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.
Chris Deliso of Balkanalysis points out the latest travesty of the Western media: 59,000 stories on Auschwitz, three on Jasenovac. As if the third-largest death camp in Nazi-occupied Europe simply never existed. Franjo Tudjman certainly thought so, and it appears the current Croatian leadership shares his "historical" perspective.Contemporary German estimates of Serbs murdered by the Ustasha (in Jasenovac and elsewhere) ranged as high as 750,000. Wiesenthal center uses the number of 600,000. Serbian researchers have spoken of up to 700,000 victims. Modern revisionists, Croat and otherwise, talk of 30-100,000, at most. Among them is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which ...
Syrian constitution is questionableThe Russian-proposed constitution for Syria is raising a storm in Media. Not only the opposition but the governmental circles are discussing it. Many forums are endlessly debating its 85-controversial articles. Some Syrians feel insulted by a charter authored by one outside power and approved by two others, Turkey and Iran.The Islamists are furious, because the draft constitution scraps Article 3, which specifies Islam as the religion of the president of the republic. This is a long-standing article since 1920 which several Syrian leaders, including Hafez Al Assad, tried to change, with little luck. Arab nationalists are also ...
Israel treats Arabs the way Nazis treated Jews – a racist, fascist, white Jewish supremacist (the chosen people nonsense), Arab-hating society systematically ghettoizing and terrorizing people for praying to the wrong God.Palestinians are treated like subhumans, enduring virtually every type indignity and mistreatment under brutalizing militarized rule, civil justice denied.Institutionalized racism worse than South African apartheid denies them fundamental human and civil rights. De-Arabization is official Israeli policy. Occupation harshness facilitates slow-motion genocide.Millions suffer horrifically. Anyone resisting tyranny is eliminated – brutalized, imprisoned or murdered.Muhammad Allan is a Palestinian political prisoner – rearrested at Barzilai hospital before his release to ...
Not satisfied with having sponsored the artificial creation of Kosovo, the United States has now decided to ram the mafia state through NATO and the European Union. A new member with such characteristics is the last thing that Europe needs right now. However, it should work wonders for the consolidation of U.S. political and military agenda in the region, not to speak of the flourishing heroin trade from Afghanistan…both of which, as Engdahl points out in this sharp analysis, pose a threat to Russia and may backfire in the end.In one of the more bizarre foreign policy announcements of a ...
The superhighway to disaster is already being paved.From Donald Trump’s first days in office, news of the damage to America’s international stature has come hard and fast. As if guided by some malign design, the new president seemed to identify the key pillars that have supported U.S. global power for the past 70 years and set out to topple each of them in turn. By degrading NATO, alienating Asian allies, cancelling trade treaties, and slashing critical scientific research, the Trump White House is already in the process of demolishing the delicately balanced architecture that has sustained Washington’s world leadership since ...
In years before 2014, the Afghan think tanks would opine that the US may wind down Afghanistan’s conflict through the end of this year, inferring that the goal of founding the nine large military bases across the country is almost accomplished. Many would delightfully say that Afghanistan is phasing into a new chapter with the flames of war quelled as the US government insisted on troop withdrawal.Entrenching military headquarters in strangers’ territories has no excuse or legal ground under any circumstances. The Afghan nation would cast aside objection to this permanent military foothold thanks in most part to the bitter ...
The reason Hillary Clinton was crushed in the electoral college during this election is because she lost Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania . The reason behind the unprecedented loss can be summed up in two sentences. We will not forget. We will not forgive.These three states are home to the Serbian-American community. For most of them, their traditionally Democratic ticket vote turning Republican was a clear repudiation of Hillary Clinton's role in the Balkan genocide."An American Serb generally doesn't vote FOR anyone, but AGAINST a Biden, a Clinton, a McCain, against whoever Madeleine Albright supports, against whoever bombed Serbia, recognized Kosovo... Wait, was Dubya a ...
Whenever bombings and shootings escalate in the Middle East, Israeli propagandists say that Israel is exercising its right of military self-defense against indiscriminate attacks coming from the Gaza Strip. But as this article documents, the right to use force in self-defense is contingent on Israel ending its military occupation and blockade of Gaza.DON’T MISQUOTE ME ON THAT!Doubtless some unscrupulous person or persons will quote or interpret this article out of context and claim that I’m saying that Israel has no right to self-defense at all. So, let me be clear: Israel is a nation-state like any other, like it or ...
