American Empire Project
2 total works
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were "isolated incidents" in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few "bad apples." However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to "kill anything that moves." Drawing on a decade of research into secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals the policies and actions that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. He lays out in shocking detail the workings of a military machine that made crimes in nearly every American unit all but inevitable.
"Kill Anything That Moves" takes us from archives filled with Washington's long-suppressed war crime investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led his troops to commit what one participant called "a My Lai a month."
"Kill Anything That Moves" takes us from archives filled with Washington's long-suppressed war crime investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led his troops to commit what one participant called "a My Lai a month."
The Pentagon works with Hollywood to develop new robot weapons systems, and encourages Hollywood to glorify and sanitise military violence. The military works with computer manufacturers to develop more efficient ways of killing, and the products from that collaboration are fed back as cool new kit for the impressionable youth. Food companies are drawn into research on meals and drugs that will make soldiers stay awake for longer, be more alert and hyped up. Western society is becoming militarised in hitherto unimaginable ways. This is the new, high-tech military-industrial complex: it is everywhere and nowhere. Nick Turse draws this strange, frightening world-within-the-world into the light.