The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars

by John Tirman

Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for? This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians. And yet Americans devote little attention to these deaths. Other countries, however, do pay attention, and Tirman argues that if we want to understand why there is so much anti-Americanism around the world, the first place to look is how we conduct war. We understandably strive to protect our own troops, but our rules of engagement with the enemy are another matter. From atomic weapons and carpet bombing in World War II to napalm and daisy cutters in Vietnam and beyond, our weapons have killed large numbers of civilians and enemy soldiers. Americans, however, are mostly ignorant of these methods, believing that American wars are essentially just, necessary, and "good."Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight against.

Genres: History, War, Nonfiction, Politics, American History, The United States Of America, Military History

418 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 11, 2011

Reviews

[Naeem · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I saw this title, “The Death of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars,” I wanted to be among the first to read it. The title seemed to promise at least three things: (1) a through assessment of those killed in WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq war, and the Afghanistan war; (2) an attempt to answer the question of why US citizens seemed indifferent to the death of foreign civilians killed by their military; and, (3) and some numbers I could memorize.

The book runs 368 pages and my plan was to read the theoretical chapters, followed by the chapters on Iraq and Afghanistan. The theoretical chapters didn’t do much for me since they plow through terrain that I have been surveying for many years: racism, orientalism, exceptionalism, and the frontier mentality.

The Iraq chapter – the longest, at 76 pages – serves as a quick guide to Iraqi history, the US intervention, and the debacle that follows. Not particularly gripping stuff for me given how much of it I have already read. Perhaps the best aspect was the title of the chapter, “Iraq: the Twenty Years’ War, which not only captures how long the US has been at this country but also resonates well with those of us who read E.H. Carr.

The Afghanistan chapter, not even 20 pages, felt inadequate to me.

I was very surprised that chapter 10 intrigued me the most. This is a history and assessment of how the war dead are counted. When we consider that the death count for the destruction of Amerindians by Europeans ranges from 3 million to 70 million and that for the Atlantic slave trade from 3 million to 42 million, and considering that Ward Churchill vociferously claims that estimates for living Amerindians are deliberately low so that white people can continue to indulge in the fantasy of thinking “Indians” no longer exist, then we get a sense at what is at stake in counting -- although these three issues are not part of Tirman’s discussion here.

What is included in Tirman’s discussion are the range of methods of determining fatalities, an assessment of these methods, who does the counting, how the counting is assessed, and what the numbers are for US wars. All this engrossed me.

The book is disappointing to me mainly because it wanders. I needed it to be more focused, exact, and more in the reader’s face.

However, if you don’t usually follow this kind of material and if you prefer a more diffuse approach, then this might be perfect for you.

At least Tirman is asking the right questions. See below.


Quotes:

“One wonders if the American-made disasters are simply too painful to discuss, even by those policy makers, journalists, and academics who are meant to do so. 7

“…this is a country that has a lot of wars and a lot of popular literature and films and television programs about war, and yet the interest in what happened to the Koreans, Vietnamese, and Iraqis is almost nonexistent. 8

“This collective autism has several dimensions and consequences. One is the evident disrespect for global legal norms…12

“Simply put, there is little evidence that the American [sic] public cares what happens to the people who live where our interventions are conducted. And the question is why? Why are Americans [sic] indifferent to this suffering that is significantly a consequence of military actions they approved? What are the consequences of this vast carelessness? 338

[Alex Linschoten · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book offers an account of civilian casualties as inflicted by the US military. Tirman attempts to explain two things: the different ways that civilian casualties were caused and experienced (by foreign populations, and as received by the American public), and the reasons for the apparent indifference displayed by the general public to those same casualties.

Some of the reasons suggested for the latter are unconvincing; pseudo-psychological explanations for American indifference may ring true in a general sense but more work needs to be done to move beyond this.

Luckily, the rest of the book doesn't suffer these problems. Tirman examines US military interventions in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. He surveys local perceptions and accounts of the war in those countries, then parallels this with an examination of US public and media awareness of the conflicts. Needless to say, there is often a big gap between the two.

In one of the most interesting chapters, Tirman shows the different ways people have tried to estimate civilian casualties. This is a notoriously tricky issue, and you can get a good sense of the various tradeoffs amidst the statistical trickery without needing a new degree in Mathematics.

