Based on classified documents and interviews, argues that American acts of violence against millions of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War were a pervasive and systematic part of the war.
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians The American Empire Project Winner of the Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by just a few "bad apples." But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves." Drawing on more than a decade of research into secret Pentagon archives and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time the workings of a military machine that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded-what one soldier called "a My Lai a month." Devastating and definitive, Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians The American Empire Project Winner of the Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by just a few "bad apples." But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves." Drawing on more than a decade of research into secret Pentagon archives and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time the workings of a military machine that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded--what one soldier called "a My Lai a month." Devastating and definitive, Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.
Shortly before 8 am on 16 March 1968, C Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Regiment, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, on a search-and-destroy mission in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam, entered the hamlet of My Lai. By noon more than 400 women, children and old men had been systematically murdered. To this day, the My Lai massacre has remained the most shocking episode of the Vietnam War. Yet this infamous incident was not an exception or aberration. Based on extensive research and unprecedented access to US Army archives, and tracing the responsibility for these atrocities all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon, War Without Fronts reveals the true extent of war crimes committed by American troops in Vietnam and how a war to win hearts and minds soon became a war against civilians.
Here is the new, hip, high-tech military-industrial complex--an omnipresent, hidden-in-plain-sight system of systems that penetrates all our lives. From iPods to Starbucks to Oakley sunglasses, historian Nick Turse explores the Pentagon's little-noticed contacts (and contracts) with the products and companies that now form the fabric of America. Turse investigates the remarkable range of military incursions into the civilian world: the Pentagon's collaborations with Hollywood filmmakers; its outlandish schemes to weaponize the wild kingdom; its joint ventures with the World Wrestling Federation and NASCAR. He shows the inventive ways the military, desperate for new recruits, now targets children and young adults, tapping into the "culture of cool" by making "friends" on MySpace. We are a long way from Eisenhower's military-industrial complex: this is its twenty-first-century progeny.--From publisher description.
Napalm, incendiary gel that sticks to skin and burns to the bone, came into the world on Valentine’s Day 1942 at a secret Harvard war research laboratory. On March 9, 1945, it created an inferno that killed over 87,500 people in Tokyo—more than died in the atomic explosions at Hiroshima or Nagasaki. It went on to incinerate sixty-four of Japan’s largest cities. The Bomb got the press, but napalm did the work. After World War II, the incendiary held the line against communism in Greece and Korea—Napalm Day led the 1950 counter-attack from Inchon—and fought elsewhere under many flags. Americans generally applauded, until the Vietnam War. Today, napalm lives on as a pariah: a symbol of American cruelty and the misguided use of power, according to anti-war protesters in the 1960s and popular culture from Apocalypse Now to the punk band Napalm Death and British street artist Banksy. Its use by Serbia in 1994 and by the United States in Iraq in 2003 drew condemnation. United Nations delegates judged deployment against concentrations of civilians a war crime in 1980. After thirty-one years, America joined the global consensus, in 2011. Robert Neer has written the first history of napalm, from its inaugural test on the Harvard College soccer field, to a Marine Corps plan to attack Japan with millions of bats armed with tiny napalm time bombs, to the reflections of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a girl who knew firsthand about its power and its morality.
“[A] vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors” (Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects). A dramatic true story of men and women trapped in the grip of war, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead is modern crisis reporting at its best. For six weeks in the spring of 2015, award-winning journalist Nick Turse traveled on foot, as well as by car, SUV, and helicopter, around war-torn South Sudan, talking to military officers and child soldiers, United Nations officials and humanitarian workers, civil servants, civil society activists, and internally displaced persons—people whose lives had been blown apart by a ceaseless conflict there. In a fast-paced and emotionally powerful fashion, Turse reveals the harsh reality of modern warfare in the developing world and the ways people manage to survive the unimaginable. Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead isn’t about combat. It’s about the human condition, about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and about death, life, and the crimes of war in the newest nation on earth. “The average journalist follows the herd of others. A bold one like Nick Turse goes to where the herd isn’t. His searing reporting in this book brings alive the suffering of a country that the United States, midwife to its birth, has largely forgotten.” ―Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Mirror at Midnight
War stories are mostly innocent fables and understood as such by both the teller and the hearer. However, they have long been used for political and national purposes, and those about the war in Vietnam were no exception, as painfully evidenced in the 2004 presidential campaign. John Kerry campaigned as a war hero. His opponents cast him as a liar and a traitor and their war story prevailed. ""War Stories"" delves into the myths associated with the Vietnam veteran s experience and looks at them through the war stories they told and continue to tell. Kulik conducts an extremely thorough review of the Vietnam literature and interviews participants wherever possible, poking holes in the war myths of people throughout the political spectrum. War Stories discusses how returning Vietnam vets were treated and delves into the myths that atrocities were commonplace, that all veterans of that war suffer from PTSD, and that all are guilt ridden. Kulik s research and analysis of such stories lies at the heart of this book s originality and provides a new perspective on the Vietnam War for scholars, students, and general readers. His purpose in exposing such stories is not to deny or minimize American war crimes in Vietnam but to cut through the cant of false stories so that we retain our outrage at those that are true. As we are faced with future war stories from Iraq and Afghanistan and their likely exploitation, the moral stance and the lessons learned in this book will be especially important."
While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of U.S. involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the reader from the marshy swamps of the Mekong Delta to the bomb-saturated Red River Delta, from the corridors of power in Hanoi and Saigon to the Nixon White House, and from the peace negotiations in Paris to high-level meetings in Beijing and Moscow, all to reveal that peace never had a chance in Vietnam. Hanoi's War renders transparent the internal workings of America's most elusive enemy during the Cold War and shows that the war fought during the peace negotiations was bloodier and much more wide ranging than it had been previously. Using never-before-seen archival materials from the Vietnam Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as well as materials from other archives around the world, Nguyen explores the politics of war-making and peace-making not only from the North Vietnamese perspective but also from that of South Vietnam, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, presenting a uniquely international portrait.