A Look at “Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”

In Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (Metropolitan Books. New York. 2013), Turse writes that the US military’s official position, and the popular understanding in the US, is that leadership “has never condoned wanton killing or disregard for human life.” (2) On the rare occasions when atrocities are brought to light, they are blamed on low-level individuals and are said to be aberrations having nothing to do with official policy. The My Lai massacre, for example, was blamed on Lieutenant William Calley, who is said to have gone “crazy” (4,5) – although he and his unit were following orders from up the chain of command. In terms of striving for an understanding of the Vietnam war, Turse’s book is of crucial importance for its detailed illustration of two points: one, that the atrocities at My Lai were “eclipsed by similar American actions throughout the country”. A 2008 Harvard Medical School study put the number of deaths due to the Vietnam war at 3.8 million. Turse says this may well be an underestimate. The total number of civilian casualties (meaning people killed and wounded) may be around 7.3 million. This includes 8,000 to 16,000 paraplegics, 30,000 to 60,000 blinded, and 83,000 to 166,000 amputees. This was an “endless” American “slaughter” that “wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year”. (13) Secret US government internal investigations, which Turse unearthed, reveal that “atrocities were committed by every … major army unit in Vietnam” (emphasis in original). When he began his investigation of US war crimes in Vietnam, Turse thought it would be like “looking for a needle in a haystack.” What he discovered was a “haystack of needles.” (21)

Two: This pattern of behavior was not “accidental.” (14) Rather, it was the “outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.” (6; related: 40-51)

The ethos of the US’s Vietnam attack plan was “embodied most fully” in Secretary of Defense (1961-68) Robert McNamara. The plan, which was carried out with “corporate”, “businesslike”, “scientific”, “assembly line … efficiency”, was fairly simple: to kill so many people that the independence/communist movement would “give up the fight”. “At the most basic level”, “everything” thus “came down to” what was termed the “body count”. “Body count” was the “preeminent statistic” – the military’s “raison d’etre” – a command flowing “from the Pentagon…”, which essentially assigned “killing quotas”. The “war managers” thus “base[d] the entire American military effort” on producing “Vietnamese corpses”, (40-4) with results for the Vietnamese population at large that were quite “…foreseeable.” (14) These results were also “facilitated by the contempt that Americans generally” had for the Vietnamese. US President Lyndon Johnson referred to Vietnam as “a piddling piss-ant little country.” McNamara called it a “backward nation”; Kissinger, a “little fourth-rate power”; others called it a “garbage dump”; the “asshole of the world”. A popular proposal was to “Kill ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.” (49) Vietnamese were commonly regarded as “subhuman”, a notion that was tied into the “Mere Gook Rule”, or MGR, which said Vietnamese were “little more than animals” and thus “could be killed or abused at will.” (50)

The strategic effort to produce mountains of Vietnamese corpses began with training, wherein US recruits – essentially an army of teenagers (34) – were intentionally conditioned to regard Vietnamese people as “dinks”, “gooks”, “slopes”, VC (another US-coined pejorative term), “slants”, “rice-eaters”, etc., and simultaneously indoctrinated into virtual sociopathy and toxic masculinity, constantly made to shout slogans like “Kill! Kill! Kill!”. (28, 30) Instruction on laws of war was almost entirely absent, and, if mentioned, was buried far beneath training overwhelmingly intended to mold hardened killers.

Once they reached Vietnam, soldiers found that “emphasis on body counts was everywhere”, coming “down through the channels.” One soldier: “It was all about body count. Our commanders just wanted body count.” A medic: “Get the body count. Get the body count. Get the body count. It was prevalent everywhere… [T]he mindset of the officer corps from the top down.” (44) Corpse production was further encouraged through a system of punishments and rewards. Lower producers had to stay in the field longer, risking their lives. Higher producers spent less time in the field and received awards such as resort-vacation passes, “medals, badges, extra food, extra beer, permission to wear non-regulation gear, and light duty at base camp.” Another medic called this a “real incentivizing of death”. A veteran termed it a killing “competition”. In this competition, some soldiers “racked up huge personal body counts” of “a thousand or more”. (43-44) One, Roy Bumgarner, may have personally killed 1,500 people as part of “Operation Speedy Express”, a case highly relevant to “the American way of war”. (199)

