These deaths, therefore, were not exceptional and accidental but routine and systematic, the consequence of both military policy and a pervasive ground-level homicidal ethos created in training and passed down continuously through the chain of command. This ethos not only failed to understand the reality of the social and political situation in the country, it also successfully de-humanised the entire population in the minds of American soldiers. With an average age of 19, these soldiers were effectively children, armed with the latest military technology, frustrated by the system which kept them in physical misery, constantly fearful of violent death, and kept on the edge of psychic survival by the demands of their job. If you are faint-hearted, you might want to keep some smelling salts nearby when you read it. It's that bad...The truth hurts. This is an important book.” ―Dayton Daily News In a 2008 exposé in The Nation for which he won the Ridenhour Prize, Turse reported on a veteran whistleblower who served in Operation Speedy Express. [36] Kill Anything That Moves... [ 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?” — Washington Post Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It's an important piece of history.” ―Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam In Military Review, journalist and Vietnam war correspondent Arnold R. 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. His conclusions may be overstated, but Turse makes a strong case that the dark side of America's war in Vietnam was a good deal darker than is commonly remembered. If the American war was not a crime against humanity, Turse confronts us with convincing evidence that there was an American war that it is hard to call anything else—and that we should not scrub this out of our history." [43]These ‘chain of command’ lies were augmented by administrative lies - failure to report or pass on reports of illegal military conduct; refusal by relevant officers to initiate courts martial or other disciplinary procedures; dismissal by courts martials themselves of obvious crimes; and the systematic destruction of documents and records of thousands of likely criminal incidents. Mendacity was not just a policy, it was also a culture within which atrocities were tolerated, indeed encouraged as long as evidence to the contrary could be suppressed, ignored, or denied. Rape was as common as murder. A veteran from the 198th Light Infantry Brigade is quoted by Turse as saying that he knew of 10 to 15 rapes of young girls by soldiers from his unit “within a span of just six or seven months.” A Vietnamese woman in an Army report Turse quotes said she was detained by troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and “then raped by approximately ten soldiers.”“In another incident,” Turse writes, “eleven members of one squad from the 23rd Infantry Division raped a Vietnamese girl. As word spread, another squad traveled to the scene to join in. In a third incident, an American GI recalled seeing a Vietnamese woman who was hardly able to walk after she had been gang-raped by thirteen soldiers.” A Marine in the book spoke about a nine-man squad that entered a village to hunt for “a Viet Cong whore.” The squad found a woman, raped her and then shot her through the head.

Despite communiqués, radio reports, and English-language accounts released by the Vietnamese revolutionary forces, the My Lai massacre would remain, to the outside world, an American victory for more than a year. And the truth might have remained hidden forever if not for the perseverance of a single Vietnam veteran named Ron Ridenhour. The twenty-two-year-old Ridenhour had not been among the hundred American troops at My Lai, though he had seen civilians murdered elsewhere in Vietnam; instead, he heard about the slaughter from other soldiers who had been in Pinkville that day. Unnerved, Ridenhour took the unprecedented step of carefully gathering testimony from multiple American eyewitnesses. Then, upon returning to the United States after his yearlong tour of duty, he committed himself to doing whatever was necessary to expose the incident to public scrutiny.7 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.32Soon, 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. The True Place the American War Holds in the Memory of South Vietnamese vs. North Vietnamese? It Ain’t that Simple…

An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” — San Francisco ChronicleMeticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune 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.

An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” As we commemorate yet another anniversary of the end of the war and the US government continues to do its utmost to rewrite history and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat through The United States of America Vietnam War Commemoration , KATM is a sledgehammer counterpoint to this disgraceful historical whitewash aka faux commemoration. This was, and remains, the American military's official position. In many ways, it remains the popular understanding in the United States as a whole. Today, histories of the Vietnam War regularly discuss war crimes or civilian suffering only in the context of a single incident: the My Lai massacre cited by McDuff. Even as that one event has become the subject of numerous books and articles, all the other atrocities perpetrated by U.S. soldiers have essentially vanished from popular memory. Turse has reported on the South Sudanese civil war that began in 2013 including an investigation of a government ethnic cleansing campaign for Harper's, and wrote a book on the South Sudanese civil war, Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead. Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch wrote, "Turse gives a sobering account of the horrific crimes against ordinary people that define South Sudan's conflict. He shows how efforts to count the dead, investigate the crimes, and bring perpetrators to justice have so far failed. His compelling account reminds us why accountability is both urgent and necessary." [28] The Los Angeles Review of Books said Turse "delivers a scathing and deeply reported account of South Sudan's suffering since its collapse in December 2013." [29] Next Time They'll Come to Count The Dead was a finalist for the 2016 Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. book award. [30] Drone papers [ edit ]Andrew J. Bacevich, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), and author of Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War 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. 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.