¹ David Dellinger, “North Vietnam: Eyewitness Report” Liberation, December 1966, 3-15.

² See Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth About U.S. War Crimes-Inside the Army's Secret Archive of Investigations (New York: Basic Books, 2008).

³ “Notes from the Editors,” Monthly Review, September 2012, 64.

⁴ On the myth of the spat upon veteran, see Jerry L. Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: New York University Press, 1998). On US and Japanese historical revisionism, see Censoring History: Citizenship and Memory in Japan, Germany, and the United States, eds. Mark Selden and Laura Hein (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000).

⁵ Sahr Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage: Americans, Noncombatant Immunity, and Atrocity After World War II (London: Routledge, 2006), 47. On Arnold, see Flint Dupre, Hap Arnold: Architect of American Airpower (New York: McMillan, 1972).

⁶ H. Bruce Franklin, War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, rev ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008).

⁷ In Beau Grosscup, Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London: Zed Books, 2006), 23. See also Alfred Hurley, Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Airpower (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975).

⁸ Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 53; Mark Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust: US Bombing Strategy, the Destruction of Japanese Cities and the American Way of War from World War II to Iraq,” Japan Focus, May 2, 2007; Bombing Civilians: A 20^th Century History, eds. Marilyn B. Young and Yuki Tanaka (New York: The New Press, 2009). Some pilots were emotionally affected. Howard Zinn and Senator George McGovern developed pacifist views after serving as bombers in World War II.

⁹ Quoted in Rashid Khalidi, Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 27. See also Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 146.

¹⁰ “Report of Activities,” July 1, 1920-June 30, 1921, Records of the Department of State, Related to the Internal Records of Haiti, 838.105, National Archives, College Park Maryland; Irwin R. Franklyn, Knights of the Cockpit: A Romantic Epic of the Flying Marines in Haiti (New York: Dial Press, 1931), 227, 228.

¹¹ James S. Corum and Wray R. Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 2003), 28.

¹² Gregorio Selser, Sandino (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), 82; Richard Grossman, “The Blood of the People,” in When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror, ed. Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Neill Macaulay, The Sandino Affair (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), 116.

¹³ Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower, 151.

¹⁴ Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust.” Harris previously headed the RAF in Palestine. He stated that the “solution to Arab unrest was to drop one 250 pound or 500-pound bomb in each village that speaks out of turn…The only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will have to be applied.” Corum and Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars, 65.

¹⁵ Selden, “A Forgotten Holocaust;” Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower, 274; John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York; Pantheon, 1986). On the atomic attacks and psychological effects on survivors, see Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (New York: Vintage, 1967).

¹⁶ Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians: From the 20^th to the 21^st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians, 155. In contrast to LeMay, “Hap” Arnold told the New York Times that the potential destructiveness of future wars meant that the US must not let another occur. In Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, 47.

¹⁷ John Steinbeck, Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team (New York: Penguin Classics, 2009); Sherry, The Rise of American Airpower, 137.

¹⁸ Richard Falk provides an excellent discussion of the weakness of humanitarian laws aiming to protect civilians and the gap between US rhetoric and its promotion of state terrorism in “State Terror Versus Humanitarian Law” in War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, eds. Mark Selden and Alvin Y. So (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 41-63. In the 1940s, air force officers also set about improving the aerial warfare capabilities of proxy regimes in the Philippines and Greece fighting leftist guerrillas. Corum and Johnson, Airpower in Small Wars, 109, 125.

¹⁹ Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern American Library, 2010). On the US political economy after World War II, see Paul A. Koistenen, Arsenal of World War II: The Political Economy of American Warfare (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004); Seymour Melman ed., The War Economy of the United States: Readings on Military Industry and Economy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1971).

²⁰ Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War : Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes 1945-1947 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).

²¹ Conrad Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 23; Young, “Bombing Civilians: From the 20^th to the 21^st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians, 157.

²² Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, Korea: The Unknown War (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 117-118. According to Cumings, a partial table of the destruction shows: Pyongyang - 75%; Chongjin - 65%; Hamhung - 80%; Hungnam - 85%; Sariwon - 95%; Sinaju - 100%; Wonsan- 80%. The napalming of refugees is discussed in John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars (New York: Oxford, 2011), 104-05. Orders were given from Ambassador John Muccio, via Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to use lethal force against refugees who blocked US tanks or had the potential of fomenting insurrections in US controlled zones. At No Gun Ri, refugees were strafed and killed by US planes and shot. See Charles J. Hanley, Sang-Hun Choe, and Martha Mendoza, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Holt, 2000) and Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, 96-102.

