Soon, the United States was dispatching equipment and even military advisers to Vietnam. By 1953, it was shouldering nearly 80 percent of the bill for an ever more bitter war against the Viet Minh.19 The conflict progressed from guerrilla warfare to a conventional military campaign, and in 1954 a Gallic garrison at the well-fortified base of Dien Bien Phu was pounded into surrender by Viet Minh forces under General Vo Nguyen Giap. The French had had enough. At an international peace conference in Geneva, they agreed to a temporary separation of Vietnam into two placeholder regions, the north and the south, which were to be rejoined as one nation following a reunification election in 1956.

In an earlier investigation for The Intercept, Turse revealed "that from 2012 to 2014 some of America's most elite troops—including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets—carried out 500 Joint Combined Exchange Training missions around the world", a number that the U.S. military had previously refused to reveal. [56] Afghan War victims [ edit ] If KATM were a prescription drug, it would have this warning on its label: Do not read before going to bed, if you’re depressed, or if you’re under the influence of alcohol or any controlled substance. If you suffer from PTSD, be it from war or another traumatic event in your life, read it in measured doses. Yes, really; it’s that graphic and potentially traumatic. A masterpiece... Kill Anything That Moves is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare....Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did.” Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water.4

Mailing Address

But the stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some "bad apples," however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. And as Ridenhour put it, they were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military. This ethnic cleansing operation was not limited to the local unit command structure. In Operation Speedy Express duing the late 1960s in a command that covered the Mekong Delta, Vietnam's most densely populated area, the general in charge exerted huge pressure on those below him to get the body county up, and in this was quite successful: On average in the county, US troops suffered one casualty for every eight inflicted on the enemy. In the Mekong they got the ratio up to 1:134. This statistical anomoly didn't raise an eyebrow at the Pentagon. "Running" was considered to be a killing offense. As one helicopter machine gunner related, if hovering over some Vietnamese did not cause them to run, a short burst put near their feet would, and then they could be mowed down. One general in charge of a more northern command was more creative: He'd go out daily in a helicopter with a good supply of grenades, spot farmers working in their fields and you can guess the rest. What explains these staggering figures? Because the My Lai massacre has entered the popular American consciousness as an exceptional, one-of-a-kind event, the deaths of other civilians during the Vietnam War tend to be vaguely thought of as a matter of mistakes or (to use a phrase that would come into common use after the war) of "collateral damage." But as I came to see, the indiscriminate killing of South Vietnamese noncombatants—the endless slaughter that wiped out civilians day after day, month after month, year after year throughout the Vietnam War—was neither accidental nor unforeseeable. Kulik, Gary (2015-03-15). "The War in Vietnam: Version 2.0". History News Network . Retrieved 2015-03-23. Ridenhour's efforts were helped by the painstaking investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh, who published newspaper articles about the massacre; by the appearance in Life magazine of grisly full-color images that army photographer Ron Haeberle captured in My Lai as the slaughter was unfolding; and by a confessional interview that a soldier from Charlie Company gave to CBS News. The Pentagon, for its part, consistently fought to minimize what had happened, claiming that reports by Vietnamese survivors were wildly exaggerated. At the same time, the military focused its attention on the lowest-ranking officer who could conceivably shoulder the blame for such a nightmare: Charlie Company's Lieutenant William Calley.8

Writing in The Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam." [39] 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." [40] Groundless criticism about what he supposedly left out: It’s about war crimes committed by US soldiers in Vietnam as a frequent occurrence and the policies and conditions that led to those war crimes being committed. Turse proves it using US government documents and stories from US veterans and Vietnamese survivors. It was widespread and officially sanctioned. Therefore, there is really no basis on which to criticize him for not including everything you wanted him to include. If someone were to write a book that included everything Turse left out, it wouldn’t be the first. Kill Anything That Moves argues, persuasively and chillingly, that the mass rape, torture, mutilation and slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was not an aberration--not a one-off atrocity called My Lai--but rather the systematized policy of the American war machine. These are devastating charges, and they demand answers because Turse has framed his case with deeply researched, relentless authority...There is no doubt in my mind that Kill Anything That Moves belongs on the very highest shelf of books on the Vietnam War.” Or, as retired US Army officer Sanford D. Cook stated in response to my 2014 article Jumping on the Vietnam War Commemoration Bandwagon: The Vain Search for Honor, “We cannot tell the truth to others if we cannot first tell the truth to ourselves. That war was wrong, and celebrating it today is an obscene gesture of national self-justification.”