Much of the text is dedicated to looking at specific examples of what resulted from this approach to war and how it was executed. “Sometimes, when units were short of ‘kills’, prisoners or detainees were simply murdered.” Such killings occurred “in unit after unit”. (46-7) Part of the body-count strategy involved using technological “overkill” on the “little fourth-rate power”. Facing guerillas armed mainly with rifles and soda-can grenades, or North Vietnamese troops armed with AK-47 rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades, the US employed an “arsenal unlike any seen before” – “more killing power, destructive force, and advanced technology than any military in the history of the world”. Some top commanders openly celebrated Vietnam as a US “weapons lab”. (78) Ultimately, the US unleashed the equivalent of 640 Hiroshimas on Southeast Asia during the Vietnam war – mostly in South Vietnam (as so many there supported the independence/communist movement), where, unchallenged (as the South Vietnamese had no air defenses), the US carried out, via millions of sorties, “the most intense bombing campaign in history.” (79-80) It also engaged in ecocide through intensive chemical warfare, spraying toxic compounds over vast swathes of land and “4.8 million people”, with resultant cancers, birth defects, etc., ongoing. The US also set “massive” forest fires, wiping out “about 100,000 acres of forest.” (96)

Regarding specific killings, Turse writes “no one could bear to read a full listing”. In hundreds of pages, he describes atrocity after atrocity, but first qualifies that this is merely a “series of snapshots culled from a vast album of horrors” – a “fraction” of the reports he was able to assemble. (108-9) In addition to gruesome killings, Turse logs the repeated American use of human shields, such as forcing civilians to act as mine detectors and, when they were blown up, tallying them as part of the “body count”. (121, 217) Many, such as General George S. Patton III (son of the famous WWII General), took and displayed “macabre souvenirs”, like Vietnamese skulls – a practice unsurprising, Turse notes, given the contempt the US had for the Vietnamese people. US personnel “hacked the heads off Vietnamese” people to keep or “exchange for prizes offered by commanders.” “Many more” took ears, which were sometimes made into necklaces. Other body-part souvenirs included “scalps, penises, noses, breasts, teeth, and fingers”. One soldier noted there were people “in all the platoons with ears on cords”. Another soldier said the sight was an “everyday occurrence”. Soldiers regularly mutilated corpses and took “photos of their handiwork”, “filling scrapbooks with the results.” A journalist noted “thousands” of albums “all seemed to contain the same pictures”: “the severed head shot, the head often resting on the chest of the dead man or being held up by a smiling Marine, or a lot of the heads, arranged in a row, with a burning cigarette in each of the mouths, the eyes open”. Some of the pictured victims were “very young”. “Half the combat troops” had these “snapshots”. “[S]ome American troops hacked the heads off the dead and mounted them on pikes or poles”. Others “lashed corpses to US vehicles and drove through towns and villages”, or ran down “pedestrians by the roadside”. (161-3) As Vietnamese women were “doubly ‘other’”, sexual violence was “omnipresent”. In the field, “rape was a way of asserting dominance, and sometimes a weapon of war” used to torture “women captives to gain information”. Some women were “kidnapped”, raped, and murdered. “Gang rapes” were “horrifyingly common”. (164-68) Torture was “routine”; “the norm”; a “matter of de facto policy”. One unrepentant soldier said torture was used “by all units”. (172, 187)

Turse notes most of this is “forgotten”; “buried”; “vanished” (258) – or, as Trouillot might put it, “silenced”.

Though Turse notes that he reports only a “fraction” of documented atrocities committed by US forces in Vietnam, reading through the two central atrocity chapters (4 and 5) still becomes a disorienting, brutal, and then numbing slog. For the sake of reference and sanity, there could have been more organization to delineate specific categories of crimes in these sections. However, an argument in favor of Turse’s choice might be that to become familiar with this material requires an element of the insane.

Turse elevates his text to essential-status by illustrating that the insanity existed within a wider businesslike, statistical, assembly-line-efficient, top-down strategy of terror.

