Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam [Hardcover]

Nick Turse (Author)

Book Description

Release date: January 15, 2013

Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians

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."    

Thousands of Vietnam books later, Kill Anything That Moves, devastating and definitive, finally brings us face‑to‑face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day.

Editorial Reviews

From Bookforum

After reading Turse's meticulous, extraordinary, and oddly moving account, it's hard to avoid concluding that the US record in Vietnam has more in common with the Wehrmacht and the Imperial Japanese Army than "the greatest generation" that fought those enemies in World War II. —Jeff Stein

Review

A New York Times Bestseller

“Harrowing.”
—The New York Review of Books

“An indispensable new history of the war… Kill Anything That Moves is a paradigm-shifting, connect-the-dots history of American atrocities that reads like a thriller; it will convince those with the stomach to read it that all these decades later Americans, certainly the military brass and the White House, still haven’t drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“A powerful case… With his urgent but highly readable style, Turse delves into the secret history of U.S.-led atrocities. He has brought to his book an impressive trove of new research—archives explored and eyewitnesses interviewed in the United States and Vietnam. With superb narrative skill, he spotlights a troubling question: Why, with all the evidence collected by the military at the time of the war, were atrocities not prosecuted?”
—Washington Post

“There have been many memorable accounts of the terrible things done in Vietnam—memoirs, histories, documentaries and movies. But Nick Turse has given us a fresh holistic work that stands alone for its blending of history and journalism, for the integrity of research brought to life through the diligence of first-person interviews.… Here is a powerful message for us today—a reminder of what war really costs.”
—Bill Moyers, Moyers & Company

“In Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth… Like a tightening net, the web of stories and reports drawn from myriad sources coalesces into a convincing, inescapable portrait of this war—a portrait that, as an American, you do not wish to see; that, having seen, you wish you could forget, but that you should not forget.”
—Jonathan Schell, The Nation

“A masterpiece… Kill Anything That Moves  is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare.… Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did.”
—Chris Hedges, Truthdig

“Nick Turse’s explosive, groundbreaking reporting uncovers the horrifying truth.”
—Vanity Fair

“Explosive… A painful yet compelling look at the horrors of war.”
—Parade

“Astounding… Meticulous, extraordinary, and oddly moving.”
—Bookforum

“Meticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“If you are faint-hearted, you might want to keep some smelling salts nearby when you read it. It’s that bad… The truth hurts. This is an important book.”
—Dayton Daily News

“Kill Anything That Moves argues, persuasively and chillingly, that the mass rape, torture, mutilation and slaughter of Vietnamese civilians was not an aberration—not a one-off atrocity called My Lai—but rather the systematized policy of the American war machine. These are devastating charges, and they demand answers because Turse has framed his case with deeply researched, relentless authority... There is no doubt in my mind that Kill Anything That Moves belongs on the very highest shelf of books on the Vietnam War.”
—The Millions

“In the sobering Kill Anything That Moves, Nick Turse provides an exhaustive account of how thousands upon thousands of innocent, unarmed South Vietnamese civilians were senselessly killed by a military that equated corpses with results.… Kill Anything That Moves is a staggering reminder that war has its gruesome subplots hidden underneath the headlines—but they’re even sadder when our heroes create them.”
—Bookpage

“An in-depth take on a horrific war… A detailed, well-documented account.”
—Publishers Weekly

“This book is an overdue and powerfully detailed account of widespread war crimes—homicide and torture and mutilation and rape—committed by American soldiers over the course of our military engagement in Vietnam. Nick Turse’s research and reportage is based in part on the U.S. military’s own records, reports, and transcripts, many of them long hidden from public scrutiny. Kill Anything That Moves is not only a compendium of pervasive and illegal and sickening savagery toward Vietnamese civilians, but it is also a record of repetitive deceit and cover-ups on the part of high ranking officers and officials. In the end, I hope, Turse’s book will become a hard-to-avoid, hard-to-dismiss corrective to the very common belief that war crimes and tolerance for war crimes were mere anomalies during our country’s military involvement in Vietnam.”
—Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried
 