²³ Crane, American Airpower Strategy in Korea, 1950-1953, 40, 41, 43; Conway-Lanz, Collateral Damage, 149. One 60-year-old man, too sick to brush away hundreds of flies that swarmed him, told a New York Times reporter that he “wanted to die - I would rather die than live like this.”

²⁴ Cumings, The Korean War, 160. Air strikes were also called in frequently in the South to help clear out villages. One in Seoul struck an orphanage killing over 100 children.

²⁵ Reginald Thompson, Cry Korea, 2^nd ed. (New York: Reportage Press, 2009); I.F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War, rev ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 258; Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II : The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 706-07. Gen. Douglas MacArthur hatched a plan to drop between 30 to 50 atom bombs across the neck of Manchuria and spread radioactive cobalt capable of wiping out animal and plant life for at least 60 years. “We can then be sure of no land invasion from the north,” he said.

²⁶ Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol II, 705; “Attack on the Irrigation Dams in North Korea,” Air University Quarterly Review, 6 (Winter 1953-1954), 41. On biological warfare allegations and experiments, the most fiercely debated issue of the war, see Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman, The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); “United States Biological Warfare during the Korean War: Rhetoric and Reality”; Stewart Lone and Gavan McCormack, Korea Since 1850 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 115-18.

²⁷ Marilyn B. Young, “Bombing Civilians: From the 20^th to the 21^st Centuries,” in Bombing Civilians, 160.

²⁸ Quoted in Wilfred G. Burchett, Vietnam North (New York: International Publishers, 1966). The Air Force claimed that air power “executed the dominant role in the achievement of military objectives,” with the threatened devastation of North Korea's agricultural economy forcing Kim Il-Sung to the bargaining table. Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 141.

²⁹ Noam Chomsky, Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 50, 51. The orders for the food destruction program are available in the National Security Files at the JFK presidential library. E.g. Dean Rusk, memo for the president, “Defoliant Operations in Vietnam,” November 24, 1961, Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, Meetings and memoranda, Box 332, Defoliant Operations in Vietnam. Fred Wilcox, Scorched Earth: Legacies of Chemical War in Vietnam with an introduction by Noam Chomsky (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).

³⁰ Michael Clodfelter, The Limits of Air Power: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (London: The Free Press, 1989), 134; Ronald B. Frankum, Jr. Like Rolling Thunder: The Air War in Vietnam, 1964-1975 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefied, 2005), 19-66 details the air war over North Vietnam, 1965-68. As early as April 28, 1965, a memorandum from CIA Director John McCone criticized the limited scale of bombing and called for expansion of the air war

³¹ Harrison Salisbury, Behind the Lines: Hanoi December 23-January 7 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 100; Harrison Salisbury, “No Military Targets, Namdinh Insists,” New York Times, December 31, 1966, 3; The Wasted Nations: Report of the International Commission of Inquiry of US Crimes in Indochina, ed. Frank Browning and Dorothy Foreman, introduction by Richard Falk (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 91; Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (Stockholm, Copenhagen), ed. John Duffet (Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, 1968).

³² Jonathan Neale, A People's History of the Vietnam War (New York: The New Press, 2003), 78; Burchett, Vietnam North, 13. See also John Gerassi, North Vietnam: A Documentary History (London: George Allen, 1968). Burchett reported that planes bombed a TB hospital in Than Hoa, killing 40 patients and doctors and wiping out 50 buildings in what appears to be a typical act.

³³ The Wasted Nations, 134, 135.

³⁴ David Dellinger, “North Vietnam: Eyewitness Report” Liberation, December 1966, 3-15. See also Eric Prokosch, The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Antipersonnel Weapons (London: Zed Books, 1995). Some cluster bombs had fiberglass pellets which were invisible to Xrays. This incapacitated the wounded even more because of the difficulty of finding an extracting it.

³⁴ Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, rev ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 183; Bernard Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York: Doubleday, 1967); James W. Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986), 225.

