 |
 Feb/Mar 2013 A new book
lays bare the grisly logic of mass killing in Vietnam Jeff Stein Kill
Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnamby Nick Turse $30.00 List
PriceFor more info visit: Amazon •
IndieBound • Barnes & Noble One dark night in South
Vietnam in mid-1969, I
stopped for a beer at the rickety shack that served as an officers’
club for
the First Marine Division, based a few miles outside of Da Nang, on the
central
coast. I had just delivered an intelligence report warning of an enemy
rocket
attack on the city. I found
myself sitting next to a guy with a war-weary, thousand-yard stare. He
turned
out to be a navy doctor assigned to one of those medical teams that
(along with
other “hearts and minds” civic projects) were supposed to bring the
locals over
to our side. He started telling me about days spent taking peasants’
blood
pressures, cleaning sores, listening to tubercular chests, giving
shots, and so
forth. And then I noticed his cheeks were moist with tears. He took a
drag on
his cigarette. “We fix ’em
up,” he said softly, wiping the tears away, “and then they”—he nodded
at the
distant sound of outgoing artillery—“then they blow ’em away.” In truth, you only needed a few weeks in Vietnam to know the place was seriously fucked up. A few more weeks in, you just wanted to survive the madness. “Mistakes were made,” it was always said—and it still is, in many quarters—about the conduct of the war: The civilian slaughter wasn’t deliberate, it was just horribly careless or crazed, people said. A tragedy. Even events as macabre as My Lai—where perhaps five hundred unarmed people, almost all of them old men, women, and children, were gunned down by US Army troops over several hours—were “understandable,” the apologia went, given the nature of a war that pushed GIs beyond the breaking point. Nick Turse
is here to tell you—to show you—that’s wrong. My Lai was not a mistake
or an
aberration or even an exaggerated case of aggravated assault, he
persuasively
demonstrates in this grim but astounding book: It was born of a
deliberate
body-count strategy that came down from on high and was pursued
energetically
by colonels down to sergeants. It was a strategy that logically led to
an
approved practice on the ground that’s summed up in the book’s title:
“Kill
anything that moves.”
A US Marine
torches a Vietnamese home with a flamethrower. Of course,
this is hardly the first time allegations of mass murder in Vietnam
have been
raised. Following Seymour Hersh’s groundbreaking My Lai exposé in 1969,
a flood
of influential long-form magazine pieces and books appeared that “ate
away at
the notion,” Turse writes, “that each atrocity brought to the attention
of the
American public was a singular incident.” And then,
suddenly, the flood turned into a trickle, and the trickle to dust. War
crimes
had become “so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking
into,”
Turse writes, adding that “it was almost as if America’s leading media
outlets
had gone straight from ignoring atrocities to treating them as old
news.” An
atrocity now had to be something bigger than My Lai to write up;
otherwise,
editors told reporters, it would seem like piling on. There was
something bigger, actually, Turse recounts: a six-month-long spree of
mass
murder, rape, and pillaging in the Mekong Delta, carried out by
soldiers of the
Ninth Infantry Division, under the command of General Julian Ewell,
that was
swept under the rug. Thoroughly
reported out and documented by Newsweek’s Saigon bureau chief, Kevin
Buckley,
and his Vietnamese-speaking reporter Alex Shimkin, the
five-thousand-word
blockbuster was buried by the magazine’s editors for several months, at
which
point Buckley asked permission to sell the piece elsewhere but was
turned down.
Only in June 1972 did a gutted, 1,800-word version of Buckley’s account
of the
1969 rampage see print, stripped of eyewitness interviews and even
Ewell’s
name. “In its eviscerated state,” Turse writes, “the article attracted
only a
slight ripple of interest.” Years later,
Newsweek editor Kermit Lansner, a former Art News editor who
“socialized with
the Long Island painters of the Abstract Expressionist movement,”
according to
his 2000 New York Times obituary, explained to Buckley why he had
buried the
piece. “He told me,” Buckley says in Turse’s book, “that it would be a
gratuitous attack on the [Nixon] administration at this point to do
another
story on civilian deaths after the press had given the army and
Washington such
a hard time over My Lai.” Yes, Nixon
was treated so unfairly. The president did his part in keeping the lid
screwed
on, naturally. In 1969, when the prosecution of top Green Beret
officers for
the unauthorized execution of a suspected North Vietnamese double agent
threatened to unmask the CIA’s Phoenix assassination program, Nixon
intervened
to have the case quashed. (The men, whose plight was highly publicized,
came
home as heroes.) Following
the black eye it got over My Lai, the military, too, was making it
harder to
get allegations of war crimes to surface or stick. In Turse’s detailed
accounting, witnesses were ignored or told to shut up, files went
missing,
prosecutors declined to prosecute, and cases were dropped. Even more
troubling,
those who reported instances of murder, rape, arson, and pillaging by
their
erstwhile brothers-in-arms did so at the risk of their lives. Nobody
was going
to jail, least of all high-ranking officers who had abetted the killing. By 1973, a
cloak of silence had settled over what really happened in Vietnam.
