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A review by mburnamfink
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
5.0
"War is hell."
- William Tecumseh Sherman
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke
Most brutal armies: The Mongol Horde. The Nazi Wehrmacht. Military Assistance Command Vietnam? Yes, it was that bad.
This book fills a vital gap in the literature. According to Turse, roughly 30,000 non-fiction books have been written about Vietnam (I have quite a few to go. *gulp*). Those that concern war crimes tend to focus on specific incidents, particularly My Lai. None look synopticly at how America fought the war. Drawing on the files of the US military Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (those that haven't mysterious disappeared), and interviews with veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse has compile a chilling account of the routine occurrence and sanctioning of war crimes.
An estimated million civilians were killed in South Vietnam during the American war. Some of these were the collateral of the American juggernaut: victims of aerial bombardment, Agent Orange, and random shellings. Many more were callously personal: village bunkers cleared with grenades, children run over by convoys, girls on bicycles knocked down by passing troops. And a final category is chillingly inhumane: torture and execution of prisoners, buzzing farmers with helicopters until they ran in terror and then machine gunning them as Viet Cong, hours long gang rapes of teenage girls by combat patrols. Day after day for years on end, in every province of the country, American soldiers mistreated Vietnamese civilians in ways that violated every law of war.
Turse admits that this book is not a complete story, but he tells enough to show a clear pattern of abuse starting at the highest echelons of command. Body count-driven strategy meant that commanders were encourage to manufacture kills by any means necessary. Higher echelons didn't bother to check that the bodies were accompanied by weapons. Similarly, nobody was sanctioned for war crimes. Lt. Calley became the fall man for 40 more senior officers, and suffered only a few months of house arrest and the loss of his reputation. The Mere Gook Rule, which started that American lives were precious, firepower was cheap, and Vietnamese lives worth nothing at all, was applied at every level-from shooting 'escaping' prisoners to flattening villages and relocating the population to squalid strategic hamlets.
I believe strongly that war is a moral enterprise, and in Vietnam those in command showed the utmost moral cowardice and disregard for the honor of their uniforms and the American flag. In seven years of war, Vietnam experienced something equivalent to the My Lai massacre every week. What happened there was just as bad as anything on the Eastern Front in WW2, my previous gold standard for man's inhumanity to man.
- William Tecumseh Sherman
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
― Edmund Burke
Most brutal armies: The Mongol Horde. The Nazi Wehrmacht. Military Assistance Command Vietnam? Yes, it was that bad.
This book fills a vital gap in the literature. According to Turse, roughly 30,000 non-fiction books have been written about Vietnam (I have quite a few to go. *gulp*). Those that concern war crimes tend to focus on specific incidents, particularly My Lai. None look synopticly at how America fought the war. Drawing on the files of the US military Vietnam War Crimes Working Group (those that haven't mysterious disappeared), and interviews with veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse has compile a chilling account of the routine occurrence and sanctioning of war crimes.
An estimated million civilians were killed in South Vietnam during the American war. Some of these were the collateral of the American juggernaut: victims of aerial bombardment, Agent Orange, and random shellings. Many more were callously personal: village bunkers cleared with grenades, children run over by convoys, girls on bicycles knocked down by passing troops. And a final category is chillingly inhumane: torture and execution of prisoners, buzzing farmers with helicopters until they ran in terror and then machine gunning them as Viet Cong, hours long gang rapes of teenage girls by combat patrols. Day after day for years on end, in every province of the country, American soldiers mistreated Vietnamese civilians in ways that violated every law of war.
Turse admits that this book is not a complete story, but he tells enough to show a clear pattern of abuse starting at the highest echelons of command. Body count-driven strategy meant that commanders were encourage to manufacture kills by any means necessary. Higher echelons didn't bother to check that the bodies were accompanied by weapons. Similarly, nobody was sanctioned for war crimes. Lt. Calley became the fall man for 40 more senior officers, and suffered only a few months of house arrest and the loss of his reputation. The Mere Gook Rule, which started that American lives were precious, firepower was cheap, and Vietnamese lives worth nothing at all, was applied at every level-from shooting 'escaping' prisoners to flattening villages and relocating the population to squalid strategic hamlets.
I believe strongly that war is a moral enterprise, and in Vietnam those in command showed the utmost moral cowardice and disregard for the honor of their uniforms and the American flag. In seven years of war, Vietnam experienced something equivalent to the My Lai massacre every week. What happened there was just as bad as anything on the Eastern Front in WW2, my previous gold standard for man's inhumanity to man.