June 16, 2013 4:42 pm

The wartime horror inflicted on Vietnam

Review by Borzou Daragahi

A meticulously researched account of the cruelty of US troops to Vietnamese civilians raises questions for today’s conflicts

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse, Metropolitan (RRP£18.99, RRP$30)

One atrocity among the many recounted in Nick Turse’s searing and meticulously documented book about US conduct during the Vietnam war stands out for the gratuitous cruelty of the troops in their day-to-day interactions with often defenceless civilians.

In rural Quang Nam province in June 1966, four unarmed local people approached a group of Marines in an attempt to retrieve the body of an elderly man killed the day before by US troops. They wore white, carried a white flag bearing a red cross and brought a letter of introduction in English from an official of the pro-US south Vietnamese government. The troops blindfolded them, destroyed the letter and flag and ordered them to leave. Once they were about 40 metres away, the soldiers opened fire, killing two and wounding a third.

This account was among hundreds Turse found in 2001 while in Washington researching a doctoral thesis on post-traumatic stress order. He stumbled upon boxes full of forgotten archives from the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, a once-secret US military project launched to document alleged American atrocities in order to keep them quiet.

Turse copied about a third of the documents before they were removed from public view the following year. Their accounts of civilian massacres, rapes and torture form the core of his book, which includes interviews with soldiers involved as well as victims and witnesses.

The book is a damning account of the horrors the US inflicted on civilians in its failed quest to keep Vietnam’s south from falling to the communist north. But rather than single out a few bad apples, such as those tried and sentenced for the My Lai massacre, Turse aims to identify policy decisions and a military culture that led to what he describes as systematic, flagrant disregard for the lives and rights of Vietnamese people.

Despite America dropping more bombs on the north than it used in all of the second world war, the greatest victims of US firepower, and by the far the largest percentage of people killed, were the same civilians the US was ostensibly attempting to liberate. According to Turse, My Lai was but one of many such massacres in the south Vietnamese countryside; it seems every other village in certain provinces has erected a monument detailing US atrocities.

Students and contemporaries of the war recall “kill counts” and“free-fire zones” that were part of US tactics against guerrillas in the south. “Kill anything that moves” was a phrase that came up repeatedly in the case files and soldiers’ recollections of their orders, epitomising a mindset that devalued Vietnamese life.

In 1968, the US army paid Vietnamese families about $33 for each adult civilian killed unintentionally, half that for each child. MGR, an acronym commonly used by soldiers, stood for the “mere gook rule”, hinting that no American would ever be punished for killing any Vietnamese.

The book zeroes in on the consequences of granting young men, deprived of sleep and creature comforts while heavily armed, wide latitude to pursue murky policy objectives against an elusive foe in a foreign land. Civilians navigating constantly changing rules of engagement to which they were not privy found little escape from the onslaught. Displaced peasants, terrified by bombing and“rural pacification” campaigns, descended on cities or squalid camps, only to be shot by soldiers. In detention centres, beatings and torture were common – including against pregnant women and the elderly, such as the 86-year-old grandmother beaten “mercilessly” by US Special Forces.

Whistleblowers were frequently left to twist in the wind, ignored, reassigned for speaking out or even – a fact that has echoes in today’s National Security Agency scandal – placed under investigation. Even those convicted rarely received more than a slap on the wrist.

The writing at times fails to measure up to the powerful underlying research. A project that took a decade to research would have benefited from a few more months of literary tweaks. Nevertheless, as Turse himself occasionally notes, the stark, cool bureaucratic language in the accounts adds to the impact of the brutality.

The question for many readers will be how much has changed. Is the spectre of ultra-violence against civilians yet to be exorcised? Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have displayed shades of the conduct recounted here, perpetrating atrocities that suggest disregard for foreign lives. But rarely with such impunity and not on the scale of what the author depicts in an era before the proliferation of real-time satellite and internet communications technology made covering up such crimes nearly impossible.

The reviewer is a north Africa correspondent for the Financial Times

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... But Iraqis don't have that choice...

