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Kill Anything That Moves
Kill Anything That Moves
Kill Anything That Moves
Audiobook8 hours

Kill Anything That Moves

Written by Nick Turse

Narrated by Don Lee

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

4.5/5

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About this audiobook

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were “isolated incidents” in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few “bad apples.” However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to “kill anything that moves.” Drawing on a decade of research into secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals the policies and actions that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. He lays out in shocking detail the workings of a military machine that made crimes all but inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 21, 2013
ISBN9781622311903
Kill Anything That Moves
Author

Nick Turse

Nick Turse, an award-winning journalist and historian, is the author of The Complex and the research director for the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Nation. Turse’s investigations of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam have gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He lives near New York City.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A graphic and harrowing look into the past. As a child, I did not understand the negative rhetoric that surrounded the soldiers of this war. I understand it now. This book is a page turner and I recommend reading it, but the stories of the atrocities committed upon civilians is disgusting and utterly horrific, especially the female civilians. Reader beware. I was not prepared for some of these stories.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Turse provides an updated account of the Vietnam War that takes a critical view of U.S. participation in the war utilizing new archival materials to chronicle the war. The book is worthwhile interpretation of the war, although it should be utilized in connection to other books to fully understand a war as complex as Vietnam
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Compelling, heartbreaking. While too young to have gone (in my 50's now) I've worked side by side with hundreds of Vietnam Veterans. I can tell you that a lot of guys came back some of them brought their souls with them, but nobody came home unfazed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Excellent book. THIS is how war progresses. Quite the exhaustive argument against military action.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Kill Anything That Moves is based on previously unused archival material and interviews, and tells the tale of American systematic disregard for Vietnamese lives and the atrocities that were committed during the Vietnam war. In some of the first pages, Turse recounts the well known story of the My Lai massacre from 1964, in which American soldiers murdered around 400 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, both men, women-many of whom were raped, children and infants. Only one soldier, Second Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted, and he ended up servicing only a few years under house arrest. Contrary to what is oftentimes thought today, however, the My Lai massacre was the rule of American warfare in Vietnam, and not an abhorrent exception. The rest of the book reads a descent into more and more indiscriminate violence and successively increasing depravity. Although the book at times becomes a catalogue of violence and horror, we are never brought out of context. Turse traces the various factors that contributed this culture. He starts with boot camp, which consciously dehumanized the soldiers and taught that obedience was paramount. Illegal orders were common, and soldiers, who did not have extensive training in the legality of war, often had to be uncertain about how to respond. Often those who gave the orders did not themselves know what was legal and not. "Body count"- enemies killed, is term that runs through the book. The ubiquitous focus on body counts seems to have been partly an effect of the system's priorities, but became also a driver itself, since both honor and more tangible rewards were distributed on the basis of that measure. This lead to a practice in which any killed civilian (or even water buffalo) was labelled as Viet Cong, and also incentivized the killing of those civilians. A part of this was Pentagon pursuit of the "crossover point", at which enemies were killed faster than they were replaced. The "mere gook rule" said killings of Vietnamese were nothing to worry about. "Free fire zones," special areas of dubious legality in which everyone could be killed, were instituted. A number of actions by the US army served only to alienate the Vietnamese population: people were driven away from their homes, villages, hamlets and crops were burnt, animals were killed, people were shot at, collective punishment enforced, corpses were mutilated. Sometimes the population starved and raided the garbage of the soldiers for food. Some soldiers started making adornment of their victims, e.g. ears on cords. In the chapter on torture, the practices initially described bears a sinister resemblance to the revelations of the maltreatment of prisoners that occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the early 2000's: Electricity to body parts, water torture, beatings, humiliations. The torture was not restricted to these practices, though, Turse goes on to list among other things, hanging people upside down, inserting needles under fingernails, ripping