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.

“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

“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.”
—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

“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

“Turse is to be commended for compiling a detailed, well-documented account of atrocities committed by American troops against civilians in Vietnam.… If you don’t believe that there were thousands of cases of American troops running amok among the civilian population of Vietnam, Turse’s research will change your mind. For more than a decade, he scoured reams of U.S. military archival documents, read countless memoirs and other primary source materials, and interviewed Vietnam veterans and Vietnamese victims of the brutality. His book leaves little doubt that American atrocities ‘went on all the time, all over South Vietnam, for years and years.’”
—The VVA Veteran

“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—up there with the non-fiction of Neil Sheehan, David Halberstam, Seymour Hersh, Jonathan Schell, and Frances FitzGerald, the memoirs of Michael Herr and Philip Caputo, the fiction of Bobbie Ann Mason, Robert Stone, Jayne Anne Phillips, Tim O’Brien, Ward Just, and, of course, Graham Greene.”
—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 meticul