Book Review: Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse
Turse's 2013 book Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is an essential document that compiles numerous war crimes and finds them to be deliberate and encouraged by commanders.
“Shouldn’t bother you at all, just some more dead gooks. The sooner they all die, the sooner we go back to the World.” - US Marine, quoted on page 50
“I hate the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live.” - John McCain, 2000
Near of end his exhaustive and authoritative exposé on the many crimes committed during the American occupation of Vietnam, his 2013 book Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse notes that “There have been more than 30,000 nonfiction books published on the Vietnam War since the conflict began, but only a tiny fraction focus on American atrocities.” This is the central mission undertaken by the author, who brings together primary documents, interviews, and research materials to argue conclusively that the untold story of the Vietnam War is one the US government would rather stay untold. It is the story of confusing, contradictory goals and orders, a climate of permissiveness and coverups, of racism at all levels and above all, of slavish self-centeredness and unapologetic exploitation. Beginning with an examination of the events surrounding the incident at My Lai, Turse dispels the popularly held notion that it was anything out of the ordinary, arguing instead that it was part of an overarching culture and should not have come as a shock to anyone. It was commonplace, and much like its administrative outcome mostly amounted to scapegoating one man to obfuscate its obvious ramifications for everyone else involved, My Lai’s putative distinctiveness actually caused many other similar, prolonged campaigns of brutal criminality to be overlooked. The American public was pacified—it had its scapegoat in the figure of William Calley, and could sleep well knowing justice had been served, little knowing that the military was mostly composed of Calleys, their facilitators, and their silent, cowed observers.
The US military’s policy of “shoot first, ask questions never” made sense in light of several factors: the racism and othering inculcated into troops during basic training and reinforced as an unspoken rule in the field, the desire of the relatively reluctant fighting forces to just get back home alive (from their perspective, why take any chance that a Vietnamese who appears to be a harmless civilian is not a Viet Cong in disguise when the penalty for guessing wrong is death and the penalty for killing them unnecessarily does not exist?), and the tendency for the Viet Cong to wage an amorphous guerilla war in and around civilian areas. The last factor was only a rote excuse—as Turse repeatedly points out, the actual presence of enemy fighters was not necessary to order the destruction of a village or to throw grenades into shelters, only the (very explicitly uninvestigated) possibility that they could have once been in the area. The theme of the Vietnam War, he argues, was a policy of preemption over prevention. Civilians were killed because their actions (in many cases this was something as innocent as running away, which no one knew could cause them to get shot at) might one day have amounted to a legitimate threat, because waiting for the danger to actually manifest would have been too risky, and the lives of Americans were worth exponentially more than the lives of the Vietnamese. Indeed, to the Americans in charge, their comfort and complete safety were worth murdering the entire nation if it came down to it, and without the courageous and unlikely whistleblowers who helped put an end to the war, this might have come to pass. The behavior of our fighting forces throughout the war was tantamount to murdering a passerby because he looked at us the wrong way, and the program of racist indoctrination visited on both America at large and its military casted all Asians as something less than human, a barely-civilized collective who placed no value on their individual lives. With all this mind, the civilian casualty count, unacceptable and horrifying even by the military’s own admission, can be seen as “an operation, not an aberration,” Turse’s quotation of Ron Ridenhour, the whistleblower who exposed the My Lai massacre:
At the end of it, if you ask people what happened at My Lai, they would say: “Oh yeah, isn’t that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those people?” No, that was not what happened. Lieutenant Calley was one of the people who went crazy and killed a lot of people at My Lai, but this was an operation, not an aberration. (Page 4-5)
Turse elaborates on this idea a few pages later:
Most of the time, the noncombatants who died were not herded into a ditch and gunned down as at My Lai. Instead, the full range of the American arsenal—from M-16s and Claymore mines to grenades, bombs, mortars, rockets, napalm, and artillery shells—was unleashed on forested areas, villages, and homes where perfectly ordinary Vietnamese just happened to live and work. (Page 19)
The unseen war was both personal and impersonal according to the many stories recounted and reports cited in the book. Insofar as it was personal, ground troops would abuse, rape, and kill Vietnamese civilians with little thought and often just for kicks, but perhaps more suffering all told was of the impersonal, coldly detached variety, with bombardment and immolation of villages for little military purpose, with the goal of subjugating communities or increasing the infamous “kill counts” (a major factor in some of the war’s most startling atrocities and a powerful motivator for career-minded military men). As Turse repeatedly points out, the lack of weaponry confiscated after a skirmish was often telling: hundreds of civilians could be killed at a time, but if the killers had only a few weapons to show for it, it was undeniable that their victims were unarmed. Though widespread, these incidents were almost never investigated, as everyone was happy enough to move on and juke the statistics. Soldiers frequently carried these confiscated weapons to drop next to corpses to confer the appearance of guilt, a practice still widely used in the military today.
