Tom Gallagher gives high praise to Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves, a “history of the Vietnam War that finds the My Lai massacre more the rule than the exception.” Gallagher describes an American press that shrank from the truth:
In 1968, in terms of press coverage, even Ramparts, arguably the most radical mass-market publication in the nation, refused to run a war-crime story by a veteran who had witnessed the crime. But after My Lai became public knowledge, Turse asserts: “It was almost as if America’s leading media outlets had gone straight from ignoring atrocities to treating them as old news.” In 1972, Newsweek’s departing Saigon bureau chief filed a story about an operation called “Speedy Express,” in which he concluded that “thousands of unarmed, noncombatant civilians have been killed by American firepower. They were not killed by accident. The American way of fighting made their deaths inevitable.” His editors, however, argued that running the story would constitute a “gratuitous attack” upon the Nixon Administration, which had just taken such a hit over My Lai.
Henry Kissinger once told Richard Nixon, “Once we’ve broken the war, no one will care about war crimes.” And as the US turned the bulk of the war over to its South Vietnamese government allies to lose, Kissinger proved right. In the tremendous research effort that produced this book (including many interviews of Vietnamese and American soldiers), Turse finds that, “The scale of the suffering becomes almost unimaginable,” but not as “unimaginable as the fact that somehow, in the United States it was more or less ignored as it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”
The Dish 