dutch people "liberating" them than were killed by the Germans. In fact, what Turse recounts may just be far, far worse than the absolutely brutal action of ISIS, unless of course ISIS is killing females after sexually abusing them with guns and stomping on babies heads to increase body counts for rewards. Sorry to be so shockingly summarizing Turse. To recommend it to others could cause potentially some severe reactions.Turse presents serialized, intentional and constant killings of innocent civilians which just leaves the reader absolutely shocked. He never stops naming the victims, the time and place and keeps going year after year. One at first believes he is making it all up but the documentations proves otherwise. Literally, one's imagination could not make up such gruesome events. Hundreds of good Americans wrote desperately to their parents, to their pols, to the media year after year but nothing changed. The military judicial system here and there pretended to take actions but allowed nearly all of the gruesome murdering to go mostly unpunished. MacArthur advised Westmoreland to enact "a scorched earth policy" and that the Asian mind fears artillery shelling. On top of brutal ground work, more brutality was added upon a weak non-threatening society with relentless bombing, napalm, artillery and naval gun firing so that Turse provides unbelievable stats such a one valley being hit by 311,000 artillery shells plus B52 bombing and napalm strikes and Phantom strafings, etc. He selects three senior military officials for more detailed description of their atrocities: Sergeant Roy Bumgarner, General John Donaldson and General Julian Ewell. What they did is beyond belief. He calls Ewell "The Butcher of the Delta."My Lai was investigated by the Pentagon and it resulted in a policy to prevent similar info from getting out and Turse discovered docs related to this and this seems to have gotten him going. My Lai pales in comparison to the ongoing and constant massacres of 10 to 130 civilians seemingly unbelievable week after week, month after month, year after year. In fact, on the same day of My Lai another massacre of more than 90 civilians took place not far from My Lai at My Khe. Besides this, 3 million Vietnamese were exposed to herbicide and dioxin---we knew that already. The very bizarre habit on part of many GIs was the collecting of body parts as souvenirs, hanging cut off ears around the neck (we knew that, too, but not the scope) and on rare occasion even, sorry to say so, a male genital. General Patton himself, son of WW II General Patton partook in this atavistic and brutal custom when decapitated heads were boiled to remove the flesh and thus he kept a skull on his desk and even carried it during his farewell party.Turse has been faulted for not focusing on the horrible bombing of North Vietnam. Well, that was not his subject. He does mention briefly now and then the atrocities committed by the VC but indicates that they were mild compared to the size, scope and varieties of tortures, mutilations, murder and killings carried by the U.S. which pretended to help the Vietnamese. The juxtaposition of the gruesome deeds and the image sold at home and abroad is THE most perfect and giant example of schizophrenic marketing and successful image making. If a society has THE highest violent crime rate of all adv. societies than one can potentially expects its soldiers to misbehave brutally in wars. John Wayne's movie the Green Berets and Reagan's statement that the war was for a noble cause can only prompt cynical derision. They are in the realm of severe psychopathology and grandiose self-delusion very similar to our presumed high living standard, which BTW few believe any more, given slumerica created by those who were uncritically operating in our dangerous myths.Vietnam was used as a giant experimental societal guinea pig on which to test various new military hardwares, methods of torture and all sorts of new fangled and innovative ways to carry on warfare. The conclusion and the proper policy is to prevent ANY foreign military adventures on part of the U.S. The military has become a caste system of sorts already and we do not need more of that on top of trillions spent on the wholesale destruction of tiny non threatening and backward societies. Is totally immoral to advocate unnecessary military intervention which cause only blowbacks. The U.S. is extremely lucky that the immense suffering of the Vietnamese did not cause massive blowbacks as has been and is happening all across the Middle East.Finally, as a historian one must say that the Cold War of which Vietnam was part, was based upon the totally wrong misconceptualization that communism would be static, would not reform and moderate itself. That demonization was necessary to sustain the military. Yet, since we disengage from holding a gun on Communism it proved itself to be quite capable of reforming and even adopting substantially capitalism and emulationg Wall Street. Thus, had we not held a gun on it, it would have reformed earlier and we could have saved trillions for sorely needed domestic improvements.What is also amazing is the fact that the book was a NY Times bestseller and no one refuted Turse's facts or references and all agree, even critical reviews, that the facts are true. If so, then future scholars will compare statistically the shocking behavior at the personal level of ordinary soldiers and at the bureaucratic level and higher ups and the military judicial with what the Russians did in Afghanistan and what happened in WW II, etc. Psychiatrists and psycho-historians will have a field day at some future time to expose and analyze the deformed and decayed mentality and lack of minimum human impulses on part of the thousands Turse exposes.Unfortunately, Turse does not focus on the ongoing casualties and deaths resulting from unexploded ordinance and dioxin induced genetic defects and the left over general ecological degradatioon which altogether will take many generation to recover, if it is even possible. In a modified fashion it is being repeated in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, etc