Many of the most effective passages concern testimony given by the troops themselves, in moments of truthful vulnerability found in a letter home or a guilty admission after their tour ended. Marine Ed Austin writes in a letter to his parents: “There are more civilians killed here per day than VC either by accident or on purpose and that’s just plain murder. I’m not surprised that there are more VC. We make more VC than we kill by the way these people are treated. I won’t go into detail but some of the things that take place would make you ashamed of good old America.” (He is referring to blowback, an idea that is unnervingly applicable to modern conflicts). As Turse argues, these testimonials are stronger because they are impossible to deny or write off as the biased editorializing of left-wing anti-war crusaders, though as we will see with some of the negative reviews of this book, such a dishonest smear tactic is still possible. On page 140, he recounts another visceral and stunning admission, the kind which can only be offered by a criminal who knows they will never see any kind of punishment for their actions:
Low told us that when we got to the village we were to shoot everyone including women, children, and old men. After we were on the patrol…he changed the order to kill only young men. When we arrived at the village…I walked around the corner of a hut and came upon a man repairing a fishing net. I told this man in Vietnamese to get out of there. He just looked at me and smiled…I then heard Low on the other side of the hut, so I called to LT Low and told him that I had a young gook. Low replied “you haven’t killed him yet,” that’s when I pulled the trigger and shot the man…he fell backwards off the stool he was sitting on and layed on the ground moaning…I looked at the man I had shot and then walked away. (Page 140)
This man was then killed on the orders of Lieutenant Low, and a medic mutilated the body. He was called in as Viet Cong despite presenting no suspicious movements, a common and unchecked practice that by itself resulted in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the service of inflating the aforementioned kill counts.
The racism and colonial attitude of the US military did not stop at justifying their active mistreatment. Often, torture was left to the Vietnamese themselves, both to add a layer of plausible deniability to the proceedings and to reflect what they considered to be their more brutal, primitive nature. Turse quotes two contemporary accounts of their methods, the first from a reporter for New York Times Magazine and the second from Captain Ted Shipman (page 173-4):
Anyone who has spent much time with Government units in the field has seen the heads of prisoners held under water and bayonet blades pressed against their throats…In more extreme cases victims have had bamboo slivers run under their fingernails or wires from a field telephone connected to arms, nipples or testicles. Another rumored technique is known as “the long step.” The idea is to take several prisoners up in a helicopter and toss one out to loosen the tongues of the others.
You see, they do have some—well, methods and practices that we are are not accustomed to, that we wouldn’t use if we were doing it, but the thing you’ve got to understand is that this is an Asian country, and their first impulse is force…Only the fear of force gets results. It’s the Asian mind. It’s completely different from what we know as the Western mind…Look—they’re a thousand years behind us in this place, and we’re trying to educate them up to our level.