out nails, shackling people tightly in tiny "tiger cells", severe beatings, and free reign being given to Vietnamese interrogators, and claims that all this was widespread. Even applied to the enemy, these practices are controversial, to say the least. In a context were those in the field had huge discretion, soldiers often did not know who were the enemy and were constantly in danger, and proper trials were not held, a large number of innocents had to be harmed. A chilling question is whether also the graver torture that is documented for the Vietnam war have occurred in recent wars, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the similarity of at least some of the practices, there is perhaps no good reason not to suspect that there may be more. Turse allocates much time to "Speedy Express," an operation that took place in a few months from December 1968 to May 1969. This operation condoned massive deadly force on a previously unseen scale, with possibly thousands of civilians killed.A bipartisan delegation visited, two members saw some mistreatment, etc. and reported on it, but were suppressed in the final report. Whistle blowers were not listened to. In general resistance to the war not in the news to begin with. A little more after a while, much with My Lai, then more. Veterans started to come forward and make the atrocities known. These were often harassed. Daniel Ellsberg leaked "the pentagon papers," partly about American disregard for Vietnam lives, etc. Pentagon fought against publication. Conference in Oslo just a week after publication of the pentagon papers, about warfare in Indo-China. Damning statement from commission. Turse does not offer any quick fixes for current or future war-makers to avoid the atrocities of Vietnam, he seems content to document how bad the war really was. It is a worthwhile endeavor.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    “Kill anything that moves” suffers from the shrill marketing of its author. Perhaps that is necessary to gain the attention of a wider audience. While it refreshes or even creates the public memory that the Vietnam War was devastating to the Vietnamese, the claim that the atrocities were not known or were distinctive are not actually true.Extreme violence against indigenous people is as American as apple pie. From the early settlement to the conquest of the West, “only a dead Indian was a good Indian”. US imperial efforts in the Philippines and Central America produced a steady stream of atrocities that continues to this day with the largely unpunished war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen as stark reminders. The United States is nothing special, however. Other empires like the Spanish, the French, the British, the Russians and other were not squeamish either in destroying other people’s lives and fortunes. At the very heart of the idea of an empire lies the concept that some are more equal and their lives much more valuable. Official propaganda, however, requires doublespeak and acquiescence to actions such as destroying the village in order to save it.What makes the Vietnam War different, is the scale of the American force to distribute punishment and violence. While the Italians could send biplanes to bomb insurgent Libyans and the French shelled the compounds of unruly Syrians with artillery, the economic might of the United States and the power of its military meant that they could bomb and set up free-fire zones in areas which lesser empires would not have had neither the potential nor the incentive to do. The American corporate media is also highly proficient in shielding the general public from learning about the damage inflicted (see Manufactured Consent).Apart from reminding the public about the horrors the Us military inflicted upon Vietnamese civilians (and has not paid reparations for), the value of Turse’s book is showing how the leadership protected and protects the blackest of its black sheep. The recent failure to prosecute war crimes has a long history in Vietnam, from the George Zimmermann spiel of eliminating all survivors in order to make prosecution difficult to the lenient punishments of the perpetrators and even quiet admiration by the public (Dick Cheney’s torture specialist in Iraq is now a “motivational speaker” in Texas). The failure to look back promotes future crimes, especially if the idea of empire continues to be pursued.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is an important book. I always had a somewhat vague knowledge that things did not go well for the civilians living in Vietnam during the time of the Vietnam War, but I had no idea it had been this bad. The author lays out the evidence showing systematic, pervasive, and horrifying brutalization, torture, rape, murder, and general mistreatment of civilians all over that nation during the war at the hands of American troops. This book will open your eyes. If only a fraction of the crimes alleged in this book are true, and I think more than that are indeed true, you will want to take action in whatever ways you can. I know I will.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't even know how to begin this review as this book was a startling read. It is hard to believe that our military leaders had so little regard for human life as reported by author Nick Turse. According to this book, millions of innocent civilians were killed and wounded during the Vietnam War. Turse describes many instances of this occurring and shows that My Lai was not an isolated incident as we had been told for years. I am sure there are many people who will not believe this book, but I find it hard to discount. Turse did more than a decade of research and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors. He provides extensive notes documenting his research and interviews. I would recommend this book as an important piece of the history of the Vietnam War as fought by the United States.