Kosovo’s municipal authorities continue to ignore the growing number of illegally built mosques, which now total more than a hundred.An illegal construction boom that has carpeted Kosovo’s cities and villages with unlicensed buildings is not confined to homes and shops.A survey of Kosovo municipalities by Balkan Insight has revealed that more than 100 mosques have been built without planning permission in the past ten years.To date, action has been taken against just one illegal mosque and local authorities told Balkan Insight they are hesitant about committing themselves to removing such buildings in the future.The Islamic Community of Kosovo, BIK, through ...
Origins of immages: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google & Pinterest.
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.
[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]
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 ...
Part IEthnolinguistic SerbdomSerbia’s Prince Miloš’s schemes to solve the „Serbian Question“ were based exclusively on the historical (state) rights of the Serbs. However, during his reign, a new and cardinal dimension on an understanding of Serbian national identity and, therefore, the idea of the creation of the national state of the Serbs was introduced into Serbian political thought by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) who framed the concept of a linguistic Serbdom.In his brief essay “Срби сви и свуда” (“Serbs All and Everywhere”),[1] V. S. Karadžić established the linguistic criteria for determining Serbian national self-identity and reformulation of the whole concept ...
The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016.IntroductionHistorically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting what President Eisenhower called “The Military Industrial Complex”.What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called “US Foreign Policy”, namely ...
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 ...
Zagreb, 1941Become familiar with the basic info about one of the most beautiful countries in the world - Croatia. Photos, data & recommendations where to stay in order to enjoy this Adriatic pearl. If you are not the Serb.Split, Dalmatia, Croatia, 2019: "Kill the Serb" on the car with the plates from SerbiaOrigins 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 ...
The Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar, above in 1943, was made up of 18,000 Bosnian Muslims and 300 Albanian Muslims. Bosnian Muslims were not Nazi and fascist “collaborators”, but Nazis themselves.The Bosnian Muslim Government and Army of Alija Izetbegovic reformed and reconstituted the Bosnian Muslim Nazi SS Division Handzar from World War II. Contrary to the nonsensical screed of Croat Marko Attila Hoare, whose mother is Croatian Marxist and Ustasha apologist Branka Magas, and other Bosnian Muslim apologists and propagandists, there is overwhelming and abundant proof of the existence of a “Handzar Divizija” in the Bosnian Muslim Army. The existence of ...
The opposition in Montenegro unanimously decided to boycott the local elections in Niksic, scheduled for March 12. This decision was made in protest against the political trial against the deputies from the Democratic Front (DF) Andrija Mandic and Milan Knežević. DF, Democratic Montenegro, Demos, civil movement URA, the Social Democrats and the Socialist People’s Party refused to participate in the elections after the Mandic and Knežević were deprived of parliamentary immunity.Andrija Mandic said that the prosecution was launched in order to weaken the Democratic Front. He added that he wants to raise the question about the legitimacy of the removal ...
Islamic forces entered Europe from Asia and North Africa in order to enslave, convert, persecute and either completely destroy Christianity or to enforce dhimmitude. Before this process began you had the complete annihilation of Christianity in many parts of North Africa and in various parts of the Middle East it was one long sojourn into dhimmitude, pogroms and massacres.Christianity survived in some areas, for example in Egypt, however, numbers succumbed after Arab colonial and Islamic discrimination took route. Therefore, a complete Islamic inquisition took root in Arabia (modern day Saudi Arabia) and just like the Sunni Islamic inquisition against Buddhism ...
As far as Ukraine goes, Ankara seems to be setting the pace for NATO’s deepening involvement in the country’s war.Russia is investigating reports of Turkish attack drones being deployed for the first time in Ukraine’s eight-year civil war. The Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) under the command of the Kiev regime claimed that the drones were used earlier this week in combat against ethnic Russian rebels.This is a potentially dramatic escalation in the smoldering war. For it marks the direct involvement of NATO member Turkey in the conflict. Up to now, the United States and other NATO states have been supplying ...
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 ...
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)