We've moved on from the Iraq war – but Iraqis don't have that choice

Like characters from The Great Gatsby, Britain and the US have arrogantly turned their backs and left a country in ruins

John Pilger

The Guardian, Sunday 26 May 2013 18.00 BST

Iraq's ministry of social affairs estimates 4.5 million children have lost one or both parents. This means 14% of the population are orphans. Photograph: Reuters

The dust in Iraq rolls down the long roads that are the desert's fingers. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat; it swirls in markets and school playgrounds, consuming children kicking a ball; and it carries, according to Dr Jawad Al-Ali, "the seeds of our death". An internationally respected cancer specialist at the Sadr teaching hospital in Basra, Dr Ali told me that in 1999, and today his warning is irrefutable. "Before the Gulf war," he said, "we had two or three cancer patients a month. Now we have 30 to 35 dying every month. Our studies indicate that 40 to 48% of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long after. That's almost half the population. Most of my own family have it, and we have no history of the disease. It is like Chernobyl here; the genetic effects are new to us; the mushrooms grow huge; even the grapes in my garden have mutated and can't be eaten."

Along the corridor, Dr Ginan Ghalib Hassen, a paediatrician, kept a photo album of the children she was trying to save. Many hadneuroblastoma. "Before the war, we saw only one case of this unusual tumour in two years," she said. "Now we have many cases, mostly with no family history. I have studied what happened in Hiroshima. The sudden increase of such congenital malformations is the same."

Among the doctors I interviewed, there was little doubt that depleted uranium shells used by the Americans and British in the Gulf war were the cause. A US military physicist assigned to clean up the Gulf war battlefield across the border in Kuwait said, "Each round fired by an A-10 Warthog attack aircraft carried over 4,500 grams of solid uranium. Well over 300 tons of DU was used. It was a form of nuclear warfare."

Although the link with cancer is always difficult to prove absolutely, the Iraqi doctors argue that "the epidemic speaks for itself". The British oncologist Karol Sikora, chief of the World Health Organisation's cancer programme in the 1990s, wrote in the British Medical Journal: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Iraq sanctions committee]." He told me, "We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics."

Recently, Hans von Sponeck, former assistant secretary general of the United Nations and senior UN humanitarian official in Iraq, wrote to me: "The US government sought to prevent WHO from surveying areas in southern Iraq where depleted uranium had been used and caused serious health and environmental dangers." A WHO report, the result of a landmark study conducted with the Iraqi ministry of health, has been "delayed". Covering 10,800 households, it contains "damning evidence", says a ministry official and, according to one of its researchers, remains "top secret". The report says birth defects have risen to a "crisis" right across Iraqi society where depleted uranium and other toxic heavy metals were used by the US and Britain. Fourteen years after he sounded the alarm, Dr Jawad Al-Ali reports "phenomenal" multiple cancers in entire families.

Iraq is no longer news. Last week, the killing of 57 Iraqis in one day was a non-event compared with the murder of a British soldier in London. Yet the two atrocities are connected. Their emblem might be a lavish new movie of F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Two of the main characters, as Fitzgerald wrote, "smashed up things and creatures and retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness … and let other people clean up the mess".

The "mess" left by George Bush and Tony Blair in Iraq is a sectarian war, the bombs of 7/7 and now a man waving a bloody meat cleaver in Woolwich. Bush has retreated back into his Mickey Mouse "presidential library and museum" and Tony Blair into his jackdaw travels and his money.

Their "mess" is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs' estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. "This means a horrific 14% of Iraq's population are orphans," he wrote. "An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows". Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

In her book Dispatches from the Dark Side, Gareth Peirce, Britain's greatest human rights lawyer, applies the rule of law to Blair, his propagandist Alastair Campbell and his colluding cabinet. For Blair, she wrote, "human beings presumed to hold [Islamist] views, were to be disabled by any means possible, and permanently … in Blair's language a 'virus' to be 'eliminated' and requiring 'a myriad of interventions [sic] deep into the affairs of other nations.' The very concept of war was mutated to 'our values versus theirs'." And yet, says Peirce, "the threads of emails, internal government communiques, reveal no dissent". For foreign secretary Jack Straw, sending innocent British citizens to Guantánamo was "the best way to meet our counter-terrorism objective".

These crimes, their iniquity on a par with Woolwich, await prosecution. But who will demand it? In the kabuki theatre of Westminster politics, the faraway violence of "our values" is of no interest. Do the rest of us also turn our backs?

www.johnpilger.com

•This article was amended on 27 May 2013. The original referred to the A-10 Warthog aircraft as the A-10 Warhog.

Link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/26/iraqis-cant-turn-backs-on-deadly-legacy#