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Well written review of the darkest of the dark side of the Vietnam War. Turse finally explains why the nightly kill comparisons on the news were so much apart of the deceit of the War and how the war was fought in terms of debits and credits. It makes it very clear that we, as citizens, must always keep a critical eye on those who may pretend to serve us.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow. This book was a challenge to read, but not because of how it was written - but because of the disturbing information it contains. It brings to light a part of the war that I didn't realize even existed. It's upsetting to think that the higher levels of the military and government were only concerned about the body count - no matter how that happened. This "brainwashing" of these young soldiers to act that way is inexcuseable. And I wonder how each of them have handled this when they returned to the states. Highly recommend this book to gain an understanding of a difficult chapter in our history.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is not a pleasure to read. It is somewhat repetitious. These do not represent stylistic flaws, but they are fundamentally related to the subject matter. The subject matter is a systematic recounting of atrocity after atrocity, cover up after cover up, crime after crime, by named individuals at all levels of the military and civilian government of the United States during that long period of war. I'm sure it could been a longer book, but it would have been only that much more unbearable to contemplate for the reader. Like any serious history book, this book consists of slightly over 40% footnotes. It is based on official Pentagon records, newspaper and other journalistic publications, war statistics from the Government of Vietnam and from the government of the United States, interviews, trial transcripts, and war memorials in this country and abroad. The interested reader is obviously invited to see for himself, but I feel no inclination to do so. Frankly, I am glad to have finish the book. I am glad I read the book. I now understand the missing part of the American failure in Vietnam. I understand the darkness that has subsequently overtaken the thinking of my fellow citizens in America, and I see in detail the origins of the actions taken by military and intelligence officials as they committed new war (but not dissimilar) crimes in the Middle East in the past decade. I see also that I was, like everybody else, unaware of the true nature of the war in Vietnam despite despising the effects I saw of the war on television, in my age peers, and in my own family. I think it has become painfully clear that history denied is ignorance enshrined. I think the denial of science, the mindless embrace of myth, the rise of conservative ideology that wants to go back to an imagined world that appears to knowledgable citizens never to have existed-- all this can be understood to be a result of the distortion of the history of living memory. This kind of Orwellian manipulation is demonstrable harmful to rational decision making. We have come to believe falsehood, and this makes us vulnerable to newer lies. We are like people awakening from a nightmare and then trying, and then succeeding in forgetting all of it. I don't want to forget, I want to understand, I want to find ways to avoid repeating mistakes, I want to help others never experience some of the mistakes that now haunt three generations of Americans. I am happy to read and to understand improved reflections of the truth, despite the sadness, wherever they can be found. I highly recommend the book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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 indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe" (78).Kill Anything That Moves is not a pleasure to read. It's not an entertainment. It's a rote account of atrocity after atrocity that gives names and faces to the abstraction created by numbers and statistics. And I felt it in my stomach with every turn of the page. This is war at its most foul, most hellish, most base and brutish. In other words, it's war without the veneer of romanticism; it's war that is not cloaked in nobility and honor and valor. It's about what men can and will do to a people they feel are inferior, labeled as "Other." It's an important book because it confronts us with the truth of what war is and the toll it takes on the land on which it's fought and its civilian populace. And it reminds us of the moral corrosion it sometimes inflicts upon the boys--little more than children--who fight it. Countless novels and non-fictions have been written about the horror of the Vietnam War and the impact it had on a generation, and rightly so. It is important to acknowledge the service and sacrifice of those who fought, regardless of how one feels about the policies of the U.S. in Vietnam. However, those accounts have mostly focused on the American cost in the war. Turse's account is different in that its purpose is to explore the war atrocities committed by American forces as a result of military policies that reinforced a "kill anything that moves" mentality. The book also reveals that My Lai was not an aberration, but only seemed one after the military used intimidation and cover-ups to keep other atrocities quiet and out of the media. This was especially true