KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES - NICK TURSE

Back on my bullshit in 2024. I’ve never been a huge Vietnam war guy, probably due to my disdain for the Boomers. However, despite the fact that they’d love for us to forget about it and how a group of peasant farmers in Southeast Asia triumphed over the leaders of the free world, it does loom large over American culture and the American psyche and it’s something I’d like to know more about. This book goes a long way to settle the major liberal critique of the war. Basically, the right-wing take on our defeat is that the army wasn’t allowed to really go out there and win, that “wokeness” (tho they would not have used that term at the time) prevented an all-out victory. A sort of Rambo take on the whole thing that was more prominent in the 80’s, when the wounds of that war were fresher. Slowly a more Ken Burns style critique has crept in, one that says that we meant well and we were trying to help but mistakes were made, and we’re very sorry. Our heart was in the right place but we fell short of our values. This book makes it clear what the Vietnam war was, a series of massacres and bloodbaths and industrial scale rapes. Turse catalogs how a military appearance, headed by former Ford man and proto-wonk McNamara used “data” to show how the war could be won by focusing on “body-count” stats. This, of course, trickles down to grunts as a directive to collect scalps by any means, especially since the incentives were such that one needed only to show that there were kills, no one was checking to see if those killed were VC. Which is how you end up with hundreds dead in actions but only 3 weapons found. Or the idea that anyone running is a military target. Which ends up in things like My Lai. Actually the My Lai section was interesting, not just in the horrific facts of the case but for the way it was spun and weaponized. Essentially the military (including a young Colin Powell) tried to minimize it before admitting it did happen and sort of pivoting to making sure that since it was so big (500 civilians) and so outrageous (war rapes, burning villiages) that it was posited as the only incident of it’s type. It’s the only one you ever hear about, though Turse points out there was a similar massacre on that day by another company in a different region of the country. Terse highlights actions like Operation Speedy Express that killed around 7,000 civilians in a 3 month period that never get talked about. He lists so many mass rapes and incidents of child “prostitutes” (a horrific turn of phrase) on army bases that part of the book reads like 2666. Very interesting stuff, very chilling. Important to teach yourself American history and to see what the cost of maintaining an empire actually is.