“Nick Turse reminds us again, in this painful and important book, why war should always be a last resort, and especially wars that have little to do with American national security. We failed, as Turse makes clear, to deal after the Vietnam War with the murders that took place, and today—four decades later—the lessons have yet to be learned. We still prefer kicking down doors to talking.”
—Seymour Hersh, staff writer, The New Yorker

“This deeply disturbing book provides the fullest documentation yet of the brutality and ugliness that marked America’s war in Vietnam. No doubt some will charge Nick Turse with exaggeration or overstatement. Yet the evidence he has assembled is irrefutable. With the publication of Kill Anything That Moves, the claim that My Lai was a one-off event becomes utterly unsustainable.”
—Andrew J. Bacevich, Colonel, U.S. Army (Ret.), and author of Washington Rules: America’s Path To Permanent War

“American patriots will appreciate Nick Turse’s meticulously documented book, which for the first time reveals the real war in Vietnam and explains why it has taken so long to learn the whole truth.”
—James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers

“Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It’s an important piece of history.”
—Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam
 
“In this deeply researched and provocative book Nick Turse returns us to Vietnam to raise anew the classic dilemmas of warfare and civil society. My Lai was not the full story of atrocities in Vietnam, and honestly facing the moral questions inherent in a ‘way of war’ is absolutely necessary to an effective military strategy. Turse documents a shortfall in accountability during the Vietnam War that should be disturbing to every reader.”
—John Prados, author of Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945–1975

“Nick Turse’s Kill Anything That Moves is essential reading, a powerful and moving account of the dark heart of the Vietnam War: the systematic killing of civilians, not as aberration but as standard operating procedure. Until this history is acknowledged it will be repeated, one way or another, in the wars the U.S. continues to fight.”
—Marilyn Young, author of The Vietnam Wars, 1945–1990

“Nick Turse has done more than anyone to demonstrate—and document—what should finally be incontrovertible: American atrocities in Vietnam were not infrequent and inadvertent, but the commonplace and inevitable result of official U.S. military policy. And he does it with a narrative that is gripping and deeply humane.”
—Christian Appy, author of Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered From All Sides

“No book I have read in decades has so shaken me, as an American. Turse lays open the ground-level reality of a war that was far more atrocious than Americans at home have ever been allowed to know. He exposes official policies that encouraged ordinary American soldiers and airmen to inflict almost unimaginable horror and suffering on ordinary Vietnamese, followed by official cover-up as tenacious as Turse’s own decade of investigative effort against it. Kill Anything That Moves is obligatory reading for Americans, because its implications for the likely scale of atrocities and civilian casualties inflicted and covered up in our latest wars are inescapable and staggering.”
—Daniel Ellsberg, author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (January 15, 2013)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805086919
• ISBN-13: 978-0805086911
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.2 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (166 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,833 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > History > Asia > Vietnam > Vietnam War
  • #4 in Books > Law > Specialties
  • #9 in Books > History > Military Science

More About the Author

Nick Turse is a journalist, historian, and the author of Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. Turse's work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Nation, among other publications. His investigations of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam have gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

205 of 227 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Can Kill Anything That Moves tell us something new about the Vietnam War? January 17, 2013

By Sergio

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

The editorial reviews for "Kill Anything That Moves" certainly got my attention. A who's who of acclaimed authors & reporters that any of the thousands of Vietnam War book authors , would be jealous of. "A tour de force of reporting......" Jonathan Schell, "The evidence he has assembled is irrefutable...." Andrew Bacevich, "I hope, Turse's book will become a hard-to-avoid, hard-to-dismiss corrective...." Tim O'Brien, "American patriots will appreciate Nick Turse's meticulously documented book...", James Bradley, "Nick Turse's Kill Anything That Moves is essential reading..." Marilyn Young "Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It's an important piece of history." Frances FitzGerald. The Accolades continued with similar sentiment from Semour Hersh, Vanity Fair Magazine, John Prados, and Christian Appy. However Reading, " No book I have read in decades has so shaken me, as an American" from Daniel Ellsberg set the hook.

