Thursday, March 14, 2013

"They all looked alike."

On August 18, 1980, Republican candidate for president Ronald Reagan addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In his speech, Reagan identified a disease plaguing America: "the Vietnam Syndrome." Infected by North Vietnamese propaganda, the Gipper argued, Americans had become convinced that the United States was an imperial power engaged in an immoral and unwinnable war in Vietnam. That belief, however, wasn’t contained to just Vietnam, it had seeped into the American mindset, making the public reluctant to use force abroad going forward. Reagan, however, would have nothing to do with such weakness masquerading as moral introspection and uncertainty. He told the veterans assembled that it was time to recognize a purifying truth: "ours…was a noble cause." How could it not be when the United States had lost much more than confidence in the jungles of Vietnam. "We dishonor the memory of 50,000 young Americans who died in that cause when we give way to feelings of guilt as if we were doing something shameful," Reagan told the veterans in attendance. War crimes like the My Lai massacre, where a unit of U.S. soldiers massacred approximately 500 elderly men, women, and children in March 1968, were a horrific yet minimal by-product of a just war.

If Reagan’s Vietnam Syndrome is a chauvinistic, backwoods misdiagnosis of why the American people grew weary of the war in Indochina, then Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves is a reckoning with how much death and destruction the United States had to inflict on the Vietnamese to reach that crisis of faith in American Messianism. My Lai, Turse explains, wasn’t a bloody exception within a principled war to defeat Communist expansion: it was the ghastly rule.

"My Lai was an war operation, not an aberration," Turse tersely states at the outset of his disturbing book. "This was the war in which the American military and successive administrations in Washington produced not a few random massacres or even discrete strings of atrocities, but something on the order of thousands of days of relentless misery – a veritable system of suffering. That system, that machinery of suffering and what it meant for the Vietnamese people is what this book is meant to explain." Full story...

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