³⁶ Marilyn B. Young, The Vietnam Wars (New York: Harperperennial, 1991), 177; Christian G. Appy, Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides (New York: 2003); Eric Norden, “American Atrocities in Vietnam,” in Crimes of War, ed. Richard Falk, Gabriel Kolko and Robert Jay Lifton (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 265-284.

³⁷ Quoted in The Wasted Nations, xi.

³⁸ Jonathan Schell, “The Village of Ben Suc” In The Real War: the Classic Reporting on the Vietnam War (London: Corgi Books, 1989).

³⁹ Truong Nhu Tang, A Vietcong Memoir: An Inside Account of the Vietnam War and its Aftermath (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 167, 170.

⁴⁰ The Air War in Indochina, ed. Norman Uphoff and Raphael Littauer, with a preface by Neil Sheehan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1; Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon's Vietnam War (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998). On the GI rebellion see David Cortright, Soldiers in Revolt, rev ed. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005) and David Zeiger, Sir no Sir!: The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the Vietnam War (Displaced Films, 2006).

⁴¹ See e.g. Young, The Vietnam Wars ; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985). The best depiction that I have seen of the tunnel system is in the documentary The Cu Chi Tunnels, produced by Mickey Grant (1990).

⁴² Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Information Reveals that Cambodia was Bombed far More Heavily Than Previously Believed,” The Walrus, October 2006; Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia: New Light on US Air War,” Japan Focus, May 12, 2007,

⁴³ See Ben Kiernan, How Pol Pol Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930-1975, 2^nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

⁴⁴ Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia.”

⁴⁵ See William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York; Pocket Books, 1979); Kiernan, How Pol Pot Came to Power, 350; Noam Chomsky, At War with Asia: Essays on Indochina (New York: Vintage, 1970). Starvation and disease pervaded the country, with the Nixon administration failing to provide adequate relief support.

⁴⁶ Owen and Kiernan, “Bombs Over Cambodia.”

⁴⁷ Kimmo Kiljunen, ed. Kampuchea: Decade of the Genocide: Report of a Finnish Inquiry Commission (London: Zed Books, 1984); Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1979) and later works by Chomsky.

⁴⁸ See Thomas L. Ahern Jr., Undercover Armies: CIA and Surrogate Warfare in Laos, 1961-1973 (Washington, DC: CIA, Center for the Study of Intelligence, 2006), 10.

⁴⁹ American ambassador, Vientiane, to Secretary of State, August 4, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson library (LBJL), Operations Coordinating Board (OCB), Laos, box 268; Dean Rusk to American embassy, Vientiane, and American embassy to Secretary of State, August 18, 1964, LBJL, National Security Files, Country File Asia and the Pacific, Laos (NSF), box 265; Bromley Smith to President, December 14, 1964; and George Denney Jr., U.S. Department of State, to Secretary of State, January 27, 1965, LBJL, NSF, box 269; American embassy Vientiane to Secretary of State, March 20, 1964, LBJL, NSF, box 265.

⁵⁰ Alfred W. McCoy, “The Secret War in Laos, 1955-1975,” In A Companion to the Vietnam War, ed. Marilyn B. Young and Robert Buzzanco (UK: Blackwell, 2002), 195; Perry L. Lamy, “Barrel Roll, 1968-1973: An Air Campaign in Support of National Policy,” Maxwell Air Force Base, May 10, 1995; Bromley Smith to President, December 14, 1964, LBJL, NSF, Laos, box 269. Operation Barrel Roll focused on northern Laos, while Operation Steel Tiger took place in the eastern portion of the country along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

⁵¹ Noam Chomsky, introduction to Laos: War and Revolution, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Leonard P. Adams (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), xviii; Fred Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars: Life Under an Air War (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 23; Martin Stuart-Fox, A History of Laos (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 144; G. Chapelier and J. Van Malderghem, “Plain of Jars, Social Changes under Five Years of Pathet Lao Administration,” Asia Quarterly (Winter 1971).

⁵² Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, 35, 38-39.

⁵³ Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, 48-49, 81; Robert Shaplen, Time Out of Hand: Revolution and Reaction in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 348.

