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

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Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It's an important piece of history. author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and Frances FitzGerald Enough has been said, here and elsewhere, about the contents of the bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (KATM) and the meticulous archival and field research on which it is based. It is a brilliant–a word I use sparingly–work about one of the most tragic periods in Vietnamese and US history. On the occasion of the 46 th anniversary of the end of the US War in Vietnam, it’s worth revisiting the value of KATM’s singular contribution to the world’s knowledge about what the US did in and to Vietnam and its people. And then, in a stunning reversal, almost immediately after the exposure of the My Lai massacre, war crime allegations became old hat—so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking into. In leaflets, pamphlets, small-press books, and "underground" newspapers, the growing American antiwar movement repeatedly pointed out that U.S. troops were committing atrocities on a regular basis. But what had been previously brushed aside as propaganda and leftist kookery suddenly started to be disregarded as yawn-worthy common knowledge, with little but the My Lai massacre in between.15

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 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." Groundless criticism about what he supposedly left out: It’s about war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam as a frequent occurrence and the policies and conditions that led to those war crimes being committed. Turse proves it using US government documents and stories from US veterans and Vietnamese survivors. It was widespread and officially sanctioned. Therefore, there is really no basis on which to criticize him for not including everything you wanted him to include. If someone were to write a book that included everything Turse left out, it wouldn’t be the first. One marine remembered finding a Vietnamese woman who had been shot and wounded,” Turse writes. “Severely injured, she begged for water. Instead, her clothes were ripped off. She was stabbed in both breasts, then forced into a spread-eagle position, after which the handle of an entrenching tool — essentially a short-handled shovel — was thrust up her vagina. Other women were violated with objects ranging from soda bottles to rifles.”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 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

Turse is the co-author of a series of articles for the Los Angeles Times that was a finalist for the 2006 Tom Renner Award for Outstanding Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. [34] This investigation, based on declassified Army records, interviews, and a trip to Vietnam, found that U.S. troops reported more than 800 war crimes in Vietnam. Turse asserted that many were publicly discredited even as the military uncovered evidence that they were telling the truth. [35] Operation Speedy Express exposé [ edit ] Ridenhour Prize, for investigation into the killing of Vietnamese civilians by American troops during Operation Speedy Express [8] 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. 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.20 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.The war's casualty figures are staggering indeed. From 1955 to 1975, the United States lost more than 58,000 military personnel in Southeast Asia. Its troops were wounded around 304,000 times, with 153,000 cases serious enough to require hospitalization, and 75,000 veterans left severely disabled.26 While Americans who served in Vietnam paid a grave price, an extremely conservative estimate of Vietnamese deaths found them to be "proportionally 100 times greater than those suffered by the United States."27 The military forces of the U.S.-allied Republic of Vietnam reportedly lost more than 254,000 killed and more than 783,000 wounded.28 And the casualties of the revolutionary forces were evidently far graver—perhaps 1.7 million, including 1 million killed in battle, plus some 300,000 personnel still "missing" according to the official but incomplete Vietnamese government figures.29

Vietnam would have been unified in a 1956 national election, according to the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, which the US and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) refused to sign, an election in which Ho Chi Minh would have received “possibly 80%” of the vote, according to none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. 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 A searing and meticulously documented book...A damning account of the horrors the United States inflicted on civilians.” In 2001, while researching in the U.S. National Archives, Turse discovered records of a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group that was formed as a result of the My Lai massacre. These records became the focus of his doctoral dissertation, Kill Anything That Moves: United States War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965–1973. [10] [11] Career [ edit ]Kulik, Gary; Zinoman, Peter (September 2014). "Misrepresenting Atrocities: Kill Anything that Moves and the Continuing Distortions of the War in Vietnam" (PDF). Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review . Retrieved 2014-10-22. 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.” Despite communiqués, radio reports, and English-language accounts released by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the My Lai massacre would remain, to the outside world, an American victory for more than a year. And the truth might have remained hidden forever if not for the perseverance of a single Vietnam veteran named Ron Ridenhour. The twenty-two-year-old Ridenhour had not been among the hundred American troops at My Lai, though he had seen civilians murdered elsewhere in Vietnam; instead, he heard about the slaughter from other soldiers who had been in Pinkville that day. Unnerved, Ridenhour took the unprecedented step of carefully gathering testimony from multiple American eyewitnesses. Then, upon returning to the United States after his yearlong tour of duty, he committed himself to doing whatever was necessary to expose the incident to public scrutiny.7 Kelley B. Vlahos, the managing editor at The American Conservative, called Turse "by far the most dogged reporter of the U.S. military operations in Africa." [47] Special Operations Forces [ edit ] Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians

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 Watson, Justin (2002). The Martyrs of Columbine: Faith and Politics in Tragedy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25. ISBN 9780312239572. With only a general location to go by—fifteen miles west of an old port town known as Hoi An—we embarked on a shoe-leather search. Inquiries with locals led us to An Truong, a small hamlet with a monument to a 1968 massacre. But this particular mass killing took place on January 9, 1968, rather than in February, and was carried out by South Korean forces allied to the Americans rather than by U.S. soldiers themselves. It was not the place we had been looking for. Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It's an important piece of history.” ―Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam Higgins, Jim (2013-08-03). "Book painstakingly recounts Vietnam War atrocities". Milwaukee Journal Sentinel . Retrieved 7 May 2018– via Stars and Stripes.The plethora of designations and the often hazy distinctions between them underscore the fact that the Americans never really grasped who the enemy was. On one hand, they claimed the VC had little popular support and held sway over villages only through terror tactics. On the other, American soldiers who were supposedly engaged in countering communist aggression to protect the South Vietnamese readily killed civilians because they assumed that most villagers either were in league with the enemy or were guerrillas themselves once the sun went down. Americans have long believed that the very notion of empire is an offense against our democratic heritage, yet in recent months, these two words — American empire — have been on everyone's lips. At this moment of unprecedented economic and military stre