Originally published on 2017-11-26

About the author: Robert J. Barsocchini is a graduate student in American Studies. Years working as a cross-cultural intermediary for corporations in the film and Television industry sparked his interest in the often astounding discrepancy between Western self-image and reality. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists.

Source: Washingtons Blog

Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!

Donate to Support Us

We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter (X), Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.

READ MORE!

Washington Leads the World to War

What must the world think watching the US presidential campaign? Over time US political campaigns have become more unreal and less related to voters’ concerns, but the current one is so unreal as to be absurd.The offshoring of American jobs by global corporations and the deregulation of the US financial system have resulted in American economic failure. One might think that this would be an issue in a presidential campaign.The neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony is driving the US and its vassals into conflict with Russia and China. The risks of nuclear war are higher than at any previous ...

Why does the US Need Wars and Armed Conflicts?

During the last thirty years after the collapse of the USSR, the world, renamed by the West into a “Euro-Atlantic” one, began to change drastically, giving itself a completely different substance than Washington and the “renewed Europe” organized by America wanted it to be. It began to swell with a completely different meaning, the balance of forces in it began to change, and the East, together with Russia and China, announced that a new future was coming. Even India, Iran, Brazil, and South Africa have grown economically and militarily and politically aware of their place in modern history, demonstrating to ...

Poles outraged by participation of their citizens in attack on Russia

Following reports in a number of media outlets that Polish mercenaries as part of the Ukrainian armed forces invaded the Kursk region of Russia,https://www.lrt.lt/pl/wiadomosci/1261/2341640/lukaszenka-oswiadczyl-ze-pod-kurskiem-walcza-polscy-najemnicyA local blogger conducted a social survey on the streets of Warsaw. Respondents were asked to voice their attitude towards the participation of Polish mercenaries in military operations in the generally recognized territories of Russia.The interlocutors spoke with restraint against the participation of Polish mercenaries in the Russian-Ukrainian military conflict.https://youtu.be/SgUrsTSeD00?si=IkZyKDApOx9e5ULALocal residents interviewed on the streets of Warsaw did not rule out future retaliatory measures from the Kremlin towards their country for supporting Ukraine and acknowledged that Poland ...

Neocon 101: What do Neoconservatives Believe?

“Neocons” believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.Most neocons believe that the US has allowed dangers to gather by not spending enough on defense and not confronting threats aggressively enough. One such threat, they contend, was Saddam Hussein and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since ...

Obama: Yes We Can

Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.

Al-Qaeda’s Balkan Ties: The Bosnian Connections

Should anyone have had any doubts, the barbaric murder of US photojournalist James Foley fully exposes the true nature of the Islamist terrorists menacing the Middle East. Unfortunately, the savagery exhibited in what happened to James Foley was not unique—beheadings and suicide bombings have become standard tactics in the Islamist terrorists’ way of war. Just weeks before Foley’s murder Kosovo jihadi Lavdrim Muhaxheri posted similar photos of himself “in action” in Iraq. Such Islamist-terrorist ritual beheadings were seen during the Bosnian jihad as well, when extremists would produce “promotional videos” of their efforts showing the decapitation of Serb prisoners, or, in another case, ...

Before Columbus: How Africans Brought Civilization to America

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in 2014.On Monday [October 13 2014], America’s government offices, businesses, and banks all grind to a halt in order to commemorate Columbus Day. In schools up and down the country, little children are taught that a heroic Italian explorer discovered America, and various events and parades are held to celebrate the occasion.It has now become common knowledge amongst academics that Christopher Columbus clearly did not discover America, not least because is it impossible to discover a people and a continent that was already there and thriving with culture. One can only wonder how ...

Winston Churchill on the Palestinians

A Special Relationship Born in Hell: The US Should Cut all Ties with War Criminal Israel

If you want to understand what the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States really means consider the fact that Israeli Army snipers shot dead seventeen unarmed and largely peaceful Gazan demonstrators on Good Friday without a squeak coming out of the White House or State Department. Some of the protesters were shot in the back while running away, while another 1,000 Palestinians were wounded, an estimated 750 by gunfire, the remainder injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.The offense committed by the Gazan protesters that has earned them a death sentence was coming too close to the Israeli containment fence ...