Forty years
later, Turse aims to set the record straight. But what is
it a record of? Were the atrocities peculiarly American, as some on the
left
have posited, or the predictable by-product of any war, especially a
counterinsurgency campaign in which the guerrillas, their civilian
supporters,
and the truly innocent are virtually inseparable? After
reading Turse’s meticulous, extraordinary, and oddly moving account,
it’s hard
to avoid concluding that the US record in Vietnam has more in common
with the
Wehrmacht and the Imperial Japanese Army than “the greatest generation”
that
fought those enemies in World War II. Of course,
we Americans recoil from such comparisons. But here’s the rub:
Substitute
Vietnam’s “gooks,” “dinks,” and “slopes” for World War II’s Jews,
Gypsies, and
gays, add in more than a million civilian casualties from air strikes,
napalm,
Agent Orange, and mass murder beyond My Lai, and what have you got?
Industrial-style killing on a massive scale. It didn’t
start out that way, of course; it never does. First came a more
benign-sounding
idea, the “body count,” the theory that you could measure progress in
Vietnam
principally by the number of “enemy” killed, not territory gained and
held. The
numbers crunching was enthusiastically grasped by Defense Secretary
Robert F.
McNamara, a former Harvard Business School and Ford Motor Company whiz
who,
Turse writes, “had designed statistical methods of analysis for the War
Department during World War II, most famously systemizing the flight
patterns
and improving the efficiency of the bombers that decimated German and
Japanese
cities.” In South
Vietnam, this vision of “technowar,” as the sociologist James William
Gibson
dubbed it, was quickly adopted by General William Westmoreland, the US
commander,
under the tactical rubric “Search-and-Destroy.” “The
pressure to produce high body counts flowed from the Pentagon to
Westmoreland’s
Saigon villa, down the chain of command, and out to the American
patrols in the
Vietnamese countryside,” Turse writes. The problem
was that the enemy was hard to find. The Viet Cong doctrine was to
shoot and
run, and then blend into the civilian population. The GIs’ frustration,
along
with casualties from booby traps and a demand for higher body counts,
seeded
cyclones of murder in hamlets all over South Vietnam. Far from discouraging such mayhem, senior officials encouraged it, Turse found, based on his extensive interviews with former soldiers, court testimony, and after-action reports. High body counts led to promotions and time off. Entire units were sometimes pitted against each other in body count competitions with prizes at stake. This helped make the body count mind-set even more pervasive, lending death totals the air of sports statistics. “Box scores” came to be displayed all over Vietnam—on charts and chalkboards (also known as “kill boards”) at military bases, printed up in military publications, and painted as crosshatched “kills” on the sides of helicopters, to name just a few of the most conspicuous examples. The huge kill count, though, rarely matched the paltry number of weapons found. Something was terribly wrong. Turse,
managing editor of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, has traveled
to some
of Vietnam’s remotest hamlets (most with modest little memorials to
their lost
loved ones), as well as to many settlements along America’s back roads,
to find
people with sorrowful new stories to tell. Among the
veterans and peasants, there is one constant. As one former marine put
it, “We
was going to kill anything that we see and anything that moved.” Someone
should have been held accountable. It was never to be. But willful
forgetting,
burying the facts and reinventing the Vietnam experience in a more
heroic
light, has exacted a heavy cost on us—not to mention on Iraq and
Afghanistan—Turse argues. “Never
having come to grips with what our country actually did during the war,
we see
its ghost arise anew with every successive military intervention,” he
says.
“Was Iraq the new Vietnam? Or was that Afghanistan? Do we see ‘light at
the end
of the tunnel’? Are we winning ‘hearts and minds’? Is
‘counterinsurgency’
working? Are we applying the lessons of Vietnam?” And finally:
“What are those lessons, anyway?” Jeff Stein,
a former military-intelligence case officer in Vietnam, is the author
of A
Murder in Wartime:The Untold Spy Story That Changed the Course of the
Vietnam
War (St. Martin's Press, 1992). |