CounterPunch

a b "The U.S. is waging a massive shadow war in Africa, exclusive documents reveal". Vice News . Retrieved 2017-07-30. Vietnam would have been unified in a 1956 national election, according to the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, which the US and the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) refused to sign, an election in which Ho Chi Minh would have received “possibly 80%” of the vote, according to none other than Dwight D. Eisenhower. Meticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.” ―Minneapolis Star Tribune In a separate investigation, Turse analyzed the expansion of the U.S. military's Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, which is designed to train America's special operators in a variety of missions from "foreign internal defense" to "unconventional warfare". Analyzing government files, Turse found that U.S. troops carried out approximately one mission every two days in 2014. Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and others on 176 individual JCETs, a 13 percent increase from 2013. The number of countries involved jumped even further, from 63 to 87. [55] Andrew J. Bacevich, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), and author of Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War

Horrendous as these numbers may be, they pale in comparison to the estimated civilian death toll during the war years. At least 65,000 North Vietnamese civilians were killed, mainly from U.S. air raids.30 No one will ever know the exact number of South Vietnamese civilians killed as a result of the American War. While the U.S. military attempted to quantify almost every other aspect of the conflict—from the number of helicopter sorties flown to the number of propaganda leaflets dispersed—it quite deliberately never conducted a comprehensive study of Vietnamese noncombatant casualties.31 Whatever civilian casualty statistics the United States did tally were generally kept secret, and when released piecemeal they were invariably radical undercounts.32 Turse has described Kill Anything That Moves... (2013) as a history of Vietnamese "civilian suffering" at the hands of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War. [1] The book is based on archival materials Turse discovered and interviews he conducted with eyewitnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, including a hundred American Vietnam War veterans. [37] Turse won a 2014 American Book Award [6] and an Izzy ( I.F. Stone) Award for Kill Anything That Moves.... [38] Kill Anything That Moves argues, persuasively and chillingly, that the mass rape, torture, mutilation and slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was not an aberration--not a one-off atrocity called My Lai--but rather the systematized policy of the American war machine. These are devastating charges, and they demand answers because Turse has framed his case with deeply researched, relentless authority...There is no doubt in my mind that Kill Anything That Moves belongs on the very highest shelf of books on the Vietnam War.” — The Millions The plethora of designations and the often hazy distinctions between them underscore the fact that the Americans never really grasped who the enemy was. On one hand, they claimed the VC had little popular support and held sway over villages only through terror tactics. On the other, American soldiers who were supposedly engaged in countering communist aggression to protect the South Vietnamese readily killed civilians because they assumed that most villagers either were in league with the enemy or were guerrillas themselves once the sun went down.Lccn 2012020903 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-beta-20210815 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1200057 Openlibrary_edition

The scattered, fragmentary nature of the case files makes them essentially useless for gauging the precise number of war crimes committed by U.S. personnel in Vietnam.46 But the hundreds of reports that I gathered and the hundreds of witnesses that I interviewed in the United States and Southeast Asia made it clear that killings of civilians—whether cold-blooded slaughter like the massacre at My Lai or the routinely indifferent, wanton bloodshed like the lime gatherers' ambush in Binh Long—were widespread, routine, and directly attributable to U.S. command policies. After Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly escalated the war with bombing raids on North Vietnam, and unleashed an ever more furious onslaught on the South. In 1965 the fiction of "advisers" was finally dropped, and the American War, as it is known in Vietnam, began in earnest. In a televised speech, Johnson insisted that the United States was not inserting itself into a faraway civil war but taking steps to contain a communist menace. The war, he said, was "guided by North Vietnam . . . Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism."21 To counter this, the United States turned huge swaths of the South Vietnamese countryside—where most of South Vietnam's population lived—into battered battlegrounds. Not so, says Turse. In his carefully researched and documented book, Turse details how Calley's massacre at My Lai wasn't an aberration at all. Instead, it was part of an intentional policy of death and destruction that was orchestrated and condoned by the U.S. government. In 2001, while researching in the U.S. National Archives, Turse discovered records of a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group that was formed as a result of the My Lai massacre. These records became the focus of his doctoral dissertation, Kill Anything That Moves: United States War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965–1973. [10] [11] Career [ edit ] A powerful case…With his urgent but highly readable style, Turse delves into the secret history of U.S.-led atrocities. He has brought to his book an impressive trove of new research--archives explored and eyewitnesses interviewed in the United States and Vietnam. With superb narrative skill, he spotlights a troubling question: Why, with all the evidence collected by the military at the time of the war, were atrocities not prosecuted?”According to whom? What Turse tells his fellow Americans and the rest of the world is breaking news to most of them. Most are not Vietnam scholars who have read hundreds of books and thousands of primary source documents. I am more familiar than most with the information Turse presents yet KATM fills in many gaps and connects a lot of dots that - collectively - form a damning indictment of the U.S. policy du jour.