Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

The New York Times Bestseller
2014 American Book Award Winner
Winner of the Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction

“An indispensable, paradigm-shifting new history of the war...All these decades later, Americans still haven't drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. From Metropolitan Books' American Empire Project, a series of argument-driven works aiming to combat American imperialism.

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by just 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 official orders to "kill anything that moves."

Drawing on more than a decade of research into secret Pentagon archives and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time the workings of a military machine that resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded-what one soldier called "a My Lai a month." Devastating and definitive, Kill Anything That Moves finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts America to this day.