A Look at “Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam”
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” [...]
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.
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.
With rare exception, the question of whether the atomic bombs were necessary to end World War Two is debated only deep within the safety of academic circles.Could a land invasion have been otherwise avoided? Would more diplomacy have achieved the same ends without the destruction of two cities? Could an atomic test on a deserted island have convinced the Japanese? Was the surrender instead driven primarily by the entry of the Soviets into the Pacific War, which, by historical accident, took place two days after Hiroshima—and the day before Nagasaki was immolated?But it is not only the history of the ...
How Dumb is the CIA? With the hydrogen bomb test by North Korea, it should be recalled the CIA was dumb enough to be responsible for North Korea acquiring nukes.Reorganized Murder IncorporatedAccording to a Washington Post article, John Brennan has set out to restructure the CIA's longstanding model:"At issue is a basic structure that has been in place since the agency’s inception, with employees divided by function among four major directorates. The best known are the National Clandestine Service, which sends case officers overseas on spying missions and carries out covert operations, and the Directorate of Intelligence, which employs thousands ...
June 10 is a sad date in the history of the UN, the institution originally meant to play the key role in ensuring peace, security, and the primacy of law in the world. The decade since the passing of the June 10, 1999 UN Security Council Resolution 1244 addressing the Kosovo problem – the document totally ignored throughout the period – has shown that the UN is no longer playing the role prescribed to it by the post-World War II system of the international law. The Resolution the tenth anniversary of which nobody seems willing to celebrate in the UN ...
Wednesday, May 30th, was Memorial Day in the United States. The commemoration began in 1868 shortly after the American Civil War, when townsmen in several communities came together to decorate the graves of the fallen on the last Monday in May. The practice began in the northern states but soon spread to the south and the annual remembrance ceremony soon took on the name Decoration Day. As wars proliferated in the twentieth century the commemoration eventually lost its association with the Civil War and was increasingly referred to nationally as Memorial Day, eventually becoming a federal holiday.The American Civil war ...
Unfathomable as that may appear, yes, it was quite possible for the second-ranking slaughterhouse in Europe in recent memory to have slipped off the radar screen. Even such a renowned authority as Professor Gideon Greif is having an exceptionally difficult time of it in trying to put it back on.Precisely because it has not been the theme of any Hollywood spectaculars, Jasenovac does not attract any school excursions and textbooks are largely silent about it. Some background information on Jasenovac therefore seems like a good place to start.The Jasenovac death camp (1941 – 1945) is inextricably bound up with the ...
War with Russia appears increasingly likely as the US and its NATO satraps continue their military provocations of Moscow.As dangers mount, our foolish politicians should all be forced to read, and then re-read, Prof. Christopher Clark’s magisterial book, ‘The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.’ What is past increasingly appears prologue.Prof. Clark carefully details how small cabals of anti-German senior officials in France, Britain and Russia engineered World War I, a dire conflict that was unnecessary, idiotic, and illogical. Germany and Austria-Hungary of course share some the blame, but to a much lesser degree than the bellicose French, ...
For years now, the Western elite have been incessantly pushing the slogan that ‘Assad must go.’ Under the pretext of removing an ‘evil’ dictator and helping the people of Syria, the West has been funding, arming and training an array of Al-Qaeda affiliated legions to force regime change in the country. Contrary to helping the people of Syria however, this has only worked to bring pain, misery and tragedy to Syria.Even the former US Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, admitted that the insistence on ‘Assad must go’ has “paralyzed” any rationale Syrian strategy. Whenever the West appears to have moved on ...
Photo evidence of a rapid Islamization of EuroChristian southern province of the Republic of Serbia - Kosovo-Metochia.The province is occupied by NATO gangsters in June 1999 and since that time the province is experiencing massive destruction of Serbian Christian Orthodox churches and monasteries followed by building of new mosques by Muslim Albanians.Financial support for Islamization of Kosovo-Metochia is of three sources:1) Muslim Albanian diaspora living & working in Western countries;2) The Wahhabites of Saudi Arabia; and3) Other Sunni Islamic countries, especially Turkey.During the last 15 years there were more built mosques than during 400 years of Ottoman rule in Kosovo-Metochia. ...
The Balkans conflicts of the 1990s saw a massive revival and resurgence of US and Western media propaganda and infowar techniques. The “new” advocacy journalists recalled the “yellow journalism” of William Randolph Hearst, who helped induce the US to engage in the imperialistic or colonial war in Cuba in 1898, the Spanish-American War. This marked the emergence of the US as an expansionist global imperial and colonial power, like Britain, France, Spain, and Germany had been. Hearst was credited with manufacturing or “furnishing” the war in Cuba.Frederic Remington, his correspondent in Cuba, reported that nothing was happening in Cuba, that ...
