03/11/13 – Nick Turse – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our first guest today is Nick Terse, author of Kill Anything That Moves, the real American war in Vietnam.
And he is, of course, managing editor for TomDispatch.com and fellow at the Nation Institute.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Nick?
I'm doing well, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, you're welcome.
Very happy to have you here.
Oh, and I should mention, too, that you're the author of The Complex, which is a great book.
Remember, the military-industrial complex, because you have to include too many things with too many dashes.
So it's just The Complex, for short.
In other words, the entire American warfare economy from top to bottom, beginning to end.
But we don't want to get bogged down in that.
Just wanted to make sure to mention it.
Great work.
Congratulations on this thing that you've done here.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
All right.
Now, a few things.
I guess, first of all, I want to start with, as you do in the introduction, and fair enough, start with how it was that you wrote this book, the documents that you got your hands on, and the uniqueness.
Because, you know, it's interesting.
I was born in 76, right?
So I've, you know, 80s Vietnam movies, Platoon and all that kind of thing.
I guess I've always sort of known that, you know, even Michael J. Fox had that movie.
I think you refer to it in the book, right?
The rape movie.
Casualties of War.
So, yeah, so we all kind of have, or anybody my age, we kind of grew up knowing that, boy, that Vietnam War was just a bunch of people killed for nothing kind of horrible situations going on, and rapes and murders and this kind of thing.
But you write in here that no one's ever done a book like this, where war crimes in Vietnam was actually the focus, and they really tried to, you know, be exhaustive and figure out what was really going on.
So it's part of the mythology, but it's not part of the real scholarship of the war.
That's right.
You know, I was raised on those same movies, too.
And, you know, I looked around, and there were, you know, 30,000 books on the Vietnam War that are out there, but really not one that attempts to tell the complete story of what I came to see as the signature aspect of the conflict, and that's Vietnamese civilian suffering.
And, you know, you mentioned how I came to the book.
I really stumbled into it.
I was a graduate student at the time, and I was working on a project on post-traumatic stress disorder among U.S.
Vietnam vets, and I would head down to the National Archives, and basically I was looking for hard data to match up against what the veterans had told us about their service to try and place them at a particular time, particular place.
And on one of these research trips, I'd spent about two weeks, and I'd just hit nothing but dead ends.
I mean, every research avenue that I tried was a failure.
And finally, I went to an archivist that I worked with, and I told him, you know, look, I can't go back to my boss empty-handed.
I need something, at least a lead, that I can bring back.
And he thought about it for a moment, and then he said a couple words that really changed my life.
He asked me if I thought that witnessing war crimes could cause post-traumatic stress, and I told him that I thought it was an excellent hypothesis, and asked what he had on war crimes.
He told me about a group of files called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, and he said that they'd been sitting down in the archives' shelves for years, and I asked him to pull those documents, and he did.
And within an hour, I was searching through box after box, thousands upon thousands of pages of reports.
To call it an information treasure trove is the wrong phrase.
It was a horror trove.
These were reports by active-duty GIs and recently-returned veterans on massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault, mutilation.
And I knew that these documents weren't in the literature anywhere, and that's really what started me off on the path that led to Kill Anything That Moves.
All right, now I can hear right-wing gears turning out there in the audience right now, and they're saying, yeah, yeah, well, so you found some documents that said some things.
But no, you did the journalism.
You went and tracked these people down.
You went to Vietnam.
You talked to the victims, and you talked to the American soldiers and got their side of the story.
That's what this book is.
It's not just some hearsay and some documents.
That's right.
For one, these were documents that were contemporaneous with the crimes, and they're sworn testimony from American veterans and active-duty soldiers at the time.
So they're on record at the time.
But then I wanted to take this further, and I went out and crisscrossed the country talking to veterans who were in these files, and they put me on to other veterans to talk to.
And then I went to Vietnam because I really wanted to get the Vietnamese side of the story.
When you read these records, basically the Vietnamese are sort of nameless, faceless victims.
But I wanted to get their sense of what these atrocities that I found in the American records, what their experience was.
So I went into the countryside and tracked them down as best I could.
All right, now, one of the things that I've only now really got my head around, I've heard Chomsky say it this way since I was a kid, I guess, but I still really never understood that the U.S. just invaded South Vietnam.
