Ask Us Again Why We Hate America (And Why We Blame "Her" First)

A book is reviewed.

For [author Nick] Turse, a journalist and the author of a previous book on the military industrial complex’s impact on daily life, the first glimmer of understanding came in 2001 when, as a graduate student researching post-traumatic stress disorder among Vietnam veterans, he happened upon the records of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group. This was “a secret Pentagon task force that had,” he writes, “been assembled after the My Lai massacre to ensure that the army would never again be caught off-guard by a major war crimes scandal.” The papers “documented a nightmare war that is essentially missing from our understanding of the Vietnam conflict.”

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Turse cites a 1970 refugee study in one province where 80 percent blamed their homelessness on US and allied South Vietnamese government forces, 18 percent attributed the damage to actual battles between the two sides, and only 2 percent blamed the NLF alone. This assessment was backed up by John Paul Vann, head of the US’s Saigon-area “pacification” program, who wrote in 1968 that “I estimate 15,000 houses destroyed — about 99 percent of this has been the result of overreaction on the part of US and [South] Vietnamese units.” Overreaction.

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Another of Turse’s interesting finds is an official army investigation of the “Torture of Prisoners of War by US Officers,” which concluded that such torture was “standard practice” among US troops. And the study Defense Secretary William McNamara commissioned in 1969 that found more “than 96 percent of Marine Corps second lieutenants […] surveyed […] indicated that they would resort to torture to obtain information.”

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But after My Lai became public knowledge, Turse asserts: “It was almost as if America’s leading media outlets had gone straight from ignoring atrocities to treating them as old news.” In 1972, Newsweek’s departing Saigon bureau chief filed a story about an operation called “Speedy Express,” in which he concluded that “thousands of unarmed, noncombatant civilians have been killed by American firepower. They were not killed by accident. The American way of fighting made their deaths inevitable.” His editors, however, argued that running the story would constitute a “gratuitous attack” upon the Nixon Administration, which had just taken such a hit over My Lai.

Liberal media again. And Newsweek was considered leftest of the two-and-a-half national newsweeklies.

In the tremendous research effort that produced this book (including many interviews of Vietnamese and American soldiers), Turse finds that, “The scale of the suffering becomes almost unimaginable,” but not as “unimaginable as the fact that somehow, in the United States it was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

We will almost certainly never see an outpouring of truth-telling about Vietnam approaching that of the Second World War era for the simple reason that “we” were not on the side of the angels in Vietnam. But this only makes Turse’s work all the more significant.

Book title: Kill Anything that Moves. Subtitle: The Real American War in Vietnam.

Stabbed in the back by Walter Cronkite & liberal media & by revisionist liberal academics denying our warriors their nobility.