One of my favorite places in the city (Taken with Instagram at Strand Book Store)
Mine too!
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Very happy to see that Powell’s Books’ Daily Dose says Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is “as important a contribution to the vast Vietnam War record as any ever published” and calls it a “Must Read!”
Kill Anything That Moves is a paradigm-shifting, connect-the-dots history of American atrocities that reads like a thriller; it will convince those with the stomach to read it that all these decades later Americans, certainly the military brass and the White House, still haven’t drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.
