Americans have long been taught that events such as
the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam
War, carried out by "a few bad apples." But as award-winning journalist
and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking
investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all
exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and
systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to "kill anything that
moves."
Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret
Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and
Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official
policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded.
In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that
made crimes in almost every major American combat unit all but
inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from archives
filled with Washington's long-suppressed war crime investigations to the
rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot
camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to
bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general
obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one participant
called "a My Lai a month."
