U.S Rulers’ War Policy in Vietnam and Now: ‘Kill Anything that Moves’

Over 30,000 books on Vietnam are in print. Why is one more, Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse, of unique value? The short answer is that it can be used as educational material. It provides 262 pages of historical facts gained from interviews and ten years of research, which prove that relentless massacres of workers and peasants on the ground and from the air were a core element of U.S. policy 40-50 years ago just as they are today.
Studying this evidence can help readers think more deeply about the causes of American racism, militarism and fascism. It fortifies our argument that U.S. capitalism and its advanced form, imperialism on a global scale, must be destroyed and that only a communist revolution can achieve it. We should make every effort to have everyone we know read the book’s fully documented exposures of the atrocities and unending mass killings that took place in Vietnam for over a decade.  
How many of us have heard of “Speedy Express”? Turse describes this six-month operation across the Mekong Delta (Dec. 68 - May 69) led by the army’s 9th Division as “industrial-scale slaughter.” Led by Gen. Julian Ewell, the operation was planned against a background of an attempt to jump-start peace talks in Paris before Lyndon Johnson left office. The U.S. sought to bring the rice-rich region and its huge population under Saigon’s control before any peace agreement.
Ewell was given a free hand and resources that included “helicopter gunships firing hundreds of rounds per minute, B-52s shaking the earth . . . F-4 Phantoms dropping canisters of napalm by the ton, navy ships off the coast that could hurl Volkswagen-sized shells at targets miles inland, and Swift Boats patrolling the delta’s waterways with machine guns . . .”  The results were a “kill ratio” (enemy to U.S. dead) of 134:1 in April 1969. Ewell’s goal was to kill 6,000 or more a month. Body counts were the most important measure of success. Who were these “enemies”?
The Viet Cong generally avoided combat when faced with the full might of the Americans, and the army’s own estimates showed that enemy forces in the region never declined and may have increased slightly. “Night search hunter-killer missions” were introduced. Primitive night-vision devices were used to identify targets, and accompanying helicopter gunships raked the area with machine guns. Top adviser John Paul Vann reported that troops simply targeted any and all people, homes and water buffalo. U.S. forces shot anyone who tried to run from the helicopters. The act of running made them enemies that could be added to sought-after body counts.
Speedy Express terrorized civilians with 6,500 tactical air strikes and the dropping of 5,078 tons of bombs and 1,784 tons of napalm. It is beyond the scope of this report to discuss the genocidal effects of the herbicide that was extensively used along river banks.
In 1971, a former aid worker, A. Shimkin, served as a Newsweek reporter. A master statistician, Shimkin crunched the numbers reported at the “Five O’Clock Follies,” the military’s nightly press briefings in Saigon. He studied the ratio of “enemy kills” to weapons recovered. The 9th Infantry reported killing 10,899 enemy troops in Speedy Express and recovering only 748 weapons. During the week of April 19, the reported ratio was 699 to 9. The army responded to charges of murdering civilians by explaining that the victims were “unarmed Viet Cong.”
Turse details how Newsweek and other media refused to publish Shimikin’s and other reports of atrocities and how the military covered up war crimes. One account exposes how a young officer named Colin Powell had nothing but praise for officers accused in the My Lai and other massacres. The book’s detailed history shows how the racism used to dehumanize victims was promoted from the top down. Enlisted men did commit crimes due to ignorance and racist thinking, but Kill Anything that Moves shows that the worst racists were the officers and fascist CIA and State Department planners who relied on anti-communism to justify genocide.
U.S. racist massacres did not begin or end with Vietnam. They continue in Afghanistan. In earlier wars, North Korea was “cratered” and millions of Korean civilians were slaughtered. Napalm was used in needless fire-bombing of Japanese cities other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were saved for the greatest terror spectacle of all.
Massacres have been part of human history since the beginning of exploitative societies, but what is important for us to do is point out that capitalist “progress” has never been able to fulfill humanity’s hope for peace. The technology controlled by imperialists has led to mass slaughter of workers on an unprecedented scale. Capitalist control of education, culture and the media has resulted in too many Americans becoming complacent about the use of advanced technology to slaughter non-combatants. Americans are taught that their military is a “force for good,” as the latest U.S. Navy commercial tells us.
PLP struggled, often successfully, to raise the level of understanding of U.S. imperialism among the hundreds of thousands who participated in the antiwar movement our party played a key role starting in the early1960s.  Shaken by the mass character of that movement, the U.S. retreat from Vietnam was followed by a powerful ideological counterattack and intensified glorification of militarism.
Hollywood’s Rambo series was a crude example of the stepped-up propaganda used to support aggression in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East.  The intense anti-Asian racism of the academy award winning movie, The Deer Hunter, attempted to justify the atrocities of U.S. imperialism’s war making.
The move to a better-paid volunteer army replacing an army of draftees, the promotion of patriotism and revenge for 9/11, and the demonization of “rogue states that hate democracy” make our job as anti-imperialists more challenging. With reporters “embedded,” media coverage of wars is better managed. We have to fight harder on all ideological fronts. Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves can be used to help win people to our party. It should be used energetically — by students, GIs, study groups, high school and college teachers, and parents trying to bring political understanding to their children.
Close to a year ago, Challenge carried a front page story on Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ midnight murders of 16 women and children in Afghanistan. We have to continue this type of exposure that pinpoints how racism leads to war crimes and how military technology is used to massacre millions, all to further the aim of U.S. imperialists to dominate the world.