I had to see for myself, how a book published in 2013 could add to the scope of knowledge, enhance the understanding of, or provide new factual material on what is known in Vietnam, as the American War. I can report upon finishing Kill Anything That Moves the book, lived up to the rave reviews and then some. In the introduction, the author explains his 10 year quest for the truth from all directions, he intrigues the reader with precise and frank discussion of the obstacles he encountered and the assistance he received, and impresses with his command of the literature, and the facts; newly uncovered by himself as well as those ferreted out by the soldiers, reporters and researchers who came before him. The author, by the end of his introduction sets a high bar for himself, " This was the real war, the one that barely appears in all the tens of thousands of volumes written about Vietnam. This was the War that Ron Ridenhour spoke about-the one in which My Lai was an operation, not an aberration. This was the war in which the American military and successive administrations in Washington produced not a few random massacres or even discrete strings of atrocities, but something on the order of thousands of days of relentless misery-a veritable system of suffering. That system, that machinery of suffering and what it meant for the Vietnamese people, is what this book is meant to explain."
The 46 foot notes, in the books brief introduction alone, sourcing letters and sworn statements from US government files, as well as interviews with American Vietnam Veterans, and facts proven previously by acclaimed experts, inform quickly, those prepared to suggest unsubstantiated claims or urban legends, or the authors bias might be easy to dismiss, they are mistaken.
As Turse reveals, with uncanny skill, a difficult to hear story, of the suffering and the tragedy of the war on both combatants and civilians, he weaves the two together in a fashion, that has not been previously presented. The reader can feel the mutual empathy in his encounters with Jamie Henry, (if hero's, exist in this story Jamie would be among them). We sense his frustration with being too late to interview George Lewis, author the Concerned Sergeant letters, as he died before Turse was able to track him down. Turse marches the reader through Quang Ngai with ( thanks to the Toledo Blade) the now infamous Tiger Force, depicts the massacre at Trieu Ai,another at My Khe, he substantiates these and so many more with the testimony of participating US troops as well as the records from the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group.
*Turse tells the stories of Major Gordon Livingston, marine Gary Solis and Sargent Paul Cox told so many years ago.
* Hearing the recollections of Ho Thi A, Tran No, Luyen and scores of others who lived through these horrors and shared them with Turse, the reader can't help but feel the angst the author experienced asking them to recount them all these decade later.
* Gathering up the threads of Investigations by Ron Ridenhour, Alex Shimkin, Kevin Buckley and others, connecting the dots that they bravely set out, Turse uncovers and adds the missing pieces to their investigations telling finally in complete detail the stories they were unable to complete 40 years earlier.
* Perhaps most chilling and certainly the most important takeaway of Kill Anything That Moves, in my opinion, is that this abridged catalogue of horror was "the commonplace and inevitable result of official U.S. military policy" (Christian Appy); not mistakes, or misdeeds of a few bad apples or renegade units. But the policy conceived in the Pentagon with the compliance of two administrations and implemented not by the young men humping the boonies, but the generals and civilian architects of the American War in Vietnam, issuing orders like "Kill Anything That Moves".
Nick Turse's skill as a writer takes this difficult subject, and with care and respect weaves a compelling narrative that I could not put down. All patriotic Americans especially those interested in learning from misguided policies of our past, I'm sure will want to read Kill Anything That Moves.

109 of 130 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Far From Vet Bashing ...Vietnam Verterans thank Nick Turse January 23, 2013