⁵⁴ T. D. Allman, “Ruined Town a Vignette of War in Laos,” New York Times, October 17, 1969; T. D. Allman, “The War in Laos: Plain Facts,” Far Eastern Economic Review, January 8, 1972, 16; Fred Branfman, “A Lake of Blood,” New York Times, April 7, 1971; Branfman, Voices from the Plain of Jars, 4.

⁵⁵ Quoted in Noam Chomsky, “The Backroom Boys,” For Reasons of State, rev ed. (New York: New Press, 2003), 7, 9.

⁵⁶ Timothy Castle rationalizes the US bombing of Laos in At War in the Shadow of Vietnam: U.S. Military Aid to the Royal Lao Government, 1955-1975 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). See also Jeremi Suri, Henry Kissinger and the American Century (Harvard University Press, 2007). An important counterweight to these studies is Nick Turse's forthcoming book, The Real Vietnam War (New York: Metropolitan, 2013) and Bernd Greiner, War Without Fronts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Alfred W. McCoy has also written poignantly on the bombing in “The Secret War in Laos” in A Companion to the Vietnam War .

⁵⁷ See e.g. H. Bruce Franklin's discussion in Vietnam and Other American Fantasies (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000).

⁵⁸ See Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill & Wang, 1992) and Gordon K. Lewis, Grenada: The Jewel Despoiled (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987).

⁵⁹ Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 183.

⁶⁰ Barton Gellman, U.S. Bombs Missed 70% of Time; ‘Smart’ Munitions Far More Accurate,” The Washington Post, March 16, 1991, A1.

⁶¹ Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992). See also Triumph of the Image: the Media's War in the Persian Gulf - A Global Perspective, ed. Hamid Mowlana, George Gerbner and Herbert I. Schiller (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992).

⁶² Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time : U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992).

⁶³ Clark, The Fire This Time, 68. Pentagon analysts rejected or evaded the Clark commission findings. John F. Jones, “Giuliu Douhet Vindicated: Desert Storm, 1991” Naval War College Review, 45 (Autumn 1992), 97-102 and Col. Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy II: A Critical Analysis of the Gulf War (New York: Dell, 1992). Robert Pape skirts over the humanitarian consequences in Bombing to Win .

⁶⁴ See Iraq under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, ed. Anthony Arnove (Boston: South End Press, 2000).

⁶⁵ See Harlan Ullman et al., Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (National Defense Institute, 1996); Tirman, The Deaths of Others, 227.

⁶⁶ Michael Schwartz, War Without End: The Iraq War in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008); Seymour Hersh, “Up in the Air: Where is the Iraq War Headed Next?” The New Yorker, Dec 5, 2005. The few articles in the mainstream press on the air war primarily emphasized the danger to US pilots.

⁶⁷ Dahr Jamail, “Living Under the Bombs,” February 2, 2005. See also Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and Assault on Democracy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 47; Nick Turse, “Bombs over Baghdad: America's Secret War in Iraq,” Feb. 6, 2007; Patrick Cockburn, “Toxic Legacy of US Assault on Fallujah “Worse than Hiroshima:’ The Shocking Rate of Infant Mortality and Cancer in Iraqi City Raises New Questions About Battle,” The Independent, July 24, 2010.

⁶⁸ Marc Herold, “A Dossier on Civilian Victims of United States Aerial Bombing of Afghanistan,” Durham, N.H,: unpublished manuscript, Departments of Economics and Women's Studies, University of New Hampshire, December 2001. See also Malaila Joya, with Derrrick O’Keefe, A Woman among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise her Voice (New York: Scribner, 2009); Kathy Kelly, “Cold, Cold Heart,” Voices for Creative Nonviolence, http://vcnv.org/cold-cold-heart.

⁶⁹ Patrick Cockburn,” ‘120 die’ as US bombs village,”The Independent, May 7, 2009; Tom Engelhardt, “The Wedding Crashers,” June 13, 2008.

⁷⁰ Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan (NYU and Stanford School of Law, September 2012); Nick Turse, “Terminator Planet” May 31, 2012; Tom Engelhardt, The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's (Chicago: Haymarket, 2010).

⁷¹ See Chomsky and Herman, Manufacturing Consent.

⁷² Quoted in Martin Duberman, Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left (New York: New Press, 2012), 297.