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Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (American Empire Project) Hardcover – January 15, 2013

by Nick Turse (Author)

424 customer reviews

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The shocking images of the mounds of corpses, including women, children, and even babies, murdered by American troops in the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai symbolized for many the horror of that war. At the time, military officials insisted that the massacre was an aberration and stressed that American troops in the field behaved with discipline and restraint, and strived to avoid civilian casualties. Not so, according to Turse, an investigative journalist who has been researching and writing about American “war crimes” in Vietnam for a decade. If his goal was to illustrate that atrocities committed against civilians were more widespread than previously acknowledged, Turse succeeds. He has mined Pentagon archives and conducted interviews with American veterans to credibly support his assertion. Unfortunately, Turse has a broader agenda, which is to show that the murder of civilians was systematic and encouraged by U.S. policy. He implies that our soldiers were on an out-of-control rampage on a regular basis.The nation could use a balanced view of the conduct of our combat troops in Vietnam, but this misses the mark. --Jay Freeman

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

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Product details

Series: American Empire Project
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (January 15, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0805086919
ISBN-13: 978-0805086911
Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 424 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #543,961 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #483 in Books > Law > Specialties
- #651 in Books > History > Asia > Southeast Asia
- #1222 in Books > History > Military > United States > Vietnam War

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Max Hastings

The highly anticipated new book by acclaimed historian Max Hastings—Vietnam will stand as the definitive new history of the Vietnam War.

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“What is astonishing about the social history of the Vietnam war is not how many people avoided it, but how many could not and did not.”

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Hourly History

Do you want to learn about the Vietnam War? But don't have the time or patience for a 400-page book? You don't want to miss this!

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Michael D. Heath

What I saw and Remember

July 14, 2017

Format: Kindle Edition

I was in the Army infantry in Vietnam, 1966-67, and briefly in 1968 after Tet, but what I am saying applies to the barracks and training in the states as well as the base camps and field operations in Vietnam. A mindset of fear, hatred, cruelty and violence was developed and encouraged in combat training in order to overcome the normal mind's reluctance to kill and to put up with things normal people would recoil against, especially since most of us had just gotten out of high school or were of that age. I was generally more afraid of my "band of brothers" than I was the enemy. The blacks hated me because I was white. Some of the people I was with were borderline criminal types who had been given a choice of the army or prison. I never had any close friends really because I was always moving around. Assault in the barracks was common. In Vietnam, the base camps were more dangerous than the field. You had to watch your ass. My sergeants were sometimes okay, trying to be professional, but more often not. I remember two I really liked though, both black by the way. I remember their names after all of these years. One time I pulled two Vietnamese out of a hole or cave. They had no papers or weapons and had no military clothing or gear. I turned them over to the platoon sergeant. The platoon leader, a West Pointer, asked the platoon sergeant what to do and he gave the thumbs down signal. Then he had the point man and his slack man buddy murder them. I saw and heard of a number of things like that. I did some bad things too, but I did not do murder or hurt a helpless person. I used to think that if I was in an outfit with better discipline and better personnel that things would have been different. Today I do not think that. I was told that I was a good soldier, but I was never happy about it. I was never proud of any of it.

63 people found this helpful

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The Most Important Book on Vietnam

January 25, 2018

Format: HardcoverVerified Purchase

I have always been fascinated by the Vietnam War as my father served from 1967 through 1969 as a Naval intelligence liaison to the Marines on the ground. He rarely ever spoke of the war except in very general terms even when asked by members of our family. However, on a few late evenings, he did tell of some gut wrenching incidents which clearly still haunted him decades later. It seems to me that one of the reasons the war remains such an open wound on the American conscience is because we have failed to fully acknowledge our conduct.

This book does an incredible job of meticulously sourcing instances of war crimes though the government’s own records and also detailing direct efforts by the government to block investigations which would have disgraced the military and further eroded support for the war. Many will dismiss the events detailed in this book by claiming the North Vietnamese also engaged in such behavior. The record simply doesn’t support that view given the American’s huge artillary and aerial assault capabilities which enabled mass destruction on a historic scale. Turse further supports this through horrific statistics on civilian deaths and mass executions which were more the rule than the exception. This behavior is shown to be the result of the military’s overtly racist policies of reducing the Vietnamese population to body counts and using free fire zones as an excuse to decimate villages filled with women and children.

We cannot claim to be the beacon of freedom in the world unless we hold ourselves to the highest standards. Sadly, this book reveals we held ourselves to almost the lowest, most cynical standards possible and government leadership was never held accountable. This book should be required reading for anyone in the government in positions of power. It is a clear example of our government failing its citizens, soldiers, the Vietnamese people, and the very principles we claim to represent. After reading this book years after my father has passed away, his silence when asked about the war makes painful sense.

14 people found this helpful

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Joe Broadmeadow

Truth about the Real War in Vietnam

September 16, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Meticulously researched and documented, Kill Anything that Moves strips away the Patriotic whitewash of the Vietnam war. Exposing long hidden military records of combat realities where dead civilians became the enemy in a war measured by inflated body counts and wanton destruction. It is not pleasant to read, but truth is often the first victim of battles.

We never lost a major military battle against the NLF, he Viet Cong, or the NVA but in many ways our own combat strategies did more to alienate the very people we were trying to defend than any Communist atrocity. One might argue our conduct of the war, and subsequent abandonment of the South Vietnamese, resulted in the tragedy that befell the south when the NVA tanks rolled into Saigon as we fled from the rooftop of our Embassy

6 people found this helpful

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My Lai Was Not An Isolated Incident.

September 5, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

The horrifying reality is that My Lai was NOT an isolated instance of violence and killing of Vietnamese civilians by American forces during the Vietnam War. This book details the work and archives of a stunning example of the "banality of evil" where a Pentagon office was formed to investigate mass murders of civilians, not to expose the events or discipline those involved but simply to keep senior military officials aware of the attacks so that they would not be caught by surprise as they were with My Lai. Sadly, it shows that the pressures of a terrible war terribly directed by US civilian officials resulted in a distortion of military doctrine and the leadership of troops in the field.

To me, these events are not an indictment of the draftees in the field but of the empty and evil leadership of President Nixon and his staff. The result was largely repeated by the Bush Administration in Iraq War 2 where the only crime (as in Abu Ghraib) seemed to be taking pictures and trying to get superiors to admit to ordering the criminal behavior.

The takeaway lesson is, as always, that military discipline condemns the killing of civilians and the torture of prisoners for very good reasons: 1. They aren't effective in terms of winning a conflict and 2) the psychic damage to the individual American soldier is widespread and extreme.

5 people found this helpful

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