Vietnam: Kill Anything that Moves

A new, enormously troubling book about US policy and military actions during the Vietnam war.  Nick Turse: Kill Anything that Moves

Kill Anything

“Turse wrote the book after stumbling on a previously unexplored cache of documents in the basement of the National Archives that detailed allegations of atrocities in Vietnam. The cases, says Turse, “were closed with little or seemingly no investigation done.”

“I asked the archivist, I said, ‘Who’s worked with this before?’ And he told me that people had looked at one or two individual case files, but that no one had really worked with the records in total. And when I looked at them, I realized that these weren’t in the secondary literature anywhere. Most of these cases had never been written about by historians, so I knew that this was a significant collection. And it took me a while, but I knew that I needed to work with it.”

Turse eventually interviewed more than 100 veterans, and says that the killings “stemmed from deliberate policies that were dictated at the highest levels of the U.S. military” — and that those policies prioritized body count.

…the  war … claimed 2 million civilian lives, with 5.3 million civilians wounded and 11 million refugees.

And as Turse tells Fresh Air’s Dave Davies, “as many as 4 million [were] exposed to toxic defoliants like Agent Orange.”

 

NPR interview

NPR text

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