Product Description
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.” However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of official orders to “kill anything that moves.”
Drawing on a decade of research into secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals the policies and actions that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. He lays out in shocking detail the workings of a military machine that made crimes all but inevitable.
Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.
Drawing on a decade of research into secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals the policies and actions that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. He lays out in shocking detail the workings of a military machine that made crimes all but inevitable.
Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.
Reviews/Praise
—AudioFile
“Narrator Don Lee does a good job with this vivid content.”
—Library Journal
“A powerful case. . . . 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
“A comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. A convincing, inescapable portrait of this wara 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.”
The Nation
“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
“The truth hurts. This is an important book.”
Dayton Daily News
“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
“A staggering reminder that war has its gruesome subplots hidden underneath the headlines but they’re even sadder when our heroes create them.”
BookPage
“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, US Army (Ret.), and author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War
“American patriots will appreciate Nick Turse’s meticulously documented book.”
James Bradley, author of Flags of Our Fathers
“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
Author Bio
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