Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 91

R E V I E W E S S AY

Turse mentions Brummett, briefly, but not this letter. Nor does he mention anything comparable to Brummett’s first unit—or for that matter, anyone like the platoon sergeant in his second. If he had, Kill Anything That Moves would be a fairer, stronger book. The war in the pages of H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty (HarperCollins, New York, 1997) is hard to connect with the one we read about in Kill Anything That Moves. Turse’s war is a chaotic canvas of blood, explosions, terror, degradation, and moral disintegration. McMaster’s is abstract, with a sound-track not of gunfire but the shuffling of paper and coffee cups clinking on conference-room tables. The two books differ in another way, too. One can’t imagine any U.S. military professional reading Kill Anything That Moves without painful feelings. Dereliction of Duty is also critical of American military leadership, but many of those same professionals have taken comfort in its conclusions—possibly more comfort than is really warranted by the story it tells. McMaster, now an Army major general, was a major when Dereliction of Duty was originally published in 1997. In it, he examines events not in Vietnam but in Washington: specifically, the decisions in 1964 and early 1965 that set the United States on the road to full-scale military intervention in the war. McMaster focuses on the relationship between the civilian leaders of the era (President Johnson, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and other senior figures) on one side, and the uniformed military leadership, represented by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the other. His often-quoted final paragraph states this verdict: “The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of the New York Times or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C., even before Americans assumed sole responsibility for the fighting in 1965 and before they realized the country was at war; indeed, even before the first American units were deployed.” Perhaps because it absolves the military leaders who actually ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????e?????????????????????????????????Q????????????????????????????????????)
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