Serbian Patriarchate of Peć in the Ottoman Empire: The First Phase (1557−1594)

IntroductionThe goals of this article are: 1) to investigate the role of the revived Patriarchate of Peć in Serbian and Balkan history?; and 2) to explore and present the results of investigation of the problems with respect to: a) the role of the Serbian Church during the first decades of the Ottoman occupation of Serbian lands in the process of the creation of a Serbian national identity; b) Serbian-Turkish relations in the second half of the 16th century; and c) the reasons for Serbian disloyalty towards the Ottoman government at the turn of the 17th century.The article addresses the reasons ...

The Yugoslavia Counter-Narrative in 1993: Sean Gervasi, a Neglected Expert, Spoke Out in the Early Years of the Catastrophe

TRANSCRIPT:Harold Channer (HC): Good evening and welcome very, very much to the conversation. We’re pleased to welcome to the program, Sean Gervasi. He is a professor and academic who is concerned with economics and particularly with what is relevant to what we want to talk about tonight. He has just returned from a long stay in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and knows something of that situation. Sean Gervasi, welcome very, very much to the conversation, and back to New York. Before we go into some detail about what in the world is going on in terms of the Balkans, from your experience ...

The entrance-gate to the death camp of Jasenovac in Croatia

‘Croatian Scenario’ Shortcomings for Ending the Donbass Conflict

The so called "Croatian scenario", is something that has been periodically brought up after the start of the armed conflict in Donbass. (Among other instances, yours truly noted this in articles from this past December 17 and August 24, 2015.) Promoted at Johnson's Russia List, the December 28 Euromaidan Press article "What Ukraine Can Take from the 'Croatian Scenario' of Conflict Resolution", omits some key factors for being apprehensive about the probability for success of an Operation Storm like strike against the Donbass rebels.In 1995, the Serb Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, had essentially dropped the Krajina Serbs, with the hope that he could improve his relationship with the West. At ...

Colour Revolutions: Made in?

Donald Trump – Not My President!

Mark Twain on the Americans

From Cyprus to Syria: Turkey’s Continued Invasions

On January 20, the Turkish military began an invasion of the Kurdish-controlled Afrin region in northern Syria. Turkey’s government has declared that its operation aims “to preserve Syria’s territorial integrity,” remove “terrorist elements,” and protect civilians.The Independent, however, published the first Western media report from Afrin, and Robert Fisk reports that the list of dead includes infants. “One-year old Wael al-Hussein, a refugee…was killed on 21 January, six-year old Moussab al-Hussein from Idlib (clearly from another refugee family) on the same day,” he writes.Many journalists in Turkey, in the meanwhile, are rubbing their hands. Necati Doğru, a columnist with one ...

Germany and the Great Economic Depression

IntroductionThe article deals with the Great Economic Depression of 1929-1933 and its negative consequences on the economy of the German Weimar Republic. The aim of the article is to present the main causes and consequences of the global economic and financial crises known as the Great Economic Depression and to investigate how this depression influences the economy and finance of the newly democratic post-war German state called the Weimar Republic. The particular importance of this research subject is the fact that among all European states at the time it was exactly the Weimar Republic to be mostly affected by the ...

World Conquest: The United States’ Global Military Crusade (1945- )

GR Editor’s NoteThe following article by professor Eric Waddell was first published twelve years ago by Global Research in December 2003 in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq by US and British forces, with a postscript added in 2007. The article provides an incisive historical perspective on America’s “long war” against humanity, which is being carried out under a fake humanitarian mandate. Let us be under no illusions as to the intent of the US and its allies. We are dealing with World Conquest under the disguise of a “Global War on Terrorism”. Michel Chossudovsky, December 24, ...

The Islamic Militarization of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Muslims

Islam in the BalkansIt is the truth that the Balkan Peninsula is a mosaic of different and in some cases antagonistic religious communities with the Christian Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Islam as the principal religious denominations followed by different types of Protestants, followers of Judaism, Armenian Christian Orthodox, etc. The small Muslim communities existed at the Balkans even before the Ottoman conquest of the Peninsula which started in the mid-14th century but it was not until the mid-17th century that substantial Muslim population emerged firstly in Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Bulgaria.In a course of time, the Balkan Muslims became in ...

Democracy