Not the book, but the US government and its military handmaidens. For those of us who were around during the conflict, public reaction to the war seemed to be framed by the confrontation of some NYC hard hats and peace marchers - the pro-military right vs the peacenick lefties, a "values" standoff that, unfortunately, left out any consideration of what was actually a foot on the ground in Vietnam. McNamara and the DOD, using finely honed computer analysis, decided to run the war and achieve victory using one simple metric - once the bad guys were being killed at a rate that exceeded their replacement capabilities the war would be won. The key input for this calculation became known as the body count, and the bigger the number the closer the USA was to victory. This metric for success was agressively pushed down the chain of command, all the way down to the company level. Junior officers spent six to twelve months of trigger time in Vietnam; how they performed during this combat experience would have a direct bearing on their career advancement. The outcome of this mix was obvious in advance - measures would be taken to maximize the killing, and this fed right down to the platoon level; units "under perfoming" would be kept in the generally hellish conditions of the field longer, those "doing well" would be rewarded with R&R, extra beer rations and so forth. Layer on this an almost universal racial hatered of the Vietnamese (gooks, slopes, etc.) held by most combat troops - and many of their superiors - and a recipe for disaster was at hand, and it happened.It was decided that the best way to maximize the body-count strategy was to implement a policy called "draining the sea." Vietnamese farmers, the vast majority of the population, would be "encouraged" to move into new settlements or urban areas thereby opening up vast swaths of the country (40%) as free-fire zones that could be pounded with indiscriminate air, artillery and sea launched munitions. Turse details the staggering amount of iron bombs, artillery shells, napalm, phosphor munitions, defoliants, and cluster bombs dropped on the country. As for the latter, one B-52 run could unlease 7.5 million ball bearing munitions in less than a square kilometer; one favored bombing area, the Iron Triangle near Saigon, took 4,000 bomb or artillery hits per square kilometer. In addition, US bulldozers plowed under an estimated 2% of the county's land mass. How did this work out for the locals? Not so good. These mostly remote farming villages usually got the word they would be in a free-fire zone when leafletts rained down the day before death from above was going to be delivered; unfortunately, most were illiterate. Those who left for their "new homes" supplied by the USA discovered that about all that was provided was a razor wire-chain link fence enclosure in which the peasants were expected to fend for themselves. Many went to the cities and the urban population exploded from around 12% of the population to nearly half. Vast slums were created with lakes of sewerage and rampant disease, even including plague. Infant mortality was 36%, and prostitution the main money maker. The prison system for "political deviants" would have made Torquemada blanche.Many Vietnamese stayed in their villages because of family ties and, more importantly, farming was their only source of income. They built bunkers for protection against the next artillery or air bombardment. These were death traps when US ground troops arrived. Grenades were routinely tossed in these shelters while others set about burning down the village, slaughtering livestock and blowing up food supplies, and all-too-often raping the women and killing the inhabitants in cold blood. Village occupants were near universally women, old men, and children. In 1969 the slaugher of over 500 Vietnamese at My Lai got some media attraction, but as Turse covers in some detail, even getting the press to come forth with this story was a real push, and subsequent documented "incidents" were seen as "too hot to handle" by the US media not willing to offend the glorious administration in D.C. or the military. The book supplies almost endless examples of other My Lai incidents and the futile efforts of a number of troopers to get the story out; virtually all of these attempts were totally mushroomed by local commands, the Pentagon, or members of Congress. While 18 officer-grade military were implicated in My Lai, only Lt Calley as officer-on-the-spot was convicted. He served 40 months of house arrest at Ft Benning and was then released. Near as I can tell, Calley was the only member of the US military to serve any time for the egregious and wide spread slaughter of Vietnames civilians. Calley, however, was not directly to blame for My Lai; this incident wasn't a matter of US troops going nuts in the field; Calley's orders before the event were to kill everthing in sight, he was just following orders.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.This book is painstakenly researched and well written. The cover up of the civilian slaughter carried out by both the political and military classes was near perfect. Documents uncovered by the author produced by the after-the-fact secret Pentagon task force known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group not only confirmed incidents reported by soldiers on the ground but in many cases show claims of attrocities were actually under stated. But that's all history now. Speedy Express alone is estimated to have killed about twice as many civilians than 9/11. Ad magnum gloria. To end on another generally unknown aspect of this war - unknow as it was carried out in secret - between 1964 and 1973 the US flew 580,344 bombing missions in Laos, dumping more than two million tons of ordnance on the country (more tonnage than dropped on Europe in WWII), equal to a planeload of bombs every 8 minutes, 24-hours a day, for 9 years. 270 million cluster bombs were dropped, an estimated quarter of which did not detonate - then. Now 40 years on, less than 1% of these munitions have been destroyed and more than half of all confirmed cluster munitions casualties in the world have occurred in Laos, a gift that keeps on giving.

Livro escrito com grande cuidado informativo.

Siempre se te da a conocer un lado de la historia: El que EUA quiere que sepas. Este libro te da un punto de vista muy distinto.

It showed the disgraceful truth of the slayings by American troops in Viet nam and the utter disrespect of the viietnamese people. American soldiers should hang their heads in shame and try to repair the gross actions they made. How beautiful are the Vietnamese people to forgive and maybe forget the atrocities of those ruthless bastards, America, shame shame shame.

The author is very critical about the search and destroy missions, stressing that such missions did not severe the unarmed civilians from combating guerrilla men and as a consequence, it was a shortcut to mass killing. On the other hand the author also emphasizes the illusion of "body count" as a appropriate measure of whom won the war. It worths reading.

I think that this book is the most difficult book I have ever read. I could only bear to read it in short spurts because what is described is so horrific. Once again this is a masterpiece of historical research - unearthing documents, reports, etc. from archives as well as hours of interviews of vets from that war. I read it on my Kindle - 57% of the book was the narrative; the other 43% were footnotes. This book is about what the US military did to civilians during the Vietnam War. The major thesis is that My Lai was not an aberration - but rather policy. The searing descriptions of actual events include random murder of civilians - especially of children, women, and the elderly. The slaughter of farm animals, rape and sadidistic sexual exploitation of woman and of quite young female children. I was an American. I am now a Canadian. I lived through the Vietnam years. As mentioned in another review, I have a passion to fully understand the events that I lived through. This book is an absolute must read for anyone interested in the truth about what went on.