After the first ever cabinet meeting in the Golan Heights, Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech on April 17, 2016 that the territory “will remain under Israel’s sovereignty permanently.” This elicited admonitions from some of Israel’s greatest allies, the United States and Germany, and renewed attention on the issue.The Golan Heights were opportunistically occupied by Israel after its victory in the 1967 six-day-war. A United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) has monitored the region since 1974, when Israel and Syria signed a ceasefire agreement, and it has been considered an occupied territory of the UN and the ...
The US military forces committed a classical example of the aggression on one sovereign and independent state on April 6th, 2017 by bombing a territory of Syrian Arab Republic by 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles killing civilians who are proclaimed as usually as “collateral damage”. A formal excuse for the aggression was based as many times before (from Vietnam, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya… cases) on traditional political false flags and mainstream media fake news used by the US propaganda machinery to sanction the Pentagon’s hegemonic policy of the Pax Americana.The Fundamental DilemmaThe fundamental dilemma is why the US administrations of Obama ...
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 ...
There is yet no reckoning for Australia’s SAS war crimes in Afghanistan, although details of horrendous atrocities are coming to light. A 2016 report detailing the extent of torture and extrajudicial killings by the Australian SAS forces in Afghanistan have been described as “fuelled by blood lust”, and compared on a scale to the infamous torture and murder practices at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.The 2016 report which has recently been seen by two leading Australian news outlets, was compiled by sociologist Dr Samantha Crompvoets. Testimonies of war crimes, accompanied by the normalisation of such action and recurring impunity, have been ...
America is unique among history’s warrior states – prioritizing endless wars, not ending them to achieve a new era of peace and stability.The notion is anathema to the nation’s military, industrial, and media establishment. Wars are waged for power and profits, no other reasons.All post-WW II US wars were and continue to be acts of naked aggression against nations threatening no one – raping and destroying them, the human cost incalculable, the villainy unprecedented.Throughout its history, America has been perpetually at war at home and/or abroad, never a time of peace and stability – a shocking indictment of its abhorrent ...
I don’t want to discuss the musical merits of who should have won the recent Eurovision amateur song contest in Stockholm. It’s brazenly clear that the Ukrainian ethnic Tatar Jamala won in a rigged contest to make a political intervention. As she subsequently openly admitted, it was between the actions of Stalin in World War II against Crimean Tatars and the actions of Moscow in 2014 in Crimea. The song of Jamala was blatantly political and by Eurovision, rules ought to be grounds to strip her of the title regardless of her singing talent or lack of the same. What ...
During the last decade the deteriorating political and military situation in the world have proved the necessity of well prepared Armed Forces.It is obvious that the level of patriotism in Lithuania is high as ever. Many young men are thinking to join the Armed Forces and be useful to the country. The government only should maintain and strengthen this trend. But battling with numerous political and economical problems the government is going to make some changes in military sphere that could have far-reaching adverse consequences.It should be said that today there is a serious gap in providing the national Armed ...
This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.1. The war ...
I will not dwell either on the prehistory nor early history of the region of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) in this article.The Montenegrins and medieval SerbiaIt used to pass from one state to the other, until Stephan Nemanja (1166−1196), a nobleman from Zeta (present-day Montenegro), founded the state of Serbia, whose center very soon later became exactly in today’s KosMet. First a Byzantine vassal dukedom, Serbia became soon an independent state, to become an empire under the rule of Stephan Dušan (1331−1355), the first Emperor of Serbia.[1]Serbia’s Nemanjić’s dynasty ended with Dušan’s son, Uroš, disintegrating into many feudal possessions.[2] In the epic ...
Many of us go through life searching for our purpose, for something that we are passionate about. After years of searching finally I stumbled upon mine a few years ago. Having the world hear Syrians telling their side of the story while living through this imposed war is what ignited that fire in me. As a Syrian American that was born in Syria and lived in both countries my entire life, I feel a strong link to my heritage, my birth country, my culture, my language, my customs, my nationality, and my history.We have been bombarded with lies and propaganda ...
IntroductionAfter the referendum’s results held in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia on September 30th this year and the Western reactions on it (by the EU & NATO) it is absolutely clear that this small Balkan country is finally proven to be the Western puppet colony without its own real Government and above all the national sovereignty. To remind ourselves, the people of Macedonia were called to express their wish to change or not a state’s name into the Northern Macedonia and, therefore, its national name into the Northern Macedonians, in order to avoid further obstructions by neighboring Greece in ...
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)
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)
