These ranged from the B-52, which laid down a pattern of destruction a mile long and several football fields wide to fighter bombers capable of dropping, along with much else, 500-pound bombs and canisters of napalm to the reconfigured DC-3 equipped with a cannon capable of firing 100 rounds per second to the ubiquitous fleets of helicopters, large and small, that crowded the skies. There was only the unilateral bombardment of the land and people by the fantastic array of aircraft assembled by the United States in Vietnam. The Vietnamese foe, of course, had no assets in the air in the South, and so there was no “war” of that description. I was there to report for the New Yorker on the “air war.” The phrase was a misnomer. In early August 1967, I arrived in I Corps, the northernmost district of American military operations in what was then South Vietnam. My angle of vision on these matters is a highly particular one. Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war - a portrait that, as an American, you do not wish to see that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you should not forget and that the facts force you to see and remember and take into account when you ask yourself what the United States has done and been in the last half century, and what it still is doing and still is. “If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors if a brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his helicopter with impunity if a top general could institutionalize atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed with civilians - then what could be expected down the line, especially among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly pressed for kills?” Turse repeatedly invites us to ask what sort of larger picture each story implies. When some of these other facts are confirmed, they begin to reveal the pattern and texture in question. Each one is rich in implications, which, so to speak, reach out toward the wider area of the surrounding facts. Like a fabric, a social reality - a town, a university, a revolution, a war - has a pattern and a texture. Therefore, while providing an abundance of firsthand accounts, he has supplemented this approach. Yet it would not have been enough to simply accumulate anecdotal evidence of abuses. To be sure, he offers plenty of numbers - for instance the mind-boggling estimates that during the war there were some two million civilians killed and some five million wounded, that the United States flew 3.4 million aircraft sorties, and that it expended 30 billion pounds of munitions, releasing the equivalent in explosive force of 640 Hiroshima bombs. Turse acknowledges that, even now, not enough is known to present this picture in statistical terms. It has been Turse’s great achievement to see that, thanks to the special character of the war, its prime reality - an accurate overall picture of what physically was occurring on the ground - had never been assembled that with imagination and years of dogged work this could be done and that even a half-century after the beginning of the war it still should be done. Meticulously piecing together newly released classified information, court-martial records, Pentagon reports, and firsthand interviews in Vietnam and the United States, as well as contemporaneous press accounts and secondary literature, Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm, adding up to a continuous stream of atrocity, unfolding, year after year, throughout that country. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Now, in Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from here.įor half a century we have been arguing about “the Vietnam War.” Is it possible that we didn’t know what we were talking about? After all that has been written (some 30,000 books and counting), it scarcely seems possible, but such, it turns out, has literally been the case.

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