This pervasive racism often bordered on the genocidal. Vietnamese homes and livelihoods were destroyed on a large scale, and many were forced to move to the outskirts of Saigon to live in squalor and desperation, or moved to refugee camps throughout the country, which were no better than concentration camps (they were called “concentration zones”). Turse writes on page 65:
When Vietnamese abandoned their villages, they were often simply shuttled into overwhelmed, underfunded, understaffed, under-provisioned, and underequipped “concentration zones”—either refugee camps or artificial villages that the refugees were sometimes forced to build themselves. These settlements, which went by many different names over the years, often made farming impossible. “I had two hectares of rice in the old village,” one elderly man complained. “Now it is ripe and the grain falls into the paddy mud. I cannot harvest it. There are men here with guns who tell me that we must dig a ditch…In the bottom of that ditch we must put sharpened bamboo stakes and on each side of the ditch there must be a fence of barbed wire. When it is finished, I can return to harvest my rice. But my rice will be gone then. Who will feed my family?”
In 1962, the New York Times described a scene in which U.S. advisers and allied Vietnamese troops relocated hundreds of villagers as part of Operation Sunrise. The operation’s cheerful title belief the fact that it involved burning the food, homes, and in some cases all the possessions of the villagers before sending them to inhospitable barracks that even the lead U.S. adviser conceded were “no happy hollow.”
Homes, villages, and possessions were destroyed as a matter of course, often for no reason other than the enjoyment of pulling the trigger or lighting the match. There is a word for the subjugation of an ethnic group by an outside force, and “genocide” applied in Vietnam just as it did In Iraq and Afghanistan: total extermination of the population may not have been the ultimate goal, but it did inform the methods and commonality of “collateral damage” in the service of vanquishing the stated foe, “communism” in the case of Vietnam and “terrorism” in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan. That these euphemisms (which very conveniently were ideas and as such could not be defeated, leading to an unending, nebulous war) stood in for the brutally mistreated civilian population does not detract from the genocidal nature of the observed outcome, insofar as it was ever actually observed in the pro-military US media environment.
Predictably, Turse’s impeccable research has been met with near-universal praise from legitimate reviewers, the most important of which comes from Daniel Ellsberg, the man responsible for much of the knowledge we do have about the military’s actions in Vietnam. Ellberg writes:
No book I have read in decades has so shaken me, as an American. Turse lays open the ground-level reality of a war that was far more atrocious than Americans at home have ever been allowed to know. He exposes official policies that encouraged ordinary American soldiers and airmen to inflict almost unimaginable horror and suffering on ordinary Vietnamese, followed by official cover-up as tenacious as Turse's own decade of investigative effort against it. Kill Anything That Moves is obligatory reading for Americans, because its implications for the likely scale of atrocities and civilian casualties inflicted and covered up in our latest wars are inescapable and staggering.
The appropriate lesson will never be taken even from indisputable, thorough histories such as this book, because those who would be likely to take those lessons to heart are already its primary audience, and those who would react negatively to its revelations will never be convinced and will instead rely on ready-made propaganda sources to “debunk” its claims. It is worth examining some negative reviews, doubtlessly many of which comes from veterans and others in denial who are embarrassed at their honest portrayal. Many unfavorable reviews decry the book as biased and lament its lack of “balance,” a common theme within right-wing criticism. Never mind the factual accuracy of the work—if its facts are perceived to be lopsided, then they must be wrong, or the author must be presenting them in a dishonest way. This is a convenient and effective way to write off pernicious facts and has resulted in an overcorrection in American media platforms: complain loudly and constantly about right-wing persecution, and actual right-wing rule breaking, threats, and racism will go unpunished so that companies do not appear to be biased. As these reviews show, reality itself is evidently biased. A few non-academic reviews from Amazon summarize the average reader’s issues:
Turse in fact does go into the training of soldiers and paints them as at least somewhat sympathetic young men who were dropped into a foreign population who had been sufficiently dehumanized, to fight against an enemy that moved among civilians and who mostly fought using non-traditional, startlingly effective tactics. It is evident that many of these reviewers did not actually read the book and were motivated to post their opinion based on hearsay or someone else’s complaints. Other Amazon reviews are not much more substantial—most rely on lazily poisoning the well to discount source material or on fringe historiography (another reviewer cites charlatan far-right author and professor Rudolph Rummel’s estimation of total civilian casualties to debunk Turse’s figures):
A more serious criticism can be found on the Cross Currents site in an essay by authors Gary Kulik and Peter Zinoman, though even this more “scholarly” approach is preoccupied with baseless nitpicking, smearing eyewitnesses in an attempt to discredit them (in exactly the same manner as the military did decades prior) and taking issue with conclusions which Turse explicitly notes are extrapolations from the spotty data available. One example is particularly egregious:
Similar questions arise with regard to another important source for Turse: a series of interviews that he carried out in Vietnam during 2006 and 2008. Beyond providing the names of his interviewees and the date on which he met them (in most but not all cases), Turse offers no background information on the forty-odd witnesses that he interviewed. His failure to disclose the age of his informants is especially problematic, since most of them describe events that occurred between thirty-five and forty years ago. Consider, for example, the case of Ho Thi A, who confirmed to Turse in 2008 that all victims of a 1970 massacre that she witnessed “were civilians.” While he refers to her vaguely as being a “young girl” at the time of the massacre, he does not reveal—either in the text or in the notes—the fact that she was no more than seven or eight years old when the incident transpired. As a result, he does not discuss how a child so young could distinguish civilian casualties in a conflict famously marked by the intentional blurring of lines between combatants and noncombatants.
No commentary is necessary here, as this is a preposterous attempt at character assassination. They proceed similarly throughout, relying on propaganda (mostly government-issued) in order to “debunk” Turse’s reporting and cast it as propaganda. In summation:
Kill Anything that Moves suffers from two additional problems, one obvious and one more obscure, but both connected to the allegedly “progressive” political agenda of its author. The obvious problem is its lack of balance, manifested most clearly in its tight focus on American atrocities and its near-total neglect of the widespread violence against civilians perpetrated by Communist forces.
This plainly is not the subject of Turse’s book, nor is it ever denied that atrocities took place on both sides. The book is about “The Real American War in Vietnam”—it is in the very title of the book. The credibility of Kulik and Zinoman’s review vanishes with just that one comment, but they seem incapable of letting the equivocation go:
Given that the Vietnam War witnessed horrific levels of violence on all sides, Turse’s decision to eschew balance and write a book focused only on American atrocities makes little intellectual sense. The choice is more puzzling because the existing scholarly and journalistic literature, as discussed above, focuses on American atrocities almost exclusively. Consider, for example, the contrast between the large number of academic books on Mỹ Lai and the absence of a single scholarly monograph on the much more murderous Huế massacre. Turse’s onesided approach, therefore, cannot be defended as an effort to rebalance a distorted record. On the contrary, it adds to the distortion.
These negative reviews become self-reinforcing, sequentially citing one another in the pursuit of a false sense of legitimacy through numerical preponderance. Propaganda of this kind is notoriously effective, and the book’s detractors only need to point out all the other many negative reactions it has elicited in order to establish an air of legitimacy among the easily-led American public. And we are as easily led today as we were in the Vietnam era, when intimidation and infiltration of peace movements and pro-military propaganda dragged the unwinnable war out far longer than it should have lasted. Negative reviews by Amazon users who can barely string together a sentence may seem insignificant, and they should be, but in sufficient number and in the right (well-financed) setting, their impact is disproportionate and deadly.
