Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (American Empire Project)

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Turse has reported on the South Sudanese civil war that began in 2013 including an investigation of a government ethnic cleansing campaign for Harper's, and wrote a book on the South Sudanese civil war, Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch wrote, "Turse gives a sobering account of the horrific crimes against ordinary people that define South Sudan's conflict. He shows how efforts to count the dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so far failed. His compelling account reminds us why accountability is both urgent and necessary." [28] The Los Angeles Review of Books said Turse "delivers a scathing and deeply reported account of South Sudan's suffering since its collapse in December 2013." [29] Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead was a finalist for the 2016 Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. book award. [30] Drone papers [ edit ] The official government policy was that U.S. soldiers were prohibited from intentionally targeting and killing civilians. That was after all, what the Geneva Convention provided. Thus, the official rules of engagement were that soldiers could only kill combatants. After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly escalated the war with bombing raids on North Vietnam, and unleashed an ever more furious onslaught on the South. In 1965 the fiction of "advisers" was finally dropped, and the American War, as it is known in Vietnam, began in earnest. In a televised speech, Johnson insisted that the United States was not inserting itself into a faraway civil war but taking steps to contain a communist menace. The war, he said, was "guided by North Vietnam . . . Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism."21 To counter this, the United States turned huge swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside—where most of South Vietnam's population lived—into battered battlegrounds. With only a general location to go by—fifteen miles west of an old port town known as Hoi An—we embarked on a shoe-leather search. Inquiries with locals led us to An Truong, a small hamlet with a monument to a 1968 massacre. But this particular mass killing took place on January 9, 1968, rather than in February, and was carried out by South Korean forces allied to the Americans rather than by U.S. soldiers themselves. It was not the place we had been looking for.

Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-10-09 11:06:34 Boxid IA40257412 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier a b "The U.S. is waging a massive shadow war in Africa, exclusive documents reveal". Vice News . Retrieved 2017-07-30.Turse's detailed research, which is footnoted throughout the book, is based on court-martial records, official investigative reports, and personal interviews with soldiers and Vietnamese citizens. In fact, when I finished the book on my Kindle, there was still somewhere like 30 or 40 percent left to read. It turned out that most of the balance consisted of the footnotes in the book. An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” ―San Francisco Chronicle

Kill Anything That Moves was criticized for downplaying the scope and importance of the contribution Vietnam veterans made to the antiwar effort in the United States. During the war, U.S. antiwar activists repeatedly pointed to atrocities that Turse claimed to have "discovered." Another criticism is that his book focuses on crimes by individual U.S. soldiers while ignoring policies such as the bombing of North Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians. [42]The True Place the American War Holds in the Memory of South Vietnamese vs. North Vietnamese? It Ain’t that Simple… Writing in The Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam." [39] John Tirman of The Washington Post wrote, "Turse forcefully argues the narrower question of how the government failed to prosecute crimes committed in Vietnam or Cambodia." [40] An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” — San Francisco Chronicle New Morning, Changing Weather: Radical Youth of the Millennial Age" (PDF). 49th Parallel (4). Winter 2000 . Retrieved 2018-05-09.

As the inspector general's report concluded in this particular incident, the "Vietnamese victims were innocent civilians loyal to the Republic of Vietnam." Yet, as so often happened, no disciplinary action of any type was taken against any member of the unit. In fact, their battalion commander stated that the team performed "exactly as he expected them to." The battalion's operations officer explained that the civilians had been in an "off-limits" or free-fire zone, one of many swaths of the country where everyone was assumed to be the enemy. Therefore, the soldiers had behaved in accordance with the U.S. military's directives on the use of lethal force. As we commemorate yet another anniversary of the end of the war and the US government continues to do its utmost to rewrite history and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat through The United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration , KATM is a sledgehammer counterpoint to this disgraceful historical whitewash aka faux commemoration. As Turse documents, that was the standard mindset among the soldiers who were doing precisely what Calley was doing. In fact, the title of the book is based on what many U.S. soldiers believed was their mission -- to kill anything that moves, including unarmed women, children, and old people. Enough has been said, here and elsewhere, about the contents of the bestselling book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (KATM) and the meticulous archival and field research on which it is based. It is a brilliant–a word I use sparingly–work about one of the most tragic periods in Vietnamese and US history. On the occasion of the 46 th anniversary of the end of the US War in Vietnam, it’s worth revisiting the value of KATM’s singular contribution to the world’s knowledge about what the US did in and to Vietnam and its people. urn:lcp:killanythingthat0000turs:epub:18db30c1-00b8-4d85-ac03-51d23ddc53ea Foldoutcount 0 Identifier killanythingthat0000turs Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0ss1fg59 Invoice 1652 Isbn 9780805086911Given the frequent personal psychological dysfunctions that have been reported and analysed over decades since the end of the war in Vietnam, is it an exaggeration to suggest that these 3 million men formed a sort of leavening agent in American society, changing the social matrix of the country for generations to come? To what degree, one wonders, is the increasing rate of violent crime in the country; its persistent racism, and its populist mistrust of government (including its Trumpian expression, however paradoxical) a consequence of not just the training to kill and the suspension of basic moral structures, but also the normalisation of the lie as an American mode of being? Nelson, Deborah (2008). The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes. Basic Books. p. 192. ISBN 978-0-465-00527-7. In Military Review, journalist and Vietnam war correspondent Arnold R. Isaacs states, "it would be a mistake to dismiss the facts set out in this book just because one dislikes the author's political slant. His conclusions may be overstated, but Turse makes a strong case that the dark side of America's war in Vietnam was a good deal darker than is commonly remembered. If the American war was not a crime against humanity, Turse confronts us with convincing evidence that there was an American war that it is hard to call anything else—and that we should not scrub this out of our history." [43]

Andrew J. Bacevich, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), and author of Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War

Editorial

A masterpiece... Kill Anything That Moves is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare....Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did.” ―Chris Hedges, Truthdig