by TOM GALLAGHER
The My Lai Massacre was the Vietnam War mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968, by United States Army soldiers of “Charlie” Company of 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade of the Americal Division. Victims included women, men, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies were later found to be mutilated[2] and many women were allegedly raped prior to the killings. PHOTO/TEXT/Wikipedia
We should make Nick Turse an honorary baby boomer for writing Kill Anything That Moves. A history of the Vietnam War that finds the My Lai massacre more the rule than the exception, this book is almost guaranteed to reveal something that will drop your jaw — at least once. For me, it was the number of American military helicopter sorties flown during the Vietnam War: over 36 million. Filled with such shocking details, Kill Anything That Moves will shake you with a deeper understanding of the serial atrocity that was the US war effort in Vietnam.
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To fully appreciate the Vietnam War, we must first clear up any misperception that it was some kind of fair fight between Vietnamese, with the US helping one side and the Soviet Union and China helping the other. Turse’s book does so in many ways: There’s the fact that “our side” — American and South Vietnamese government forces — used 128,400 tons of ammunition a month in 1970, while the “other side” — the National Liberation Front (NLF), or “Viet Cong,” and the North Vietnamese government — never fired more than 1,000 tons a month. Or that the US dropped 32 tons of bombs per hour on North Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, causing some to predict it would become the most bombed country in world history.
This prediction proved wrong, Turse points out. It was South Vietnam, our ally, that became the most bombed country in history as “US and South Vietnamese aircraft flew 3.4 million combat sorties in Southeast Asia,” during which they dropped “the equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.” The “other side,” remember, never launched an aerial bombing run. “Our side” subjected 12 million acres to saturation bombing and dropped 70 million liters of herbicide (notably Agent Orange). One of the war images that lives on is that of a naked nine-year old Phan Thi Kim Phúc running down a road after having been napalmed by our South Vietnamese allies in 1972. (“Our side” dropped 400,000 tons of napalm in Southeast Asia.) Though Kim Phúc survived, a low-end estimate of the number of Vietnamese civilians who did not would be 250,000. By 1968, a US Senate study had put the number of civilians killed or wounded in free fire zones at 300,000. Free fire zones, as Turse reports in an infantryman’s words, meant that “everyone, men, women, children, could be considered [a fair target]; you could not be held responsible for firing on innocent civilians since by definition there were none there.”
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