Turse offers the public stunning new insights into past events based on reading through tens of thousands of pages of forgotten records and on interviewing scores of people — on both sides — who suffered through the Vietnam War.
Indeed, the most terrifying implication of Kill Anything That Moves is that skillful military spin combined with a disengaged public could lead to a state of perpetual war—even one as criminal as Vietnam—without a significant public outcry. With the Afghanistan war and the war on terror entering their 12th years, Turse demonstrates that only by coming to grips with the full horror of Vietnam can we understand why we are dangerously close to that perpetual state.
“I found myself tearing up, gagging at times, as I turned the pages.”
This generally isn’t what you like to read to begin a review of your book. But I couldn’t be happier, more humbled, or more moved with the review of Kill Anything That Moves by wartime aid worker-turned-reporter Tom Fox in America magazine. The piece is personal and poignant and concludes: “Kill Anything That Moves should become mandatory reading in all U.S. history classes and in classrooms where warfare is taught. But can we face the dark side of our military policies? Can we, as a nation, learn from the past? I am not optimistic. Reading this book and then passing it along could possibly pave the way. We owe this much to the ghosts of wars past and those to come.”
The visceral horror of what happened at My Lai is undeniable. On
the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the Americal Division’s
Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their
commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation
the next day in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member
Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the
village.’ ” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s
words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that
breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s
mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.
the evening of March 15, 1968, members of the Americal Division’s
Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, were briefed by their
commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, on a planned operation
the next day in an area they knew as “Pinkville.” As unit member
Harry Stanley recalled, Medina “ordered us to ‘kill everything in the
village.’ ” Infantryman Salvatore LaMartina remembered Medina’s
words only slightly differently: they were to “kill everything that
breathed.” What stuck in artillery forward observer James Flynn’s
mind was a question one of the other soldiers asked: “Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.
For those of you in and around New York City, I’ll be giving a reading and signing copies of my New York Times bestseller Kill Anything that Moves at 192 Books in Chelsea (at 192 Tenth Avenue at 21st Street) on March 27th at 7pm. For more information, call 212-255-4022 or click here.
Very happy to see that Powell’s Books’ Daily Dose says Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam is “as important a contribution to the vast Vietnam War record as any ever published” and calls it a “Must Read!”
Kill Anything That Moves is a paradigm-shifting, connect-the-dots history of American atrocities that reads like a thriller; it will convince those with the stomach to read it that all these decades later Americans, certainly the military brass and the White House, still haven’t drawn the right lesson from Vietnam.
A mosaic of Saddam Hussein lies in ruins on the road to Basra, southern Iraq, March 28, 2003. Antonin Kratochvil/VII
Turse shows My Lai was no exception. He shows that American military conduct in Vietnam followed from policies engineered from the top. The policies were criminal. Higher-ups always tried to hide their role or pin atrocities on lower level fall guys… Turse’s book is an important contribution to the battle against forgetting and against the politics of impunity.
Nothing succeeds in Washington like being tougher than the next guy. And woe to those who express doubt… the Times quoted retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama Administration’s first director of National Intelligence, who was replaced after just sixteen months on the job, as saying that the drone and predator strikes were talked about as “the only game in town”—in a way that “reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget.