of Operation Speedy Express in the Mekong Delta, which led to approximately 5,000 civilian deaths (250).Because Vietnam was not traditional Western warfare where troops met on a battlefield, the notion of "body count" as a means of determining who was winning was instituted. The results were disastrous. War became a machine with a quantifiable output, leading to increasing pressure to produce high body counts as a sign of American victory. From this, the "Mere Gook Rule" mentality was born--if it's Vietnamese, it must be VC. Kill boards were sometimes erected, keeping tally of how many kills a unit had. Because troops were told that anyone who ran in the presence of U.S. military must be a VC and could therefore by justifiably killed as an enemy, civilians were often purposefully frightened so that they would run. Women, children, and old men who clearly were not enemies were tortured and killed with little or no effort given to ensuring they were, in fact, the enemy. Weapons were planted on some of the bodies so they could be called in as enemy kills. For example, Operation Speedy Express yielded results such as "During the week of April 19 . . . 699 guerillas had been added to the division's body count (at the cost of a single American life), but only nine weapons were captured" (250). Such discrepancies should have raised suspicions--and, in fact, often did--but the whistle blowers were often threatened into keeping quiet. Turse chronicles these harrowing events, both from the perspective of the Vietnamese survivors and from interviews conducted with American veterans. Turse clearly points the finger of blame at a military establishment more concerned with sweeping everything under the rug than confronting the demons it created with its both spoken and unspoken policies. He's not without sympathy, however, on the part of the average soldier in Vietnam and he doesn't generalize. Not every American in Vietnam is portrayed as a ruthless killer. Many of the soldiers, fresh out of high school, were placed in a war where not knowing who the enemy was, seeing the gruesome and tragic deaths of their comrades, and spending endless days humping through the boonies while worrying about a seemingly phantom enemy created a sense of disorientation, fear, and anger. Combined with fear of retribution should they disobey orders, many would do as they were told without second guessing command. The book is also not without its heroes. Men like Jamie Henry, Ron Ridenhour, and the 100 Vietnam veterans who testified at the Winter Soldier Investigations refused to remain silent about what they had seen, and participated in (both willingly and unwillingly), in Vietnam. The Winter Soldier Investigations themselves "put the lie to any notion of bad apples and isolated incidents . . . the Winter Soldiers explicitly pointed to superior officers and command policies as the ultimate sources of the war crimes they had seen or committed" (239). It took tremendous courage to stand up to the military establishment and these men should be praised for their refusal to keep silent on behalf of a people who seemed a world away to the average American.I'm not naive enough to think that war is completely unavoidable. However, books like Turse's remind us of what war really is and how it can warp the morality and finer points of human nature. It's also a reminder that when we send our men and women in uniform to fight on behalf of our country, we better make certain it is for a justifiable cause--because the costs are just too high and the sacrifice too great, for both sides, when it's not.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A very important book. While researching a related topic in the National Archives, Nick Turse was shown the records of "the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a secret Pentagon task force that had been assembled after the My Lai massacre . . ." These files "contained more than 300 allegations of massacres, murders, rapes, torture, assaults, mutilations, and other atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators." Another 500 allegations "weren't proven at the time." Turse then spent years interviewing veterans and survivors in Vietnam.Turse attributes the atrocities to a variety of reasons including fear, racism or extreme attitudes of superiority, and official command policies foremost among which was the command pressure for body counts. High officers were sometimes obsessed with body counts, and for this, other books tell us, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara himself was responsible. When crimes took place and were reported, the entire Army command structure from company commanders to the Commander in Chief worked to downplay them, suppress knowledge of them, excuse the prepetrators or, if nothing else worked, to lay the blame on a few enlisted men or lower-ranking officers.This book is difficult to read. It was as difficult for me as are books on the Holocaust. I am NOT contending what the military did in Vietnam is equal to the Nazi Holocaust. But it comes closer to me. As a draftee, I served in the Army between 1969 and 1971. My service was all stateside, but I served alongside many Vietnam returnees. What I learned from these men and what I saw of the institutional culture of the Army at that time is entirely congruent with Turse's revelations in this book. These crimes were ours. We have a moral duty to acknowledge them to ourselves and to the world.