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Kill Anything that
Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam "Strafe the town and kill the people, Drop napalm in the square, Get out early every Sunday And catch them at their morning prayer."— Anonymous
Establishing a pattern of atrocities in one location after another, Turse focuses on a massacre at a village called Trieu Ai in October 1967. The provocation came when a marine was killed in a booby trap, infuriating the soldiers. No consideration was shown to women and children who had returned to the village for their belongings: "In the story of Trieu Ai one can see virtually the entire war writ small.`A0 Here was the repeated aerial bombing and artillery fire`85 Here was the deliberate burning of peasant homes and the relocation of villagers to refugee camps — that was the basic recipe for many of the mass killings over the years." The book is a revelation of the official lies and cover-ups of devastation, rape and torture that were kept away from the public gaze to allow some legitimacy to the Vietnam war. The depiction marks a dark and disturbing period in human history. The facts are backed by irrefutable evidence of widespread crimes, a true hallmark of any objective history writing that aims to provoke a debate on the legitimacy of war within a civil society.
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THE quotation brings out
the true picture of the reality of the United States’ involvement in
the Vietnam war. Nick Turse’s incredibly blunt observations tell the
truth of the grim operation in Vietnam, published in his recent book Kill
Anything that Moves, taking us back to the trauma that American’s
have still not outlived. The guilt is similar to the ingrained pangs
of conscience we see till today in the minds of many Germans who have
not forgotten the inescapably gruesome tragedy of the Jews. This is
yet another scathing critique of a war that comes as a valuable
addition to the vast literature on the Vietnam war. With in-depth
research on classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon
reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam, the writer brings the
reader face to face with the brutalities of a war that seemingly was
fought for the liberation of the people of Vietnam. A continuation of
the Cold War, it was a direct confrontation with communist forces that
threatened to take over South Vietnam. Taking a look at the
catastrophic figures of at least two million civilians killed and five
million wounded as a result of 3.4 million airforce sorties carried
out by the Americans would itself establish such a war as one of the
extreme cases of genocide in human history. It is estimated that 30
billion pounds of munitions equivalent in explosive force of 640
Hiroshima bombs were used in this massacre of innocent civilians.
Archival material, along with first-hand accounts, corroborates the
information which till now, to many, was more of a conjecture.