Kill Anything That Moves

Livro escrito com grande cuidado informativo.

Siempre se te da a conocer un lado de la historia: El que EUA quiere que sepas. Este libro te da un punto de vista muy distinto.

This is one of the most shocking books which, as a historian, one has ever read.In the sixties many people and most students were against the war. Everybody knew some of the nasty things that were reported about the Vietnam war but no one knew that the weekly body count was surprisingly generated by the intentional and almost universal killings of civilians, kids and the elderly year after year to boost the body count which, in turn, was used to maximize military promotion and rest and relaxation time and awards and recognition, etc.This book is so shocking that one thinks Turse may be some sort of extremist and obsessed with defaming the military. But his sources, listed in 85 pages, are solid and easily verified and involve hundreds of personal interviews of vets and victims and massive research here and there and in Vietnam extending over ten years. He was a Harvard Fellow and is associated with the Nation Institute. The passion, energy, drive and absolute honesty and moral crusading he exhibits is really puzzling.The reviews are listed at the beginning of the book and they are quite favorable, coming from both the left and right, from The American Conservatives, from West Point grad, soldier, scholar, patriot Andrew Bacevich, Seymour Hersh, etc. The San Francisco Chronicle terms the book a "paradigm changer" and with that I agree insofar as it will cause future historians to re-assess all of our foreign wars and connect it with the nasty things our soldiers did in France while liberating as presented in Marie Louise Robert's book "What Soldiers Do" and what European TV recently started to touch in its program "The Crimes of the Liberators" and what European historians have written when they exposed the fact that the Allies killed four to five times more Dutch people "liberating" them than were killed by the Germans. In fact, what Turse recounts may just be far, far worse than the absolutely brutal action of ISIS, unless of course ISIS is killing females after sexually abusing them with guns and stomping on babies heads to increase body counts for rewards. Sorry to be so shockingly summarizing Turse. To recommend it to others could cause potentially some severe reactions.Turse presents serialized, intentional and constant killings of innocent civilians which just leaves the reader absolutely shocked. He never stops naming the victims, the time and place and keeps going year after year. One at first believes he is making it all up but the documentations proves otherwise. Literally, one's imagination could not make up such gruesome events. Hundreds of good Americans wrote desperately to their parents, to their pols, to the media year after year but nothing changed. The military judicial system here and there pretended to take actions but allowed nearly all of the gruesome murdering to go mostly unpunished. MacArthur advised Westmoreland to enact "a scorched earth policy" and that the Asian mind fears artillery shelling. On top of brutal ground work, more brutality was added upon a weak non-threatening society with relentless bombing, napalm, artillery and naval gun firing so that Turse provides unbelievable stats such a one valley being hit by 311,000 artillery shells plus B52 bombing and napalm strikes and Phantom strafings, etc. He selects three senior military officials for more detailed description of their atrocities: Sergeant Roy Bumgarner, General John Donaldson and General Julian Ewell. What they did is beyond belief. He calls Ewell "The Butcher of the Delta."My Lai was investigated by the Pentagon and it resulted in a policy to prevent similar info from getting out and Turse discovered docs related to this and this seems to have gotten him going. My Lai pales in comparison to the ongoing and constant massacres of 10 to 130 civilians seemingly unbelievable week after week, month after month, year after year. In fact, on the same day of My Lai another massacre of more than 90 civilians took place not far from My Lai at My Khe. Besides this, 3 million Vietnamese were exposed to herbicide and dioxin---we knew that already. The very bizarre habit on part of many GIs was the collecting of body parts as souvenirs, hanging cut off ears around the neck (we knew that, too, but not the scope) and on rare occasion even, sorry to say so, a male genital. General Patton himself, son of WW II General Patton partook in this atavistic and brutal custom when decapitated heads were boiled to remove the flesh and thus he kept a skull on his desk and even carried it during his farewell party.Turse has been faulted for not focusing on the horrible bombing of North Vietnam. Well, that was not his subject. He does mention briefly now and then the atrocities committed by the VC but indicates that they were mild compared to the size, scope and varieties of tortures, mutilations, murder and killings carried by the U.S. which pretended to help the Vietnamese. The juxtaposition of the gruesome deeds and the image sold at home and abroad is THE most perfect and giant example of schizophrenic marketing and successful image making. If a society has THE highest violent crime rate of all adv. societies than one can potentially expects its soldiers to misbehave brutally in wars. John Wayne's movie the Green Berets and Reagan's statement that the war was for a noble cause can only prompt cynical derision. They are in the realm of severe psychopathology and grandiose self-delusion very similar to our presumed high living standard, which BTW few believe any more, given slumerica created by those who were uncritically operating in our dangerous myths.Vietnam was used as a giant experimental societal guinea pig on which to test various new military hardwares, methods of torture and all sorts of new fangled and innovative ways to carry on warfare. The conclusion and the proper policy is to prevent ANY foreign military adventures on part of the U.S. The military has become a caste system of sorts already and we do not need more of that on top of trillions spent on the wholesale destruction of tiny non threatening and backward societies. Is totally immoral to advocate unnecessary military intervention which cause only blowbacks. The U.S. is extremely lucky that the immense suffering of the Vietnamese did not cause massive blowbacks as has been and is happening all across the Middle East.Finally, as a historian one must say that the Cold War of which Vietnam was part, was based upon the totally wrong misconceptualization that communism would be static, would not reform and moderate itself. That demonization was necessary to sustain the military. Yet, since we disengage from holding a gun on Communism it proved itself to be quite capable of reforming and even adopting substantially capitalism and emulationg Wall Street. Thus, had we not held a gun on it, it would have reformed earlier and we could have saved trillions for sorely needed domestic improvements.What is also amazing is the fact that the book was a NY Times bestseller and no one refuted Turse's facts or references and all agree, even critical reviews, that the facts are true. If so, then future scholars will compare statistically the shocking behavior at the personal level of ordinary soldiers and at the bureaucratic level and higher ups and the military judicial with what the Russians did in Afghanistan and what happened in WW II, etc. Psychiatrists and psycho-historians will have a field day at some future time to expose and analyze the deformed and decayed mentality and lack of minimum human impulses on part of the thousands Turse exposes.Unfortunately, Turse does not focus on the ongoing casualties and deaths resulting from unexploded ordinance and dioxin induced genetic defects and the left over general ecological degradatioon which altogether will take many generation to recover, if it is even possible. In a modified fashion it is being repeated in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, etc