This is an uncomfortable read, in part because nothing presented in the book suggests that American public indifference to civilian casualties is likely to change any time soon.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Killing civilians in our illegal wars is rarely if ever discussed by “polite” people so thank you John Tirman for writing this great book on why so much indifference and denial surrounds this dark and deep American blind spot. The author argues that our collective inability to look at the killing of civilians guarantees first and foremost that this crime will continue unabated in all future wars. Some of the great things within this book: We label things and so frame them in stone often to their detriment- for example it wasn’t “the Vietnam War”, it was the Vietnam / Laos / Cambodia War – why not give all the victims of our blatant illegal aggression their due? Why do our leaders care more about foreign opinion than the opinion of their own people? It’s the US that created terror bombing says Tirman (yet no one is expected to blink today when we call “others” terrorists). Its design was to terrorize those who survive. Curtis LeMay during WWII said as soon as he lost the war he would be executed as a war criminal. Funny how such people expected their war crimes to make the people rise up against their leader and not instead to turn against the clearest aggressor. See the closing of the American frontier against the opening of the wild west of anti-communism. Communists became the new savages (just as Muslims have now replaced the communists) and the infrastructure of categorizing “the other” is always left standing. The Catholic Church fought the communists over the same territory: faith. What we unleashed against the people of South Korea was described by an American Journalist in this book as “a cloud of terror that is probably unparalleled in the world”. 200 documented cases exist of atrocities by US led forces in Korea. Read about Jeju Island. By employing many people who tortured others during WWII for the Japanese on the South Korean people, the US became more despised than the North Koreans – 75% of the South Koreans preferred the North to the Americans. The War on Communism gains its traction through revisionist history – the thought that we lost China to the reds (which ended our larger frontier fantasy), even though we knew we could have not done anything to stop it, leads directly to the idea that we have to draw the line against “them reds” somewhere - so why not Vietnam? Too bad the majority of the South Vietnamese preferred the North Vietnamese government to their own very corrupt one. US Hawks at the time knew the North was a much more popular government than the South but it just didn’t matter. American brass also ignored one of man’s biggest problems since the Salem Witch Trials – separating actual crimes of accused from false accusations made for corrupt reasons, often to settle old scores. Allowing such counter-intuitive reverse PR in all our foreign wars makes the locals end up saying the same thing to us each time: “This illegal war was neither caused by us, nor are you fighting it for us, in fact you appear to despise us.” Only 3% of Americans in one US poll at the time favored ending the war because of its effect on civilians!

My favorite part of this book is the way Tirman connects his thesis to Richard Slotkin’s neglected theory of American Regeneration through Violence which shows through out American history where again and again “we had to get violent in order to defend our democratic values”. Ingrained throughout American history is that all “bounties” require “heroics” and today war itself is labeled heroic. The author asks why the mention of casualties always means “our” casualties and never as well the casualties of the people against whom we were aggressive. Tirman shows that the US history of killing off secular nationalists leaders because they prefer to help their own people before they help the US. Tirman sees Reagan as a transparent façade of frontier myth – of course Reagan had no fighting background whatsoever - but that sure didn’t stop him! Tirman laments the US creation of the Highway of Death in Iraq “one of the most terrible harassments of a retreating army from the air in modern history”. US fear rose for five years after 9-11 not for any valid reason but because of manufactured fear. We complain about fighting Bin Laden in Tora Bora, yet Tora Bora was built with US funds! Mixed messages at anti-war rallies destroyed their overall effect. One in five Iraqi vets now has PTSD, suicide attempts by veterans are now 1,000 per month! an all-time high… Tirman explains how these wars are wars against women. Did you know William Calley was paroled after three years? What does that tell you? PC talk of healing Vietnam doesn’t involve healing its people, it’s about healing the Syndrome. Thank you John Tirman for daring to bring us this amazing book with tons of facts that makes so many other books look trivial in comparison.

So why doesn’t the military keep figures of civilian casualties? Doesn’t that win hearts and minds? If you can’t look at the downside of conflicts you will never understand “why do they hate us?”. Tirman offers three answers to his question why the present day massive apathy of the American people to civilian casualties inflicted in their name: 1. Racism 2. Frontier Myth and 3. Psychological aversion – Tirman makes interesting observations on Game Theory, Orientalism, and how literal distancing provides moral distancing. Koreans, Vietnamese and Iraqis didn’t follow our script of submission and so they were taught a lesson. They still didn’t submit but heck - we pretend they did. No wonder Tirman says we have created an architecture of indifference. Five Stars…

[Adam Orford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one book wrapped in another, neither entirely meeting its full potential, but both also containing a great deal of valuable material.

The interior chapters, and bulk of the book, are an effort at a coherent narrative of American wars and military activity - the little-known Philippine-American war, Korea, Vietnam, Reagan-era regime interventions, but not WWI or WWII, and with American western expansion against North American native populations always in the background but never fully discussed - with a perspective focused on the dreadful non-military casualties of the actions. It reads like an effort to update Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, except without the socialism, and with some of the same successes and failures. On the one hand, it develops a searing and rather convincing narrative of US military war crimes and homefront indifference over ten decades. On the other, it necessarily elevates often unverifiable claims to the status of fact, and asks the reader not to kick the evidentiary tires too firmly, given the pervasive powerlessness of the witnesses and survivors. It does not seem designed so much to convince as to reveal, and revelation is something often only accepted by those who already believe.

