BOOK REVIEW: Kill Anything That Moves’ - SFGate
I can’t help but share a glowing review of my new book from yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. Joel Whitney calls it an “indispensable new history” and continues: “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.” You can read the full review here.
If you missed my conversation with Bill Moyers about my new book, Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, you can watch it here or at Moyers & Company.
Over the course of the war, tens if not hundreds of thousands of
Vietnamese were detained by U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces. For some it was only a minor inconvenience: they were held for a few hours, questioned, and then released. Some were forced to spend a day baking in the sun, often with a burlap sack over their heads, but still escaped relatively unscathed. For many other Vietnamese, though, being detained would quickly turn into a nightmare ordeal of slaps, punches, kicks, sexual assaults, electric shocks, and the “water-rag” treatment or water torture — known today as waterboarding.
(It’s strange how much this “Viet Cong suspect” resembles an old man.)
Over the course of the Vietnam War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were detained by U.S. and allied South Vietnamese forces. For some it was only a minor inconvenience: they were held for a few hours, questioned, and then released. Some were forced to spend a day baking in the sun, often with a burlap sack over their heads, but still escaped relatively unscathed. For many other Vietnamese, though, being detained would quickly turn into a nightmare ordeal of slaps, punches, kicks, sexual assaults, electric shocks, and the “water-rag” treatment or water torture — known today as waterboarding.
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I’m reeling from a exceptionally flattering review in BookForum by national security expert (and former military-intelligence case officer in Vietnam) Jeff Stein who calls Kill Anything that Moves “Astounding… Meticulous, extraordinary, and oddly moving.”
In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description.
There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide; to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm; to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second; to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. All this was abetted by continuous artillery fire into “free-fire” zones and naval bombardment from ships just off the coast.
By the time I arrived, the destruction of the villages in the region and the removal of their people to squalid refugee camps was approaching completion. (However, they often returned to their blasted villages, now subject to indiscriminate artillery fire.) Only a few pockets of villages survived. I witnessed the destruction of many of these in Quang Ngai and Quang Tinh provinces from the back seat of small Cessnas called Forward Air Control planes.
— Jonathan Schell, Seeing the Reality of the Vietnam War, 50 Years Late