Great book! I am about halfway through the book. The book divulges evidence of the widespread and deliberate torture of the Vietnamese (civilians, as well as VC supporters) by U.S. troops throughout the war. It's really a disturbing read.

I first became aware of Nick Turse's research around 4 or 5 years ago, when teaching an A-Level course on US Cold War policy in South-East Asia. The standard text-book treatment of US atrocities in Vietnam is to focus on My-Lai, when US troops massacred several hundred men, women and children in 1968, but to depict this as an isolated incident. I never found that analysis convincing.Turse's research, however, suggested that the US war in Vietnam was a war where atrocities were not only regularly committed, but a central component of the strategy sanctioned by the politicians and the army top brass. I awaited the publication of this book with great hope that the real story of the Vietnam war might be told, and feel that the book has more than fulfilled this.Some of the atrocities outlined in this book are chilling. There are countless examples of US troops moving into small hamlets and villages, rounding up all of the inhabitants, and simply murdering them, for absolutely no reason. In most of these cases, there were few men of fighting age in the villages. Instead, it was old men, women and children who were massacred. It is also clear that many of these troops were acting under the instructions of higher-ranking officers. In fact, the order to 'Kill them all, kill anything that moves' seems to have been widely issued. Sexual violence was also used as a weapon of war and there are some really harrowing stories of young girls taken prisoner, gang-raped for several days by US soldiers and then murdered. It is hard to imagine how any occupying power in any land could act in more brutal fashion, with such callous disregard for other human beingsBehind all of this stood the US government and military hierarchy. It is patent nonsense to see the atrocities in this war as the result of un-educated, violent grunts, or a few bad apples. In fact, Turse goes to great pains throughout the book to challenge those convenient explanations. He shows the connection between strategies such as Free Fire Zones, Search and Destroy Operations and the application of utterly staggering levels of firepower and these atrocities. He shows how every US army unit was operating on the basis of achieving the highest-possible 'body count'--in line with the thinking of the entire political and military establishment--and how this led to a situation where any Vietnamese would do. They were all operating under that imperative and under tremendous pressure to kill as many as they could. Turse also shows how key military figures like Westmoreland were not only fully aware of the scale of the atrocities unfolding under the stars and stripes in Vietnam, but did their best to prevent them from reaching the eyes and ears of the rest of the world. There was a Vietnam War Crimes Working Group set up and managed by Westmoreland but its main function seemed to be to keep the government informed of what was happening, in order that allegations about atrocities could actually be parried aside. This group did not try to end the atrocities or bring the perpetrators to justice. Just one soldier was convicted in relation to My Lai, for example. In reality, the War Crimes Working Group became a key plank in the governments overall policy of keeping all of this away from the US public.When you look today at institutions such as the International Criminal Court, there are few people who ever come in front of it as guilty as those US politicians and military figures who for many years waged a campaign of genocide in Vietnam. The book shows the degree to which these men were culpable of some of the worst war crimes of the 20th century. In a roundabout way, the book also shows the bravery and fortitude of the Vietnamese people--that they could endure this savagery and still come out on top is ultimately one of the great and most uplifting achievements in human history.