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kill Anything that moves is a part of American history and atrocities that we would like to forget about or not even hear about. Nick Turse puts this unflinching and extremely well researched part of American Military massacres right in your face, you have no choice but to be moved and disturbed at what happened in Vietnam. Some tend to lend themselves , that it was not the body count that mattered, and the Pentagon was more concerned about liberation. At times this will book will open your eyes, while at the same time turn your stomach at the all out killing mentality at the highest levels. Santioned or not, this went way beyond the killing mentality of the Grunt on the ground. Well done, and one I will keep for my children to read, after they think they have a sense on what the Vietnam War was all about.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Nick Turse has written a directly in your face history of the American war in Vietnam, with a focuson our war on Vietnamese civilians. As Americans we've have long been taught that an event such as the My Lai massacre was an isolated incident in the Vietnam War. Author and historian Nick Turse shows in hisinvestigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was acceptable and not an exception. Rather, it wasfrom the top military leadership to the bottom a consequence of orders to "kill anything that moves." Nick Turse shows us how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from histirical archives to the rural Vietnamese countryside, from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to sanctioned killing campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which the general wasso obsessed with body counts that his military leadership team led soldiers to commit what was almost the equal of one My Lai a month. I have and will always be supportive of our countries military and it's defense of our freedom, this book wonderfully written by Nick Turse show us a history of sanctioned and covered up murder on the highest levels of our militray and civilian leadership.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book will become a must have addition to anyone’s Vietnam War library and marks a turning point in how we will look at the war in the future. My Lai has become the accepted aberration of the war, but Turse opens new doors through his dogged research to show that maybe it was not an aberration, but accepted policy of the government and of the military higher ups.Pouring through Pentagon archives followed up with interviews with veterans and also with the survivors of the incidents Turse gives us eye-opening evidence that My Lai-like operations occurred time and time again throughout Vietnam. These atrocities did not occur because of a “bad egg” in a platoon but because of a culture that grew in the US military forces. It was difficult to tell who the enemy was because the Viet Cong were embedded into the very civilians that were only concerned with harvesting their crops and making a living the best they could and try to ignore the soldiers that were marching through their hamlets and rice paddies. One shot from a sniper could lead to a whole village being wiped out by bombs or artillery. “Body count” became the magic phrase for the military brass. If the “body count” was high then we were accomplishing something. I think the important thing is to not blame the “grunt” or foot soldier out there. This mind-set came from the higher ups in the military scheme of things. The officers wanted to get their “ticket punch” so that their records would show that they had been in a combat zone and if they could add some “body count” to it than all the better. It was these officers who time after time had charges against them buried by investigators and were allowed to move on up the ladder of military success. This mind-set and a bunch of 18-20 year old draftees made for a situation that would lead to in some cases war against the civilians that they were trying to win over to the side of the US.Turse’s book Kill Anything That Moves was a hard book for me to read but I am glad that I did. I do not believe that a true history of the Vietnam War or an understanding of what our soldiers went through during their time there can be made without books like this. Yes it is a tough book to read but as Americans we must stand up and say we made mistakes and try to learn from them. I have to wonder if the military has learned anything or are they still busy trying to hide what happened.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Kill Anything That Moves is a well researched book about the darkest side of the American involvement in Vietnam. My Lai was not only an atrocity, it was the tip of the iceberg. Turse backs up his account with extensive reference to official documents and eyewitness accounts by American military personnel and Vietnamese cilvilian survivors. Not the easiest book to read. Maps would have been nice.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is an important contribution to the canon on the Vietnam War. The author researched court martial records, internal military memos and conducted interviews with veterans and Vietnamese over the past 10 years. What he produced is an important reassessment of America's involvement in Vietnam. Before reading this book, I (and I think many Americans) thought that My Lai was more or less an isolated incident.However this book clearly demonstrates that My Lai was only an aberration in quantity rather than quality. The author cites incident, after incident (meticulously documented in the book's copious footnotes) where US soldiers and marines harassed, attacked and killed civilians. Civilians were killed for reasons such as: taking evasive action (running), wearing black pajamas, or hiding in underground shelters. This is not say that these things happened