It was not a civil war where we intervened on one side.
That was actually the way I learned it when I was a little kid.
It was a civil war, and it was none of our damn business, and we should have stayed out.
But, in fact, it wasn't even that.
It was just that America invaded South Vietnam, and whatever government was in Saigon were simply even less than Karzai in terms of sock puppet power.
Well, I mean, the American war effort in Vietnam, really, you have to trace it back to the early 1950s when the French were, after World War II, during World War II, that's probably a place I should start, the Americans were helping a Vietnamese freedom fighter named Ho Chi Minh, and basically when American flyers would go down over Vietnam because they were flying to and from China, Ho Chi Minh and his Vietnamese cadres would go out and help these downed American flyers.
It provided intelligence for the Americans, and in turn, the Americans armed and trained them.
After the war, Ho Chi Minh thought that America could be a real ally.
Vietnam was trying to help defeat the Japanese, and they wanted to make sure that the French, who had colonized Vietnam since the mid-1800s, wouldn't return.
And they were hoping for America's support because they'd support America during World War II.
But instead, the U.S. decided that having a Cold War ally in Europe was more important, so they backed the French colonial effort in Vietnam.
They backed the reconquest, and by the end of that war, they were paying 80% of the French bill.
They were sending the French surplus U.S. munitions, surplus U.S. vehicles, and the French were even fighting in American combat gear.
So this really was an American counterrevolution with French proxies in Vietnam.
And when the French were finally defeated at Yen Bien Phu in 1954, the Americans basically took up that cause.
They began, against the war-ending Geneva Accords, they began arming and supplying a regime in the south of Vietnam.
This was against the Accords that had been put into place.
And they decided they wouldn't abide by what was supposed to be a reunification election in 1956.
The idea was that the two Vietnams, these placeholder regions, the south and the north, would go to the polls and they would select a leader.
And the U.S. was sure that Ho Chi Minh would win with 80% of the vote, and they were dead set against this.
And what happened after is they came in on the side of this placeholder region and regarded it as its own country and decided to fight it out against Ho Chi Minh and his forces from the north and also revolutionaries in the south.
And now, I don't know how sophisticated the Gallup polling was around there, but it was going to be an absolute shutout, right?
Ho Chi Minh had a majority even in the south.
In a sense, the Americans were right to consider the majority of the south to be on the side of the enemy.
That's right.
You know, they were sure that in any election he would win at least 80% of the vote.
I mean, this was a nationalist leader.
So it wasn't like he had the north all locked up and a little bit of the south, and that added up to 52% or something like that.
He had the south completely locked up as well.
Yeah, the major population centers of the south were basically hotbeds of the revolution.
I mean, for years these areas had been looking to throw off the yoke of the French.
So Ho Chi Minh was their go-to guy.
He was the one who was in support of their movement.
And so I guess this is the part that I never really understood was just how much of the population of the entire south was also on the side of the rebellion and the nationalism.
I mean, it's still somehow I only just figured out from reading your book that the VC wasn't just a minority among the people of the south, you know, these guerrillas, but that mostly they were fighting for, you know, something near a bare majority at least of the people of the south.
But no, they really were.
That's why all the atrocities is because the body count, I mean, really the enemy was simply just the people of South Vietnam.
They couldn't go north without provoking the Chinese into intervening further.
So it was just a war against the people of the south, and no wonder they could never win the damn thing.
Yeah, the regime in Saigon that the Americans backed basically only ever held some major towns where they had, you know, a large garrison of forces.
And, you know, in the countryside, wherever they happen to be with weaponry during the day, but at night, you know, this is where the war was won and lost.
And this is where the, you know, what we call the Vietnamese Communist Forces or VC, what they call the National Liberation Front and the People's Liberation Armed Forces held sway.
I mean, they were deeply woven into, you know, the village structure of most of the countryside.
You know, there were exceptions, you know, across the country, but generally in the large populated areas.
This is where the National Liberation Front was extremely strong.
These were areas that were, you know, had been looking to, you know, create an independent Vietnam for close to 100 years.
So they weren't interested in a regime that had once been linked with the French and now was linked with the Americans.
Okay.
Now, we have such a short amount of time.
I want to give you a chance to give a couple of examples of atrocities and the way this kind of worked.
