Kill Anything that Moves is a new book by Nick Turse that uncovers the reality of American brutality during the Vietnam war. There were countless My-Lai type massacres.
Here he writes about the legacy of that war and its relevance to (virtual) media silence over the human cost of US-led wars since 9/11:
Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington.… The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians.… Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall.… To such figures might be added an estimated… 11.7 millionVietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to… 4.8 million… sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.…
The numbers are staggering, the suffering incalculable, the misery almost incomprehensible to most Americans but not, perhaps, to an Iraqi.…
No one will ever know just how many Iraqis died in the wake of the U.S. invasion of 2003.… In a country with an estimated population of about… 25 million… at the time, a much-debated survey — the results of which were published in the British medical journal… The Lancet… — suggested more than601,000 violent “excess deaths” had occurred by 2006.… Another survey indicated that more than… 1.2 million… Iraqi civilians had died because of the war (and the various internal conflicts that flowed from it) as of 2007.… The Associated Press tallied up records of… 110,600 deaths… by early 2009.… An Iraqi family health survey fixed the number at… 151,000 violent deaths… by June 2006.… Official documents made public by Wikileaks counted 109,000 deaths, including 66,081 civilian deaths, between 2004 and 2009.… … Iraq Body Counthas tallied as many as 121,220 documented cases of violent civilian deaths alone.…
Then there are those… 3.2 million… Iraqis who were internally displaced or fled the violence to other lands, only to find uncertainty and deprivation in places like Jordan, Iran, and now war-torn Syria.… By 2011, 9% or more of Iraq’s women, as many as… 1 million, were widows (a number that skyrocketed in the years after the U.S. invasion).… A recent survey found that… 800,000 to 1 million… Iraqi children had lost one or both parents, a figure that only grows with the continuing violence that the U.S. unleashed but never stamped out.…
Today, the country, which experienced an… enormous brain drain… of professionals, has a total of 200 social workers and psychiatrists to aid all those, armed and unarmed, who suffered every sort of horror and trauma.… (In just the last seven years, by comparison, the U.S. Veterans Administration has hired7,000… new mental health professionals to deal with Americans who have been psychologically scarred by war.)