HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Henry Holt, Metropolitan Books ...

Metropolitan Books
Nick Turse
KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES
The Real American War in Vietnam
Publication: January 2013 Galleys available
Editor: Sara Bershtel Category: History
Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious
My Lai massacre were "isolated incidents" carried out by "a few bad
apples." However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick
Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence
against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional but was
pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to
"kill anything that moves."
Based on his decade long plunge into secret Pentagon files and
extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese
survivors, Turse for the first time reveals the policies and actions that
resulted in two million killed and five million wounded. He lays out in
shocking detail the workings of a military machine that made crimes
in almost every American unit all but inevitable. Turse's account
moves from archives filled with Washington's suppressed war-crimes
investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps
where nervous young American soldiers learned to hate Vietnamese to bloodthirsty operations like
"Speedy Express" in which a general obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one
participant called "a My Lai a month." Indeed, American violence against civilians was no isolated
incident of troops gone berserk but rather the product of carefully chosen policies, issued by
American officers and drilled into the troops to become an accepted fact of war.
Thousands of Vietnam books later, KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES, devastating and
definitive, brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day.
Nick Turse is the author of The Complex. His investigations of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam have
gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Investigative Reporting and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among
other honors. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Advance praise for KILL ANYTHING THAT MOVES:
“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, The New Yorker
British: Henry Holt
Translation: Henry Holt