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Thursday, August 1, 2013

'Kill Anything That Moves'

Chase Madar has written an interesting review of a book by Nick Turse that I blogged about before. Kill Anything That Moves tells the story, still largely unknown, about just how brutal the Vietnam War was.

Excerpt:

Of the 33,000 books about the Vietnam War, all but a few eagerly sidestep the atrocious carnage inflicted on hundreds of thousands of civilians. Nick Turse’s scholarly mission is to haul it into the center of historical inquiry and public memory, where it belongs. Kill Anything That Moves offers neither argument nor a new narrative—it simply aims to make violence against civilians “the essence of what we should think of when we say ‘the Vietnam War’.”

The war was “a system of suffering.” Turse is sick of hearing about My Lai—the programmatic slaughter of over 500 Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men carried out on March 16, 1969 by Americal Division’s Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry—not because it wasn’t an appalling war crime but because the event, now fashioned as a horrific one-off anomaly, has perversely absolved the rest of the war, obscuring for instance the massacre of 118 civilians at Dien Nien or of 68 civilians at Phuoc Binh; of 200 civilians at An Phuoc; of 86 killed at Nhon Hoa; 155 killed at the My Khe (4) hamlet.

Madar goes into considerable detail about how the real essence of the war has been covered up.

2 comments:

michael said...

As thoroughly unpleasant as Madar's work may be to read, this realization seems like Good Work...but who's reading?

This reminded me of Th. Metzger's piece "Destroy All Goo Goos," which I first read as a supplement in an update of the now-defunct Loompanics catalog.

How good ol' Murrkin boys acted in the Philippines in 1898, at the beginning of the Empire:

http://www.loompanics.com/Articles/DestroyAllGooGoos.htm

I once received a group email from RAW and Metzger looked like one of my co-recipients (along with Stang, Krassner and other Luminaries). Metzger also wrote The Birth of Heroin and the Demonization of the Dope Fiend, and Tesla fans may have missed his book Blood and Volts, because Metzger is/was always on a small press.

His character and life seem 180 degrees from the "Tom Metzger" of Orange County neo-nazi fame.

michael said...

Ehhh...yea: sorry: it's obviously Nick Turse who did the tough work, while Madar did the review.

Bravo Turse!