Kill Anything That Moves
The Real American War in Vietnam
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians
The American Empire Project
Winner of the Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a decade of scouring Pentagon archives and interviewing Vietnamese survivors and American vets, Turse (The Complex) offers this detailed, well-documented account of the "real" Vietnam War, "the one that so many would like to forget." The author shows that, contrary to popular belief, the massacre at My Lai was not an isolated incident; one soldier wrote in a 1971 letter to President Nixon that "the atrocities that were committed at Mylai are eclipsed by similar American actions throughout the country." The bulk of the book is devoted to a grueling recounting of these killings, and Turse leaves little room for doubt that "urder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process" were encouraged by body count minded war managers and badly trained junior officers, and abetted by Gen. William Westmoreland's search-and-destroy strategy. Turse maintains a one-sided historicism regarding the innumerable American war crimes, and while this tight focus allows for an in-depth take on a horrific war, it's hard to imagine what kind of readership the author had in mind when he began his gruesome project. Nevertheless, the whistle-blowers chronicled attest to the voices of reason that spoke up in the midst of carnage.