By martin paulings

Format:Hardcover

An observation before my review: it seems a robust turnout of my fellow Vietnam veterans who obviously did not read the book, offer snide remarks, but are intimidated and rightly so, by the truth and substantiated proof the author supplies. It is well understood that the volume of unsubstantiated claims of lies and exaggeration, add to the credibility of the author, not one courageous soul among them, was able to select from hundreds of footnoted sentences and show proof that the author has in anyway has mislead. It seems odd that only 1 negative review to date was a verified purchaser, you bought your book elsewhere, paying a premium and rushed to this page to post your pitiful rebuke. A few clicks can often reveal your actual motivation.
That the US military's experience in Vietnam, will not be relieved by our current and future service men and women is more likely with the understanding brought to bear by Kill Anything That Moves, truly an important work, with a truly important message. A long overdue vindication, for Veterans of The Vietnam War.
My Review
In Kill Anything That Moves, Turse does not leave the reader to focus on "series of bad apple" actions. He convincingly shows how policies from two presidents afraid to have "lost the war" on their resume, along with Secretary Robert McNamara, General William Westmoreland, and many high ranking field commanders such as General Julian J. Ewell, set the standard of accepted behavior. Body counts as metrics for success, 30 billion lbs. of munitions often dropped heights precluding discerning civilian villages from armed combatants, and defoliants destroying the agricultural heartland of the nation.
However by weaving Jamie Henry's story (among others) into Kill Anything That Moves the author allows a gripping story to unveil gruesome facts. A reluctant soldier, Henry braved the same booby trapped trails, heard the same bullets scream by his head, and scraped skin off his rotting feet like each man he served with. As a medic he saved the lives of his countrymen whether he agreed with their mission or not. Upon witnessing events however, that would not reconcile with what he understood the promise of America to be. Facing the reality of possible fratricide and the scorn of the military establishment and a segment of the country unwilling to acknowledge unpleasant truths he fought to have his story told. Decades later in Kill Anything That Moves it was.
Turse for perhaps for first time, with a staggering amount of supporting material suggest that aberration or operation is not a choice. That an attitude like Westmoreland's that the Vietnamese don't value life... informs a decision by a platoon leader to issue the order "Kill Anything That Moves". That the prosecution of the war that terrified, traumatized and ravaged the Vietnamese population for a decade were systemic with each participant playing a part. The actions that Henry witnessed and the body counts Ewell demanded. Young men fighting a virtually unseen enemy too over matched to engage directly. An invading force that did not recognize the local peoples ties to their ancestral land. Soldiers confusion with their upbringing steeped in American Idealism and a base urge for revenge when they lost a comrade.
Upping the ante for the reader Turse includes face to face interviews with survivors of ten years of horrific bombing, experiencing the loss of one's entire family in a matter of minutes. We can hardly imagine their daily calculus, trying to recognize if an American patrol entering their village was going to move through peaceful perhaps rewarding youngsters with candy or if they were in mortal danger.
Far from the Vet bashing that many assume Kill Anything That Moves will be, all patriotic Americans will applauded and appreciate this work. Kill Anything That Moves has received critical acclaim from numerous serious students of and experts on the War in Vietnam and thanks and praise from Vietnam veterans and their families.

68 of 86 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well sourced and documented. Excellent book. January 27, 2013

By S. Wilde

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Nick Turse exposes, and expands upon already known, atrocities committed by US troops throughout Vietnam, throughout the war, sometimes in very graphic detail. From the documentary record through firsthand accounts from victims as well as perpetrators, the details are here. My Lai was one of the few mass murders of civilians that reached the mainstream press, but there were many many more atrocities. Mr. Turse's book attempts to reveal some of them and succeeds in doing so.

That a culture of contempt for the Vietnamese people existed at all military ranks is clearly revealed here through thorough investigation. However, readers may not be aware of the military's obsession with body counts, which essentially propped up this culture.

For "reviewers" who rip Turse for "cherry picking" and not being a veteran of the war himself, let me say this: first, as is well known, more than 30,000 books have been written about the Vietnam war - Turse acknowledges this much himself. The book is concise, but could easily be twice three times as long with factual interviews and records. Turse chose the most reliable, documented examples available. Second, good journalists and historians are able to view, investigate, and present findings on an issue, objectively, from reliable source material from all sides of the issue.

I read the book on my Kindle. When I finished a chapter about 3/4 of the way through, I noticed the last "chapter" seemed enormous, but I was ready to grind through it. It turns out that last "chapter" was probably 75-80 pages of footnotes and source material. That was impressive and amazing. The proof is in the pudding. And the accolades from people like Daniel Ellsberg and Andrew Bacevich are to be taken seriously. Turse's other books, as well as his amazing contributions to TomDispatch.com well worth investigating for readers who found thus book interesting, educational, and enlightening.