But also, maybe first, if you could talk about McNamara and the whiz kids and the entire mistake of quantity for quality when these guys are crunching their numbers and figuring out what to do and the way that they built the incentives for the lowest private out there with an M-16.
Sure.
You know, Bob McNamara, before he became John F. Kennedy's Secretary of Defense in 1961, had worked for 10 years at Ford Motor Company.
And he came in to head the Pentagon and decided to run it the way he had run Ford, as a business.
He thought that, you know, basically you could run the Department of Defense and you could run the war in Vietnam on a sort of like a ledger sheet, debits and credits.
So he seized on the idea of an attrition strategy for Vietnam.
It's what was used during the second half of the Korean War.
And the idea was that, you know, based on one metric, the body count.
The idea was that you would kill your way to victory.
Basically, you pile up Vietnamese bodies.
You would kill enough guerrillas to the point where you were killing more Vietnamese guerrilla forces than they could put into the field.
And at that moment, the enemy would, you know, look at their ledger sheet and say, well, it's not rational to continue the war and we'll just give up.
Of course, you know, McNamara and his whiz kids never took into account that the Vietnamese saw this as a continuation of their anti-colonial struggle against the French, that they were fighting for the liberation of their country.
They didn't see this as just a rational exercise the way that McNamara envisioned it.
So, you know, he seized on this idea of body count, and, you know, it trickled down into the field, and the soldiers there were pressed extremely hard.
They were told to turn in bodies.
If they didn't, they'd be forced to stay out in the field.
You know, this was an extremely tough environment to operate in, for one, so you were courting exhaustion, and also the more time you spent out in the field, the greater chance that you'd be wounded or killed.
So they were told to turn in Vietnamese bodies, and they realized quickly that their commanders weren't discerning about what bodies they turned in.
You know, one of the best examples that people might recognize is the My Lai Massacre, where 500 civilians were killed over a period of four hours.
But when it was reported in the press, it was reported as a major victory, 128 enemy killed.
So they were taught to really ask further questions about why it was you could kill 128 hard-core enemy troops without losing one American, and why there were only three or four weapons that were turned in when you killed all these armed troops.
But their commanders never asked questions, and the American troops in the field, who had a really tough time of it, they learned quickly that you could just turn in Vietnamese civilian bodies, and often they did.
And now, you know, here's something that I think people have such a hard time with, right?
You take a good kid right out of the football team and church, and you put them in a situation like that, where all of Bob McNamara's economic incentives, the way he's built them, are in play, and you turn that kid into a monster immediately.
And it's not, you know, the human psyche can only do so well in a cold, wet jungle, you know?
That's right.
You know, one veteran that I talk to, I always remember his phrase.
He called what he and his fellow troops went through an incentivization of death.
And, you know, he talked to me about this, and many other veterans did.
They talked about the extreme pressure they were under, all these, you know, the sticks that were used.
You know, they were forced to stay out in the field a long time.
Production quotas, they called them.
That's right.
If you didn't turn in, you know, bodies, you wouldn't get an airlift out of the field.
You had to walk in and out, that type of thing.
But there were also all these carrots that were dangled in front of them, you know, a three-day R&R to get out of the field and spend it at a beach resort, extra beer, extra food, light duty at base camp, medals, badges, all these things that were thrown at the troops.
And we're talking about 18-, 19-, 20-year-old guys.
This is the average infantryman in Vietnam, so they're not much more than boys.
And, you know, they're really, you know, they're leaned on hard to produce bodies.
They're given all these incentives to produce bodies, and a lot of them did just that.
Now, some of the atrocities that you describe in the book, well-documented, multiple-sourced, where these guys are just outright machine-gunning little old ladies and including infants and children and anyone to death, just round them all up in the center of town and machine-gunning them like Nazis.
And these kinds of stories, they sound impossible.
They sound like Nick Turse must be some commie with a chip on his shoulder to make up such terrible slanders, because what could possibly explain that kind of behavior out of our guys when we're the good guys and we don't act like that?
And, really, that's the lesson, I think, isn't it, is that it's all about the incentive structure.
And if you set someone up the right way, you can take a good kid and you can really have him kill a baby with an M-16.
