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

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There were scores of witnesses on the ground and still more overhead, American officers and helicopter crewmen perfectly capable of seeing the growing piles of civilian bodies. Yet when the military released the first news of the assault, it was portrayed as a victory over a formidable enemy force, a legitimate battle in which 128 enemy troops were killed without the loss of a single American life.5 In a routine congratulatory telegram, General William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, lauded the "heavy blows" inflicted on the enemy. His protégé, the commander of the Americal Division, added a special note praising Charlie Company's "aggressiveness."6

It was all a charade. The official policy was simply a way to protect the higher-ups whenever atrocities were discovered, such as in Calley's case. The higher-ups could say, "We never authorized or condoned such things. Just look at our rules of engagement." That enabled them to get off the hook as war criminals. Keep in mind, after all, that every U.S. general officer is familiar with the case of Tomoyuki Yamashita, the World War II Japanese general who was prosecuted, convicted, and hanged by the U.S. government for failing to prevent war crimes by the men under his command. Given the frequent personal psychological dysfunctions that have been reported and analysed over decades since the end of the war in Vietnam, is it an exaggeration to suggest that these 3 million men formed a sort of leavening agent in American society, changing the social matrix of the country for generations to come? To what degree, one wonders, is the increasing rate of violent crime in the country; its persistent racism, and its populist mistrust of government (including its Trumpian expression, however paradoxical) a consequence of not just the training to kill and the suspension of basic moral structures, but also the normalisation of the lie as an American mode of being? Hieu, Trung (2007-12-29). "The Christmas bombings of Hanoi in retrospect". Voice of Vietnam (VOV) . Retrieved 7 May 2018.

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. 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?”

a b Inc., Investigative Reporters and Editors. "Investigative Reporters and Editors | 2016 IRE Award Winners". IRE . Retrieved 2017-07-31. {{ cite web}}: |last= has generic name ( help)Over time, following leads from the veterans I'd spoken to and from other sources, I discovered additional long-forgotten court-martial records, investigation files, and related documents in assorted archives and sometimes in private homes across the country. Paging through one of these case files, I found myself virtually inhaling decades-old dust from half a world away. The year was 1970, and a small U.S. Army patrol had set up an ambush in the jungle near the Minh Thanh rubber plantation in Binh Long Province, north of Saigon. Almost immediately the soldiers heard chopping noises, then branches snapping and Vietnamese voices coming toward them. Next, a man broke through the brush—he was in uniform, they would later say, as was the entire group of Vietnamese following behind him. In an instant, the Americans sprang the ambush, setting off two Claymore mines—each sending seven hundred small steel pellets flying more than 150 feet in a lethal sixty-degree arc—and firing an M-60 machine gun. All but one of the Vietnamese in the clearing were killed instantly. The unit's radioman immediately got on his field telephone and called in ten "enemy KIA"—killed in action. Here’s a bonus category that I’ll call Denial. One reviewer asked, “Is this historic material or a script for a horror movie?” The obvious answer is both. The reviewer makes the claim that the “author made up most of this stuff as the writing is repetitive using the same wording, phrases, etc.” An army inquiry into the killings eventually determined that thirty individuals were involved in criminal misconduct during the massacre or its cover-up. Twenty-eight of them were officers, including two generals, and the inquiry concluded they had committed a total of 224 serious offenses.9 But only Calley was ever convicted of any wrongdoing. He was sentenced to life in prison for the premeditated murder of twenty-two civilians, but President Nixon freed him from prison and allowed him to remain under house arrest. He was eventually paroled after serving just forty months, most of it in the comfort of his own quarters.10 a b "The U.S. is waging a massive shadow war in Africa, exclusive documents reveal". Vice News . Retrieved 2017-07-30. 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]

A searing and meticulously documented book...A damning account of the horrors the United States inflicted on civilians.” — Financial Times In his spot-on review, Vietnam: A War on Civilians, Chase Madar sums up the war, as portrayed in KATM, thus: “The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: it was policy.” The same could be said of over 400 years of US history, both domestically and internationally, from 1607 to the present, especially for non-whites. The official government policy was that U.S. soldiers were prohibited from intentionally targeting and killing civilians. That was after all, what the Geneva Convention provided. Thus, the official rules of engagement were that soldiers could only kill combatants. From the 1950s on, the United States would support an ever more corrupt and repressive state in South Vietnam while steadily expanding its presence in Southeast Asia. When President John Kennedy took office there were around 800 U.S. military personnel in South Vietnam. That number increased to 3,000 in 1961, and to more than 11,000 the following year. Officially listed as advisers involved in the training of the South Vietnamese army, the Americans increasingly took part in combat operations against southern guerrillas—both communist and noncommunist—who were now waging war to unify the country.20The 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

VLAHOS, KELLEY BEAUCAR (2017-07-24). "Chinese Troops Moving Next Door to U.S. Base in Horn of Africa". The American Conservative . Retrieved 2017-08-01. If you are faint-hearted, you might want to keep some smelling salts nearby when you read it. It's that bad...The truth hurts. This is an important book.” ―Dayton Daily News Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-09 11:06:34 Boxid IA40257412 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Isaacs, Arnold R (September–October 2013). "Remembering Vietnam" (PDF). Military Review . Retrieved 7 May 2018. 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.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. In a separate investigation, Turse analyzed the expansion of the U.S. military's Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, which is designed to train America's special operators in a variety of missions from "foreign internal defense" to "unconventional warfare". Analyzing government files, Turse found that U.S. troops carried out approximately one mission every two days in 2014. Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and others on 176 individual JCETs, a 13 percent increase from 2013. The number of countries involved jumped even further, from 63 to 87. [55] In his famous chapter How to Tell a True War Story from the Vietnam classic The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien says, "True war stories do not generalize. They do not indul 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 ] My conversations with the veterans gave nuance to my understanding of the war, bringing human emotion to the sometimes dry language of military records, and added context to investigation files that often focused on a single incident. These men also repeatedly showed me just how incomplete the archives I'd come upon really were, even though the files detailed hundreds of atrocity allegations. In one case, for instance, I called a veteran seeking more information about a sexual assault carried out by members of his unit, which I found mentioned in one of the files. He offered me more details about that particular incident but also said that it was no anomaly. Men from his unit had raped numerous other women as well, he told me. But neither those assaults nor the random shootings of farmers by his fellow soldiers had ever been formally investigated.