Nick Turse

scuttlebuttstuch:

And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be? It absorbed them, inhabited them, made them strong in the way that victims are strong, filled them with the twin obsessions of Death and Peace, fixed them so that they could never, never again speak lightly about the Worst Thing in the World. If you learned just this much about them, you were never quite as happy (in the miserable-joyous way of covering the war) with the other outfits.
- Dispatches, Michael Herr

And they were killers. Of course they were; what would anyone expect them to be? It absorbed them, inhabited them, made them strong in the way that victims are strong, filled them with the twin obsessions of Death and Peace, fixed them so that they could never, never again speak lightly about the Worst Thing in the World. If you learned just this much about them, you were never quite as happy (in the miserable-joyous way of covering the war) with the other outfits.

- Dispatches, Michael Herr

“Nick’s book makes for timely if extraordinarily painful reading, and I sat down with him recently to talk about the ongoing relevance of Vietnam, massacres, and secretly photocopying whole US government archives.” So writes Dan Denvir in prelude to an interview with me for VICE magazine about my new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

Read the full interview here: “The Secret History of the Vietnam War” | VICE

Many thanks to everyone who has donated $100 to TomDispatch.com for a signed, personalized copy of my book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, And special thanks to all of you who have been patiently waiting. I’ve just received a fresh case of books from the warehouse (see above) and will get copies out to you right away.

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Route Nine Defensive-Vietnam
Photographer: Larry Burrows

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.

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.

Turse offers the public stunning new insights into past events based on reading through tens of thousands of pages of forgotten records and on interviewing scores of people — on both sides — who suffered through the Vietnam War.

“

—	Book details massacres, torture in Vietnam war - The Charleston Gazette

Indeed, the most terrifying implication of Kill Anything That Moves is that skillful military spin combined with a disengaged public could lead to a state of perpetual war—even one as criminal as Vietnam—without a significant public outcry. With the Afghanistan war and the war on terror entering their 12th years, Turse demonstrates that only by coming to grips with the full horror of Vietnam can we understand why we are dangerously close to that perpetual state.

“

—	The Atrocity Lessons: What the US Military Learned From Vietnam - A Review of Kill Anything that Moves — The Daily Beast

“I found myself tearing up, gagging at times, as I turned the pages.”

This generally isn’t what you like to read to begin a review of your book. But I couldn’t be happier, more humbled, or more moved with the review of Kill Anything That Moves by wartime aid worker-turned-reporter Tom Fox in America magazine. The piece is personal and poignant and concludes: “Kill Anything That Moves should become mandatory reading in all U.S. history classes and in classrooms where warfare is taught. But can we face the dark side of our military policies? Can we, as a nation, learn from the past? I am not optimistic. Reading this book and then passing it along could possibly pave the way. We owe this much to the ghosts of wars past and those to come.”

The visceral horror of what happened at My Lai is undeniable. On
the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the Americal Division’s
Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their
commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation
the next day in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member
Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the
village.’ ” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s
words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that
breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s
mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.

“

—	“Kill Anything That Moves” Military Doctrine Began in Vietnam