If this was all the book were, it perhaps would have been longer and better developed, and more able to make its case in chief. But it is also devoted to attempting to explain why Americans have been, at best incurious about, at worst actively hostile to, admitting the human toll of military action undertaken in their names. The book suffers here again from not being fully devoted to its cause. Relying mostly on theoretical work developed by others and referenced but not well explained, the author paints a picture of frontier values, a cult of the cleansing power of violence, and the othering of political opponents. It ties a number of ideas together, but how convincing you find the ideas will depend almost entirely on what you already think, because it is rare that the underlying social science is well enough explained to allow for independent judgment.

Ultimately, nonetheless, this is an important attempt to craft a complete telling of something terrifying and dark, and which goes a great deal toward explaining how the rest of the world views the United States, and so, perhaps, how we should consider viewing ourselves.

[Jeffrey Thiessen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy enough read but you have to be equipped with a pretty deep interest in American history as Tirman gives just as much time to the Korean and Vietnam wars as he does their recent ones. Still though, he weaves through them all brilliantly, focusing how the real casualties of wars are never reported in American media and how this happens.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating and detailed history of the the disregard for civilian casualties by the American military. Tirman shows a detailed history of American conflicts, in which domestic audiences show concerns only for the fates of US soldiers, and little to no attention to the civilians in the places that the US military is deployed. Focuses especially on the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq Wars, with some attention to earlier American wars. The author argues there are five key reasons why civilians are killed in such large numbers: (1) contradictory orders from leader, i.e. Rules of Engagement that demand self-protection over protection of civilians; (2) incentives for officers to use strategies that increase body counts and protect soldiers; (3) training, the culture of the military and dehumanization of the enemy; (4) asymmetrical warfare and the difficulty of discriminating between civilians and combatants; and (5) the indifferent public in the US.

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this eye-opening, detailed, well researched and excellently argued book, John Tirman examines a disturbingly little mentioned facet of America's wars since 1945: The appallingly high numbers of civilians in the affected regions killed as a direct result of these wars, due to both blatant disregard for foreign civilian lifes as well as deliberate targeting of civilians, and the equally appalling indifference and callousness of the American public towards these deaths. Tirman concentrates specifically on the wars in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, though others are also looked at more briefly. Clearly a book more people need to read.

[Alex Miller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent survey of the enormous costs to civilians of America's major post-WWII conflicts (Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq) and why Americans are so unmoved by the, quite literally, incalculable numbers of Koreans, Vietnamese, and Iraqis killed. I find his whole thesis of America's "frontier heritage" as a prime motivating factor both for the wars and the shoulder-shrugging to the (non-American) human costs to be bizarre though. Did the US invade Iraq in 2003 because it needed to wean off the accumulated testosterone left over from its Wild West days? Seems dubious.

[Kavinay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is terrifying. You can't worry about what you don't count and it's a tradition that Tirman connects through copious research and stats throughout America's wars.

To be glib, it makes you realize how the action movies and news coverage of your youth all tied into a relatively blatant attempt by US political and military policy to dehumanize civilians of other countries and thereby reduce how seriously their deaths were treated by a country that styles itself as a city upon a hill.

[Michael Messner · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful and convincing analysis of how Americans' indifference toward the civilian deaths in U.S. wars impacts our views of past wars, and facilitates support or tolerance for current and future wars.

[Dominic Howarth · Rating 4 out of 5]

A heart breaking, immensely though provoking book. It needs to be read and considered by every American who lives in this country, and see our nations history as it comes out of the shadow and into the light.

[Jānis Ārgalis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ļoti noderīgs vingrinājums - reizēm paskatīties uz sevi no otras puses. Skats var izrādīties negaidīts un uz pārdomām vedinošs. Grāmata vienam nepilnam vakaram.

[Cameron DeHart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty great book. A bit long in some places (e.g. the pre-Korean War history), but the overall theme about the frontier myth and dehumanization of war victims was presented well.

[Dianna · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for 12th grade history of the United States.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book attempts to understand the psychological mechanisms that move Americans to ignore or rationalize the deaths of 'the other' in endless U.S. errands to tame the frontier. Even though I have been studying the behavior of my country for some time, much of what I learned in this book was deeply troubling nonetheless. The American way of war is ferocious and violent; millions of the other have died as a result of U.S. war making over the last 225 years and more, dating to the encounters with Indians by the people who would become America's first citizens.

John Tirman attempts to show how structures of war making and systems of thinking allow for the disastrous follies to be repeated, like a terribly broken record except with the volume off, and the voices we cannot hear through the speakers are those of the other dying in appalling numbers.

I must write a full review. For now, the people who must read this book the most are the ones least likely to read it at all.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why are Americans so unconcerned with the death of foreign civilians in America's wars? This book analyzes this issue using Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and, apparently as an afterthought, Afghanistan, and tries to come up with approximate numbers. Really, the fundamental question is how does the American empire stay continually at war, with the support of the American people, who cannot be left off the hook.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A

[Alan]

Liked it. Makes a good point