A recent PNAS study found that industry propaganda is effective at overriding scientific reporting on climate change and calling well-founded research into question. This is another overwhelmingly pressing and legitimate concern that is also derailed effectively by disinformation efforts:
Although experiments show that exposure to factual information can increase factual accuracy, the public remains stubbornly misinformed about many issues. Why do misperceptions persist even when factual interventions generally succeed at increasing the accuracy of people’s beliefs? We seek to answer this question by testing the role of information exposure and decay effects in a four-wave panel experiment (n = 2,898 at wave 4) in which we randomize the media content that people in the United States see about climate change. Our results indicate that science coverage of climate change increases belief accuracy and support for government action immediately after exposure, including among Republicans and people who reject anthropogenic climate change. However, both effects decay over time and can be attenuated by exposure to skeptical opinion content (but not issue coverage featuring partisan conflict). These findings demonstrate that the increases in belief accuracy generated by science coverage are short lived and can be neutralized by skeptical opinion content.
Turse repeatedly points out that military higher-ups were aware that with time and appropriate denials and lies, even the worst war crime can be papered over and forgotten, as they have been by 2022. In a previous article, I wrote about the insidiousness of doubt and how even a minor piece of disinformation can grow in the minds of the gullible (a majority of people now living, thanks to the defunding, privatization, and politicization of education in the US over the last 50 years). Negative reviews and opinions, if allowed to remain platformed on otherwise legitimate sites, do incalculable damage to the truth, akin to the EPA being overrun by climate science deniers or government sites hosting industry denialism.
In the end, Turse concludes that the ghosts of Vietnam still haunt us, and the precedents set there informed much of the military’s behavior in Afghanistan and Iraq. The lesson was learned: American public opinion is malleable and disinterested in the minutia of war, especially when it is bloody and embarrassing. The war crimes that took place in our more recent wars were every bit as horrifying as those which occurred in Vietnam, and Turse’s argument lends credence to the seemingly conspiratorial idea that the truth is much worse than what might be indicated by the few incidents that did emerge. If the military covers up a significant amount of its crimes and its warfighters protect one another and kill and intimidate whistleblowers, it is rational to believe that another Abu Ghraib or a siege of Fallujah or a Nisour Square massacre was occurring at all times throughout our mismanaged, violent, racist occupation (in which, echoing Vietnam, the “Gooks” were replaced by “Hajjis” with much the same disregard). We will never know the true extent of the death, dismemberment, and desperation our government brought to the Vietnamese, and likewise we have only best guesses at how many civilians died in the Iraq War alone (estimates range from hundreds of thousands to comfortably over one million). As we are seeing with revelations from Uvalde, the truth is credibly much worse than even the most committed pessimist could imagine. As with Vietnam, the truth is likely only preserved in the aging brains of those who witnessed it, where it will die forever with them, forever locked in the vaults of time.
We have already rehabilitated the popular image of the more recent wars and their architects, to say nothing of the unending adulation the warfighters themselves enjoy. What any real examination of military policy should reveal is a troublingly dark and hateful character at all levels, as well as a willfully-maintained environment of permissiveness and the facilitation of war crimes, with either a wink and a nod or threats of violent reprisal if a soldier threatens to turn whistleblower or conscientious objector. The general assumption held by Americans about their military should not be that the soldiers are mostly law-abiding and peaceful, only killing when absolutely necessary—there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that the opposite is true, and the baseline conception should consist of a preemptively violent racist who seeks any excuse to abuse, rape, and murder civilians. If they are not personally such abhorrent people, then every second they spend still serving is aiding and abetting these known murderers, and they should desert immediately. Veterans of foreign wars should be treated accordingly when they return to the US and seek to resume their lives among us; instead they are given medals, holidays, and healthcare, and the military is given an arbitrary exemption from policies meant to combat our species’ greatest existential threat, climate change.
In conclusion (page 191):
They were the very essence of the war: crimes that went on all the time, all over South Vietnam, for years and years. When you consider this, along with the tallies of dead, wounded, and displaced, the scale of the suffering becomes almost unimaginable—almost as unimaginable as the fact that somehow, in the United States, all that suffering was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.