Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

It's difficult to read Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (#281).  This isn't a textbook description of the war as cleaned up and sanitized by military or political apologists, nor is it a straight historical recounting of the events of the military campaign as chronicled elsewhere.  Kill Anything That Moves instead tells the story of the deliberate war waged against the civilian population by the US military and its allies over a period of years, destroying homes and crops, devastating entire regions, and most tellingly, resulting in the maiming, torture and death of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, but glossed over as "collateral damage".

This is a history where the My Lai massacre was the rule, rather than the exception, and the emphasis was on the "body count".  It didn't really matter whose body - man, woman or child, young or old - as long as the military unit's statistics looked good.  What doesn't match up are the amount of weapons that should have been present if those slaughtered were truly Viet Cong; 600+ dead "VC", but only 9 weapons captured? The stories are truly appalling.

What's not surprising to me is the ease with which the military was able to quash any "atrocity" stories either at their source by threatening soldiers who became whistle blowers, or the amazing way that charges were dropped against soldiers who participated in these everyday outrages despite multiple eye-witness accounts.  Dehumanization of the Vietnamese people themselves, the "kill anything that moves" atmosphere that prevailed from the highest levels of command, the misogyny that resulted in wholesale rape, and the impunity enjoyed by all ranks (except for the scapegoated Lieutenant William Calley who wasn't high enough up the food chain to escape some token punishment) created a war in which to me it is astonishing that any Vietnamese in some regions managed to survive at all. 

And if you think things have changed in the military today, you haven't been reading the papers or watching the news.  If the eye-popping rates of reported military rapes don't demonstrate that misogyny is alive and well today against our own "friendly" forces, can you imagine what that same attitude would be like unleashed against a defenseless population of unarmed women who were automatically labeled "the enemy"? 

Kudos to Nick Turse for finding the proof in the National Archives that what the Vietnamese themselves reported to American Advisors on the scene, or what the whistle-blowers tried to stop by reporting on the actions of their fellow soldiers so far outside the Geneva Convention or Rules of Engagement that even they were disgusted.  It was real, and probably only the tip of the iceberg.  If only the newspapers and magazines (Newsweek deserves its own special badge of infamy for the cowardice it displayed at the time.) had had the courage to report the stories they were being given, perhaps many lives, both Vietnamese and American could have been saved.  As for me, this book made me even more certain that protesting the war in the '60s and '70s was the right thing to do.