The Chris Moeller Archives

Vietnam, the psychotic's playground

Wanna have your patriotism seriously challenged? Read Nick Turse's book "Kill Anything That Moves" (2013). It outlines many of the atrocities of the Vietnam War-- or as they call it in Vietnam, the American War. These pungent acts of terrorism by your military against these small villages, which were filled almost always entirely with only unarmed women, children, infants, and old men, as Turse details thanks to declassified documents and eyewitness interviews, served as more command policy than aberration. As mass killings and gang-rapings go, many of them were larger in scale than My Lai. They were "not a few random massacres or even discrete strings of atrocities, but something on the order of thousands of days of relentless misery-- a veritable system of suffering." Along with your nationalism, you may lose your lunch.

Four topics to be raised upon reading this book by Turse, who had set out to report on post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by American combat vets who served in this war of nightmare:

1) The popular myth about Americans spitting (literally and figuratively) on vets when they returned from Southeast Asia has its roots in institutional efforts to propagandize what was an indefensible, immoral mission, but now it seems to me that it's also rooted in part in the damaged psyches of returning soldiers (many of them teenagers at the time) that had had their humanity stripped from them by concerted effort and then committed atrocities on a scale that Turse refers to as a "haystack of needles." Even the soldiers that were court-martialed, by and large, avoided prison time, with some even being restored ultimately to full rank.

2) The parallels between the world then and the world today are stark. Reporting war crimes became the gravest offense. The three servicemen, for example, that blew the whistle on My Lai, were denounced by many Americans, even some members of Congress, as traitors. Today, whistleblower of the 2009 Granai airstrike and the 2007 "Collateral Murder" Baghdad bombing, Bradley Manning, has been demonized as traitorous and now been successfully prosecuted in a military court under the Espionage Act. Then and today, civilians guilty of only the misfortune of living in the wrong area were re-classified by the military as "the enemy," or "terrorists." They are considered subhuman. Lyndon Johnson called Vietnam a "a piddling piss-ant little country."

3) The public worship over our military is terrifying. The flood gates are wide open now for them to commit industrial slaughter.

4) One has to wonder whether full facts will ever be known in some instances. Many case files regarding war crime investigations in Vietnam, according to the author, are fragmented or missing full pages or sections. After we've hunted down all the Nazis, will we then set our sights on the commanders of these U.S. army and marine battalions still living, as well as their superiors in Washington?

posted by CM @ 9:56 PM