Ground Zero

Hiroshima by John Hersey
New York : Vintage Books, 1989, c1985.
152 p. ; 18 cm.

I had the good fortune of going to Japan this summer, part of the motivation was knowing a couple from the US who are running the World Friendship Center in Hiroshima.  They suggested reading Hersey's book - which is available online for free at the New Yorker where it was first published in 1946.

I had read the book long ago and was impressed with what a powerful and important book it is.  It tells the story of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima by weaving together the stories of survivors who Hersey interviewed shortly after the bombing.  It is a terrifying retelling of the savage effects of the US bomb and on the strange and random ways that decided who survived and who did not.

Though it was written over seventy years ago, it has immediacy still.  For anyone interested in discovering what it was like to be in the Hiroshima bombing, this remains a powerful testament.

History Uncovered

Kill Anything that Moves by Nick Turse
New York : Metropolitan Books, 2013.
370 p. : ill., map ; 25 cm.

In 2001 Nick Turse was a graduate student doing research at the National Archives on PTSD among Vietnam Veterans when an archivist working there asked him if a veteran could suffer PTSD from witnessing war crimes.  The archivist then presented Turse with the first of many boxes of long (and intentionally) neglected documents of the Pentagon's Vietnam era War Crimes Working Group.  So began Turse's 10 year odyssey of research and interviews that would result in this seminal study of US military policy and practice in Vietnam.  Turse's contention - backed up with copious notes, Pentagon records, and sworn testimonies by veterans and Vietnamese survivors - is that official US policy from the office of the President on down was to wage war in Vietnam in a way that knowingly targeted millions Vietnamese non-combatants. He argues that My Lai was not an aberration, but typical of the US method of waging war in Vietnam.

This book is sure to become a standard reference to the Vietnam War.  It is also likely to be controversial - arguing as it does (and as did Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor) that the highest officers and officials in charge of the Vietnam War warranted proceedings for war crimes.

Kill Anything That Moves is one of those that great histories that calls into question the commonly accepted narrative of US history; in that way it reminds me of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name, an expose of the murderous convict labor system in the South, or James Brady's Imperial Cruise, a stunning exploration of the white supremacist ideology in US foreign policy leading up to WWII.