in every unit, but Turse demonstrates the killing of civilians to be widespread. It's not only riflemen that killed civilians. H&I (harassment and interdiction) artillery missions were in some cases fired into villages (friendly or VC dominated). Much worse, were the amount of bombs dropped on the South Vietnamese countryside (equal to 640 Hiroshima-strengh bombs).One chapter focuses on a General Julian Ewell who makes Patton look like a Gandhi. Ewell was fixated on high body counts in his division's area of the Mekong delta. He and his chief staff relentlessly pushed their men to up the body counts. This resulted in purposeful and accidental civilian deaths, civilians who were then counted as Viet Cong. The enemy body counts are proven to be vastly inflated when the number of dead are compared with the amount of weapons found with the bodies.Many parts of this book were really sickening to read, particularly the chapter mentioning things done to women. Although the official rules for the military may have been to treat all a civilians with respect, the subtext of what soldiers were taught in basic training and in country ran counter to that. The author makes frequent reference to the difficulty in prosecuting soldiers in court martial cases. The difficulty was the MGR ("mere gook rule"). If Vietnamese civilians were killed accidentally or deliberately, was it really that big of a deal?I lean leftward politically, but no sane person could possibly take any pleasure in finding these things out about the Vietnam war. I hope this book is widely discussed and that parts of it are taught in college courses. This country needs this historical corrective, so that we can be more skeptical about future military involvement and what the generals tell us. I strongly recommend this book to those with either an interest in Vietnam or American military history in general.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I went through Army ROTC in college and afterwards graduated from law school. Thereafter I joined the Army Judge Advocate General Corps for three years. My first year 1966-1967 I was assigned to the 9th Infantry Division which was just forming up at Ft. Riley, Kansas. I then deployed with the 9th Divsion to Vietnam 1967-1968 In the Mekong Delta, first in Long Binh (Camp Bearcat), finally at the Dong Tam Mobile Riverine Base. I left Vietnam the week before the TET Offensive. My last year of service was 1968-1969 at the Judge Advocate Appellate Division at Falls Church Virginia. I give my above military experience to explain my utter astonishment upon reading this well-documented history of the 9th Division in Vietnam. I was at all times assigned to the Division's Admin Company and thus was never directly involved in combat. Our base camps were protected each night by our artillery's "Harassment & Interdiction" firing of artillery rounds randomly into the darkness surrounding our base camps. The military claimed that the Vietnamese civilians in the area had been specifically warned to avoid approaching the base perimeter at night. While I hesitate to claim this tactic rising to a war crime, it always bothered me that every civilian had been effectively warned, given the high forced mobility of the Vietnamese civilian population. The closest I came to any evidence of war crimes was a single Article 32 Investigation I helped conduct pertaining to a soldier who repeatedly served as "Point Man" on numerous infantry patrols. In this instance, the soldier had captured a perceived enemy, took a wire hanger, formed a "9" (i.e. 9th Infantry") heated it up, and branded the captive's forehead. Other than that one case I was not aware of any war crime involving the 9th Division. Not until a year ago when an Internet search revealed a questionable short article on "Operation Speedy Express". One evening I was assigned "Charge of Quarters Duty" and spent the night guarding the Commanding General's office. I was dumbfounded to find a very large stand-alone computer and wondered what place it had in an Infantry Division. This book sadly answers my question. The Division's computer was used to track and indiscrimately drive the false increase of it's "Kill Rate" and "Body Count" reports of enemy dead ----- thereby purposely encouraging military tactics clearly leading to massively increasing Vietnamese civilian deaths and war crimes which were then covered up and reported as "Enemy Kill". Nick Turse's within book (unlike the above-mentioned Internet article) is extremely well documented and beyond questioning. I have collected many books on our war on Vietnam and have read a good number. This book is most detailed and beyond questioning. I highly recommend this book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    On the night of March 15, 1968, the commander of Charlie Company said the next day they would kill everyone in the village of My Lai. Asked what about women and children, he said "kill everything that moves." The next day they killed them all, about 500 unarmed members of farm families. You see a young mother holding her baby, you shoot her and you shoot her baby as it hits the ground. This was organized deliberate cold blooded mass murder, not combat. The US government kept it quiet for a year but one soldier blew the whistle when he got out, collecting eye witness reports and getting them published.That is just the introduction. The rest of the 350 pages here are a scholarly history of the less known massacres in the Vietnam War, based on the author's ten years of research including in the archives. Not a lot of people will read it but it helps that a major publisher is putting it in the public record for all to refer to.