“In 1968, the going rate for adult lives was thirty-three dollars, while children merited just half that. In one instance, after two members of Huynh Van Thanh's family were crushed to death by cargo dropped from a US helicopter, the American military paid him about sixty dollars and gave him some surplus food, a bottle of liquid soap, two coloring books and a box of crayons. ... By failing to accept responsibility for deaths and attempting to buy off Vietnamese grief over dead children for absurdly low amounts - about what a radio cost in America at the time - the United States explicitly commodified and devalued Vietnamese life. As James William Gibson put it, the solacium system was 'the most perverse exercise of turning people's lives and deaths into ledger entries.'”
—Nick Turse, from his book Kill Anything That Moves“Even as the conflict dragged on, year after year, the Pentagon's war managers never gave up their conviction that American technological prowess would ensure victory. ... The United States would not deploy its nuclear arsenal, but it would nonetheless assault Vietnam with the destructive power of hundreds of Hiroshimas. In other words, it would wage a war of overkill. ... [O]n average, between 1965 and 1968, thirty-two tons of bombs per hour were dropped on the North. It turned out, however, that of the munitions unleashed by the United States in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War - which added up to the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs - the lion's share was dropped not on the North but on South Vietnam, America's own ally. There, around 19 million people would be subjected to the most lopsided air war ever fought. ... The Vietnamese revolutionary forces never yielded to American firepower. But overkill did succeed in producing misery on an epic scale, especially for Vietnamese civilians.”
—Nick Turse from his book Kill Anything that Moves
Nick Turse: Exhuming Vietnam An interview with the author of 'Kill Anything That Moves' by Kelley B. Vlahos
- Antiwar: The conventional wisdom is that war crimes and atrocities committed by U.S forces in Vietnam were isolated events perpetuated by a "few bad apples" – rogue units and platoons. How does your research – this book – shatter that perception?
- Turse: The War Crimes Working Group offers irrefutable proof of atrocities committed by every major Army unit that deployed, every division and separate brigade that went to Vietnam. And just looking at the numbers, and then going to Vietnam and talking to people, I realized how pervasive the scale of that carnage was. This is what I try to convey in Kill Anything that Moves.
- We’re talking about, according to the best estimates we have — two million Vietnamese civilian dead. Add to that five million wounded, and the best numbers that U.S. government came up with was about eleven million Vietnamese made refugees. On top of that, studies show that about four million Vietnamese were exposed to defoliants like Agent Orange.
- Obviously, it’s beyond what a couple of rogue units, even a couple of rogue divisions could do. The level of carnage was almost unimaginable. I hope that Kill Anything that Moves helps to put the rest the idea of bad apples and rogue units.
- Antiwar: The emphasis on body counts, the search and destroy missions, free fire zones, heavy artillery – are all tactical frameworks that you argue set the conditions for these war crimes and atrocities to happen, whether there were explicit orders to kill civilians or not. How do you counter the establishment histories, especially those that are used to teach officers today, that acknowledge many of these things but claim a) conditions on the ground made it difficult to do things much differently and b) most of our forces were indeed adhering to the proper rules of engagement.
- Turse: I think it’s hard to argue against the fact that millions of Vietnamese were killed, wounded and made refugees. And this was due to deliberate U.S policies, like the use of unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling over a wide swath of the countryside, and due to search and destroy missions, and the overwhelming emphasis on body counts. It’s also irrefutable that these policies were dictated at the highest levels of the military. What I try to point out is that the American way of war did not just produce a random string of massacres but a veritable system of suffering. That system, the machinery of suffering and what it meant to the Vietnamese people, is what Kill Anything that Moves is meant to explain. I think it would be hard to look at those numbers and read the litany of daily events and come to any other conclusion. This was certainly policy, not bad apples.
“It’s not that Americans are more brutal than other soldiers; that’s a contest with no winner. It’s that America fights so many more wars than anyone else...”
—Gerald Kaplan in The Globe and Mail. America’s shameful history in Vietnam finally revealed“Until the My Lai revelations became front-page news, atrocity stories were routinely disregarded by American journalists or excised by stateside editors. The fate of civilians in rural South Vietnam did not merit much examination; even the articles that did mention the killing of noncombatants generally did so merely in passing, without any indication that the acts described might be war crimes. Vietnamese revolutionary sources, for their part, detailed hundreds of massacres and large-scale operations that resulted in thousands of civilian deaths, but those reports were dismissed out of hand as communist propaganda. And then, in a stunning reversal, almost immediately after the exposure of the My Lai massacre, war crime allegations became old hat -- so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking into. In leaflets, pamphlets, small-press books, and "underground" newspapers, the growing American antiwar movement repeatedly pointed out that U.S. troops were committing atrocities on a regular basis. But what had been previously brushed aside as propaganda and leftist kookery suddenly started to be disregarded as yawn-worthy common knowledge, with little but the My Lai massacre in between.”
—Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013), 5-6.“Some commanders, like an army colonel who investigated allegations of rape in an infantry battalion, nevertheless sought to cast Vietnamese women as willing participants. Writing about the heavily populated coastal regions of I and II Corps, he conjectured that in those areas “the number of young women far exceeds the number of military age males,” so the local women undoubtedly welcomed the attentions of American troops as a means to “satisfy needs long denied.” Assuming that all Vietnamese women longed for intercourse with armed foreigners marching through their villages, the colonel blithely concluded, “The circumstances are such that rape in contacts between soldiers . . . and village women is unlikely.” The colonel’s theory about universally willing partners becomes even more preposterous when we consider the shockingly violent and sadistic nature of some of the sexual assaults. One marine remembered finding a Vietnamese woman who had been shot and wounded. Severely injured, she begged for water. Instead, her clothes were ripped off. She was stabbed in both breasts, then forced into a spread-eagle position, after which the handle of an entrenching tool -- essentially a short-handled shovel -- was thrust into her vagina. Other women were violated with objects ranging from soda bottles to rifles.”
— Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a reminder that the Vietnam War took even more than the 4.5 million outright murdered in it.
'Anything That Moves': Civilians And The Vietnam War.
npr.orgI read this whole book in one night.
that’s why im STILL AWAKE.
