Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse
My rating: 5 of 5 stars


America Is #1❗️

All power is untrustworthy, everywhere and about everything. There are no exceptions. Agents of power in a democracy lie more than similar agents in a dictatorship because democratic power is more vulnerable. This is the only epistemological principle to survive in a world of increasingly concentrated power. Nick Turse’s book demonstrates the validity of this principle, and with it the corollary that the greater the power the greater the lies that emanate from it. The United States has for some time been the most powerful democratic country on the planet. And its lies are the biggest and best in the world. Greatness is at hand.

During the American war in Vietnam, between 3 to 7 million were killed in a country of 19 million. No one knows the number with any greater precision because records of civilian deaths were purposely avoided, or as proportionately underestimated as military body counts for enemy troops were over-estimated. While many of these were ‘collateral damage’ in American military operations, most were intentional killing of unarmed and non-threatening civilians, mostly women and children, or the result of military policy decisions like ‘free fire zones,’ irresponsible aerial bombardment, and an almost complete absence of training in either the Geneva Conventions or local culture.

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.

The now infamous massacre at the village of My Lai in 1968 is exceptional only because it was discovered and reported in the American media. At My Lai a company of U.S. soldiers murdered an entire village of 500 women, old men, children, and infants over a period of four hours (with a break for lunch). The entire company participated with no significant hesitation or protest by anyone. The officer in charge had received a direct command to wipe out the village, which he carried out meticulously and without question. The incident, upon being ‘leaked’ by several observers, was denied up the entire chain of command. Eventually one man, the company officer, was subject to court martial, spent several months under house arrest, and received a presidential pardon.

Turse’s research revealed hundreds of similar incidents which, because they never reached visibility in the popular press, were simply buried by the military authorities. Some further, uncountably larger number of such incidents are common knowledge among the men involved as documented through hundreds of interviews carried out by Turse. All show the same pattern as that in My Lai: unopposed murderous brutality, perceived as not just necessary but normal by those participating, and protected by a code of omertà at the highest levels in the military and beyond.* Patriotic service, military commitment, loyal camaraderie, indeed heroism had become a matter of killing without restraint.

What underlay this total moral breakdown? In Vietnam everyone lied to everyone else. They had to in order to keep the system going, to make careers, and often merely to stay alive. Government officials lied to the military commanders, who lied to their subordinates, who lied to the soldiers on the ground - about everything from the rationale and progress of the war, to the real purpose of individual military operations, to the air and logistical support that could be expected. The troops responded in kind, lying about body counts, the details of operational encounters, and their attitudes towards their officers and comrades.

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.

Literally everything recorded and reported about the war was what we have come to call fake news. Upwards of 3 million American soldiers, advisers, agents, and officials lived in the midst of this fake news, were aware of its falsity, and experienced the social reprogramming necessary to establish and normalise an ethos in which this fake news was accepted. Even before Turse’s investigation of official archives, it was clear that the malaise was systematic throughout this substantial military population: And it is clear from the Army’s own investigations that the problem was pervasive:

“the War Crimes Working Group files alone demonstrated that atrocities were committed by members of every infantry, cavalry, and airborne division, and every separate brigade that deployed without the rest of its division—that is, every major army unit in Vietnam.”

The 3 million men returned home with the knowledge of both the acts and the refusal to acknowledge the acts and their consequences.

Given the frequent personal psychological dysfunctions that have been reported and analysed over decades since the end of the war in Vietnam, is it an exaggeration to suggest that these 3 million men formed a sort of leavening agent in American society, changing the social matrix of the country for generations to come? To what degree, one wonders, is the increasing rate of violent crime in the country; its persistent racism, and its populist mistrust of government (including its Trumpian expression, however paradoxical) a consequence of not just the training to kill and the suspension of basic moral structures, but also the normalisation of the lie as an American mode of being?

Subsequent experience in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria suggests that while the country may not be very successful on the battlefield, it is certainly an undisputed #1 when it comes to lying, particularly to itself. In this, among possibly many others, Trump is indeed the perfect representative of his country.

* See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... for the consequences of mendacity within the highest government levels during the war.

View all my reviews