Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Turse has described Kill Anything That Moves (2013) as a history of Vietnamese "civilian suffering" at the hands of U.S. troops during the Vietnam War.[27] The book is based on archival materials Turse discovered and interviews he conducted with eyewitnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, including a hundred American Vietnam War veterans.[28]

Writing in the Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam."[29] John Tirman of the Washington Post wrote, "Turse forcefully argues the narrower question of how the government failed to prosecute crimes committed in Vietnam or Cambodia."[30] Writing in Proceedings Magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, Richard Ruth, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy wrote: "Turse argues that the enormous toll of civilian victims was neither accidental nor unpredictable. The Pentagon's demand for quantifiable corpses surged down the chain of command, through all branches of the U.S. military, until many units had become fixated on producing indiscriminate casualties that they could claim as enemy kills. Under this system, killing was incentivized: those with high body counts not only got promoted more quickly, their units were treated better and enjoyed greater safety than those who missed their 'killing quotas'... The incentivizing of death encouraged some U.S. soldiers to rack up thousands of kills over multiple tours. In a telling detail repeated in many of the case studies examined, the alleged Viet Cong eliminated by these American super killers often had no weapons on them when they were gunned down. Turse makes it clear that such high numbers would have been all but impossible without the inclusion of innocent bystanders."[31]

Kill Anything That Moves was criticized for downplaying the scope and importance of the contribution Vietnam veterans made to the antiwar effort in the United States. During the war, U.S. antiwar activists repeatedly pointed to atrocities that Turse claimed to have "discovered." Another criticism is that his book focuses on crimes by individual U.S. soldiers while ignoring policies such as the bombing of North Vietnam that killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians.[32] Wrote Michael Uhl in CounterPunch, "(Turse) seems to weigh the vile handiwork of individual GIs operating in the field on a par with the far more deadly toll that sprang from coldhearted policies of mass murder designed by high level commanders, political bureaucrats and academics: the indiscriminate use of artillery and air power to remove and disrupt populations, and which caused the overwhelming number of deaths and casualties among the South Vietnamese."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Turse

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Tomgram: Nick Turse, American "Success" and the Rise of West African Piracy
Posted by Nick Turse at 8:00am, September 25, 2014.
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175899/tomgram%3A_nick_turse,_american_%22success%22_and_the_rise_of_west_african_piracy

"Former CIA Head Explains Why Armed Forces Can't Legally Obey Trump"

Past American military behavior feels to give some wider context to General Hayden's comment.