Well, you know, it certainly does happen, and my book is filled with accounts from the records, from the testimony of veterans and from the Vietnamese side, and I try and spell this out.
You know, there are a lot of these micro-level atrocities, murders and massacres, but, of course, I think what I do try and bring out, though, is that most Vietnamese weren't killed by American troops on the ground.
There's only so much that a soldier or a squad or a patrol can do.
Millions of Vietnamese were killed or wounded due to deliberate U.S. policies that were coming out of the Pentagon, out of McNamara's Pentagon, things like the almost unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling across wide swaths of the countryside.
So that is, deliberate policies dictated the highest levels of the U.S. military, and this is how most Vietnamese died.
And, of course, troops saw that the way the war was being fought, they saw that pilots and artillerymen were never prosecuted for war crimes.
They saw that the countryside was just littered with bomb craters.
They saw artillery and airstrikes called in on villages that were filled with people.
And when they saw this, they knew that, for them, pretty much anything goes.
They could do what they wanted to, and they weren't going to take chances.
You know, when they saw how their commanders were fighting the war.
Well, you know, I think there was one part of this book where I laughed out loud, and not too much in a ha-ha way, but in an ironical kind of way.
I actually was floored by this, the double meaning of the term search and destroy.
I mean, I always thought that that meant, you know, go out there, find the bad guys, and destroy them.
But the soldiers that you quote in the book, they had an entirely different definition for that.
Yeah, you know, they never really were given a proper definition of search and destroy.
But what they took away from what their commanders said was basically that you would go out and search out anyone that you could find and destroy.
So this was really, when they'd go out into the countryside, they weren't going to find young men.
They were either serving with the guerrillas, they were serving with the American allied forces, or they were dodging both armies.
And they knew that whenever any army came around, it made sense to run, because they were the ones who would be, you know, constricted into whichever army came calling, or arrested, and had a chance of being just executed out in the field.
So the Americans, you know, went through the countryside, and basically they found, you know, villages filled with women, children, and old men.
They took out their frustration on these people, and they really destroyed, you know, whatever they could find, which was basically Vietnamese villages.
Well, I think you even quote one of the soldiers who just finished tossing a hut.
And he walks out, and he says, yeah, that's what I'm doing, search and destroy, right?
That's what we're supposed to do, search everything and then destroy it all.
Yeah.
So not even just search for someone, but go right to that village and search and destroy it.
Yeah, this was the takeaway that the soldiers had.
You know, they weren't given any better instructions than that.
And, you know, when their commanders gave out orders like, you know, kill anything that moves, this wasn't hyperbole on my part.
You know, this was an order that I saw consistently in the literature.
You know, they took that to be a shorthand for the war.
So things like search and destroy and body count and kill anything that moves, they kind of, you know, this was the shorthand that they knew the war by, and the war they fought was just particularly brutal.
And can you tell us a bit about the rounding up of the people of the countryside and forcing them onto these collective farms?
It sounds extremely Soviet, in fact.
Yeah, this was actually something that, you know, when the Americans were looking for a way to fight this war, you know, they looked to the way that the Japanese had fought the Chinese during World War II.
And, you know, the Chinese communists end up calling it a kill-all, loot-all, burn-all policy.
And, you know, the U.S. looked to this as a template for their type of operation.
And the idea was that you would just, you know, blanket the countryside with heavy ordnance and force the Vietnamese out.
This was the way that they would break the bonds between the guerrilla forces and the Vietnamese civilians in the countryside.
So they unleashed heavy firepower on the countryside.
They went through and burned down villages.
And they were trying to force people into what were either called by the Vietnamese concentration zones or refugee camps or into the slums that ended up bringing, basically, all the major cities and towns of Vietnam.
And the idea was just a simple one, to just bomb the Vietnamese out of the countryside.
And then you'd be able to go through and kill the guerrillas, theoretically, because there wouldn't be any civilians left out there.
But the Vietnamese who were driven into these slums and into these refugee camps, they found it almost impossible to eke out a living.
There was no farmland there.
The Vietnamese were especially tied to their land.
This is where their ancestors were buried.
And they believed that you had to stay there and venerate them.
You know, there were no jobs.
The South Vietnamese government didn't provide for them.
So they ended up just filtering back into the countryside.
