Gross Governmental Secrets Exposed

While doing a reading assignment,  in English 101, I was not only interested by what I read, but also horrified in the realization of the things our government keep from us. I have always heard things about how bad the government is and how bad the military is, but I never fully understood and believed it. This was until my partners and I completed are reading project. After watching an interview about the book "Kill Anything That Moves" by Nick Turse. The book explains some of the things that happened during the Vietnam War. The tragedies and atrocities that I discovered seemed to be easily believed, but just to ensure that I was reading fact and truth I researched further into the things I read.

Let me stop right there for a minute. Yes I know what you are thinking, a college kid doing voluntary research? Unthinkable right?

Well let me put it to you this way, everyone hears things on the news or on the internet right? When you listen to these news reports or you click on the web article that has an interesting topic you are doing research.

So throughout my investigation on this information I discovered that what I was hearing and reading was actually true. In the duration of the Vietnam War, the government often hid and still to this day hide things that happened outside of the actual fighting. American soldiers killed many Vietnamese people during the war. There were actually contests and prizes in the different camps for those who killed the most, civilian or soldier did not matter. There were box scores and tallies to keep up with the body count daily.

Another Vietnam secret that our government conceals was the misconduct of the soldiers that took place. Anything you can think of from molestations to tortures occurred during the war. In Turse's book, he explains how he finally found a Vietnam veteran, Jamie Henry, that would speak about the things that happened. Henry states that on his first day out he saw a soldier stop a young girl on the trail and molested her. Henry also mentions several people that were tortured either by being used as target practice, or thrown off cliffs, or even ran over by tanks.

Can we really blame our veterans for not speaking about the war? Whether they participated in some of these outrageous acts or just witnessed them, would you want to tell on the guys who saved your life at one point? I respect our soldiers just as much as the rest of the country.

However I feel it takes a great deal of bravery and integrity to open up and admit the horrors that happened that the government does not want us to find out about. Our government would rather cover up what happened instead of acting and putting a stop to things like this.

This reading assignment really opened my eyes and gave me a more realistic view of how the government works. I am not alone when saying that I believe the government hid these atrocities to cover themselves rather than trying to protect the country.