The Only Good South Vietnamese Farmer is a Dead South Vietnamese Farmer

“Kill Anything That Moves – the Real War in Vietnam,” by Nick Turse, 2013

This book recounts a tragedy so horrible, an experience so destructive, that a simple book review does not suffice. This is a book that shows the American War in Vietnam to be what it was – a high tech slaughter of millions of South Vietnamese civilians. For the generations of clueless Americans who vaguely know Vietnam was ‘bad’ – you don’t know how ‘bad.’  It will cure anyone of the Democratic or Republican parties.  It will cure anyone of praising the military machine.  It will cure anyone of simplistic thoughts about the innocence of good ‘ol U.S. boys.  It was free-fire, unadulterated mass murder, organized from the top.  The title of this book is not a ‘leftist’ generalization – it is a quote, a thought, a practice, repeated time and time again.

Body Count

Free-Fire Zones

Protected Hamlets – mass removal to squalid huts

Overkill; kill over and over

Kill prisoners – can’t take them along

War Criminals:  Westmoreland, McNamara, LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, Singlaub, Laird, etc.

‘Scientific’ warfare methods

Industrial slaughter
Random murder

Orders from on High

Democrats and Republicans

Holocaust of Vietnamese

3 times more dead than the so-called ‘killing fields’ in Cambodia

Statistics:

58,000 dead Americans

304,000 wounded Americans

254,00 ARVN killed

783,000 wounded

1.7M Viet Cong / NLF dead

? VC / NLF wounded?

65,000 North Vietnamese civilians dead

2M South Vietnamese civilians dead – Harvard Medical School

7.3M Vietnamese casualties overall – Dead, KIA and wounded, Levy, Govt. of Vietnam

South Vietnam’s Population:  19M

Cluster bombs

White phosphorus

B-52 strikes

F-4 Phantoms

Napalm

Huey’s spitting bullets

Agent Orange defoliant

Friendly fire

South Vietnam is the most bombed place in history.

Orders

Destroy all buildings

Burn the ville
Fire the hooch

Level the rice, the fruit trees, the cane

Sink the sampan

Kill anything that moves, including the animals

Every bomb shelter hole in the ground is a VC bunker – grenades for all

Bomb craters in the paddies

Search & Destroy

Black pajamas are VC

Anyone who runs is VC

Little kids grow up to be VC

Water buffalo are VC

The “mere gook rule.”

Random shelling – use up your ammo

Ecocide

Pacification

The real Wasteland

Destroying the country to ‘save it’

They are not called Vietnamese, they are called ‘gooks’

Get the South Koreans to do it

Get the South Vietnamese Army to do it

CIA Operation Phoenix

Tiny 'Tiger' cages for humans; Tiger Force killers

Ewell:  Butcher of the Delta

A My Lai every week

What Geneva Convention?

Highway accidents; no speed limit

Leveled neighborhoods

Records of atrocities destroyed

West Point Protection Association

No one prosecuted

Cover-ups standard
Plant a Chi-Com grenade

Rape SOP

Torture normal – 93%

Trophy strings of ears around necks

War Pigs
The U.S. government and military - war criminals

Where is a Nuremburg when you need one?

Loser’s injustice wins.

(Other books about the Vietnam War, reviewed below:  "Into the Crossfire:  Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary," and "Peoples' History of the Vietnam War.")
And I bought it at Mayday Books – and you should too.

Red Frog

February 17, 2013

The February Revolution in Russia has started, 1917