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

Product Information

And the most disturbing form of murder, because it is so intimate, is carried out by infantry troops. S. military set up a Civilian Casualty Tracking Cell whose goal was to track and lower civilian casualties.

Charles Boss, who was on the sergeant’s wildcat team, is quoted as telling an Army criminal investigator “only a couple of weeks ago I heard Bumgarner had killed a Vietnamese girl and two younger kids (boys), who didn’t have any weapons. 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.The NLF's combatants, officially known as the People's Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), included guerrillas in peasant clothing as well as uniformed troops organized into professionalized units. They were carried out because the dominant tactic of the war, as conceived by our politicians and generals, was centered on the concept of “overkill. Untold numbers were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods. S. programs that every year provides instruction and assistance to approximately 200,000 foreign soldiers, police, and other personnel. Carl withdrew into a shell,” she is quoted as saying, “stopped eating, did not talk to the children and did not or would not talk to me.

And the truth might have remained hidden forever if not for the perseverance of a single Vietnam veteran named Ron Ridenhour. Whatever civilian casualty statistics the United States did tally were generally kept secret, and when released piecemeal they were invariably radical undercounts. My Lai was not the full story of atrocities in Vietnam, and honestly facing the moral questions inherent in a ‘way of war' is absolutely necessary to an effective military strategy. Historian David Farber of Temple University wrote that Turse's assertion "only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any rage against society can be considered radical. 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.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness. And here, too, was the inevitable outcome of the soldiers’ training: all the endless chants of ‘kill, kill, kill,’ the dehumanization of the ‘dinks, gooks, slopes, slants,’ and the constant insistence that even women and small children were to be regarded as potential enemies. He shows how efforts to count the dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so far failed. Turse used the secret Pentagon reports and documents to track down more than 100 veterans — including those who had reported witnessing atrocities to their superiors and others charged with carrying out atrocities — and traveled to Vietnam to interview survivors. In recent years, careful surveys, analyses, and official estimates have consistently pointed toward a significantly higher number of civilian deaths.