And they found it preferable to live among bombs and shells and helicopter gunships and troops on the ground from both sides, rather than live in these squalid camps and city slums.
And now you say in the book that it was Samuel Huntington, the author of the Clash of Civilizations thesis, it was his idea that all this forest urbanization would be good for them, we'll be making modern men out of these little dinks.
Yeah, he felt that this was a step up for the Vietnamese, that actually it was a benefit to bomb their villages and burn them down.
He called it, as you mentioned, forced urbanization and modernization.
And he thought this was in the progressive spirit, that the Vietnamese would be doing better if they got into the cities.
And, of course, this was also the solution to winning the war in the countryside.
So he counted increased wages in the cities that could be earned.
But, of course, the people that were getting bombed into there weren't really suited for modern urban jobs as he envisioned them.
These were farmers from the countryside.
And he didn't take into account that staples like rice, which is the staple of the Vietnamese diet, went up with wartime inflation.
It cost 1,000 percent more than it had.
And there were no jobs that kept up with 1,000 percent inflation.
But he continued to tout this, and America's war manager seized on it.
They thought it was a great idea, and it's not surprising to learn that Huntington actually wrote all of this on the U.S. taxpayer dollars, that he was hired by the State Department, and this is where he came up with all these ideas while working for them.
Well, it sounds just like Stalin's five-year plan.
Exactly.
Forced industrialization.
And this gets right to the same theme that we've learned from the Iraq War, for sure, in this generation, which is the contradictory, or whatever, the difference between the stated aims and goals and the actual policy.
And what I'm talking about is we're doing this, the stated mission is because we love these people so much, we've got to save them from the communists, or we've got to save them from Saddam Hussein and give them a new world and whatever.
But at the same time, we've got to demonize them, and we've got to, we being the U.S. government, has to demonize them and exploit the most terrible racism against them, or whatever, in order to justify killing them all, or as many as absolutely, or not absolutely, but as many as necessary, maybe, and then some, to get away with what they want.
And so you have, back in the 60s and 70s in the United States, this is all told to the American people, that this is all for their own good, while at the same time, every single one of them, down to the old women, are being treated as the enemy.
Which is just like in Iraq, where anyone who dares to resist, or even is nearby someone who resists, or is a fighting-age male and is in the wrong neighborhood, or whatever.
They're all fair game, but we're doing this because we love them so much.
Yeah, I mean, this was always the great fiction of the war, that they were trying to save the Vietnamese from the terrors of communist guerrillas.
But of course, the best estimates that we have of the war indicate that 2 million civilians died during it.
Around 5.3 or so civilians were wounded, using a very conservative measure of estimation.
The U.S. government said that around 11 million Vietnamese were made refugees.
And the latest studies show that around 4 million Vietnamese were exposed to toxic defoliants like Agent Orange.
So you have suffering on an almost unimaginable scale.
So, I mean, it really puts the light of this fiction, and you're trying to help these people when that much suffering is going on in the countryside.
Yeah, well, you love them so much, anything is justified to save them.
That's the built-in self-licking ice cream cone of an excuse kind of a thing there.
Well, I'm sorry we're all out of time, and I know you've got to go, because there's so much more here to talk about.
But hopefully that's enough to whet everybody's appetite and get them interested in reading this book.
Can I ask you one more thing real quick?
Is it true that David Hackworth was a terrible war criminal?
Well, to listen to the men under his command, it does seem to be the case.
Hackworth, he was always a contrarian and did come out against some of the worst aspects of the war, but I think he was involved in a great many of them.
And some of this comes out in his own books where he says that men under his command killed too many civilians.
So he was always lurking there, but the documents I found showed that he was perhaps worse than we thought.
Well, I was pretty ignorant about any of his real Vietnam history other than that he was there, and I just liked his opposition to the Iraq War because it was so unapologetic and hardcore and right on back then.
Anyway, all right, well, listen, I'm sorry.
I know you got to go, but thank you very much for your time, Nick.
It's great to talk to you again.
It's always good to talk to you, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
All right, everybody.
That is Nick Turse from TomDispatch.com.
He's the something or other associate editor or something like that.
He's the editor of TomDispatch.com nowadays, and he's the author of The Complex and Kill Anything That Moves, The Real American War in Vietnam.
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