a b "The U.S. is waging a massive shadow war in Africa, exclusive documents reveal". Vice News . Retrieved 2017-07-30. Meticulously documented, utterly persuasive, this book is a shattering and dismaying read.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune Over four hours, members of Charlie Company methodically slaughtered more than five hundred unarmed victims, killing some in ones and twos, others in small groups, and collecting many more in a drainage ditch that would become an infamous killing ground. They faced no opposition. They even took a quiet break to eat lunch in the midst of the carnage. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area's drinking water.4

But the stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some "bad apples," however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process—such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam. And as Ridenhour put it, they were no aberration. Rather, they were the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military. The official government policy was that U.S. soldiers were prohibited from intentionally targeting and killing civilians. That was after all, what the Geneva Convention provided. Thus, the official rules of engagement were that soldiers could only kill combatants. Not so, says Turse. In his carefully researched and documented book, Turse details how Calley's massacre at My Lai wasn't an aberration at all. Instead, it was part of an intentional policy of death and destruction that was orchestrated and condoned by the U.S. government. a b Inc., Investigative Reporters and Editors. "Investigative Reporters and Editors | 2016 IRE Award Winners". IRE . Retrieved 2017-07-31. {{ cite web}}: |last= has generic name ( help) Isaacs, Arnold R (September–October 2013). "Remembering Vietnam" (PDF). Military Review . Retrieved 7 May 2018.

The Real American War in Vietnam

A masterpiece... Kill Anything That Moves is not only one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict but provides readers with an unflinching account of the nature of modern industrial warfare....Turse, finally, grasps that the trauma that plagues most combat veterans is a result not only of what they witnessed or endured, but what they did.” — Chris Hedges, Truthdig The True Place the American War Holds in the Memory of South Vietnamese vs. North Vietnamese? It Ain't that Simple... Such impulses only grew stronger in the years of the "culture wars," when the Republican Party and an emboldened right wing rose to power. Until Ronald Reagan's presidency, the Vietnam War was generally seen as an American defeat, but even before taking office Reagan began rebranding the conflict as "a noble cause." In the same spirit, scholars and veterans began, with significant success, to recast the war in rosier terms.16 Even in the early years of the twenty-first century, as newspapers and magazines published exposés of long-hidden U.S. atrocities, apologist historians continued to ignore much of the evidence, portraying American war crimes as no more than isolated incidents.17 Newsday's Les Payne Wins Aronson Lifetime Achievement Award At Hunter College". CUNY. 2009-05-04 . Retrieved 2013-02-09.

Kulik, Gary; Zinoman, Peter (September 2014). "Misrepresenting Atrocities: Kill Anything that Moves and the Continuing Distortions of the War in Vietnam" (PDF). Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review . Retrieved 2014-10-22. A searing and meticulously documented book...A damning account of the horrors the United States inflicted on civilians.” — Financial Times 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 Turse has been faulted for not focusing on the horrible bombing of North Vietnam. Well, that was not his subject. He does mention briefly now and then the atrocities committed by the VC but indicates that they were mild compared to the size, scope and varieties of tortures, mutilations, murder and killings carried by the U.S. which pretended to help the Vietnamese. The juxtaposition of the gruesome deeds and the image sold at home and abroad is THE most perfect and giant example of schizophrenic marketing and successful image making. If a society has THE highest violent crime rate of all adv. societies than one can potentially expects its soldiers to misbehave brutally in wars. John Wayne's movie the Green Berets and Reagan's statement that the war was for a noble cause can only prompt cynical derision. They are in the realm of severe psychopathology and grandiose self-delusion very similar to our presumed high living standard, which BTW few believe any more, given slumerica created by those who were uncritically operating in our dangerous myths. a b c Lerner, Lawrence (2016-08-17). "RU-N Faculty and Alumni Win Prestigious 2016 American Book Award". Rutgers University-Newark . Retrieved 7 May 2018.

By the early twentieth century, anger at the French had developed into a nationalist movement for independence. Its leaders found inspiration in communism, specifically the example of Russian Bolshevism and Lenin's call for national revolutions in the colonial world. During World War II, when Vietnam was occupied by the imperial Japanese, the country's main anticolonial organization—officially called the League for the Independence of Vietnam, but far better known as the Viet Minh—launched a guerrilla war against the Japanese forces and the French administrators running the country. Under the leadership of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese guerrillas aided the American war effort. In return they received arms, training, and support from the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency. Most every one of us has been ingrained with the notion that the massacre of innocent, defenseless women, children, and old people at My Lai at the hands of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley and the men in his unit was an aberration. U.S. officials were outraged by the massacre, we have repeatedly been told, and that's why they went after Calley in a criminal prosecution. Writing in The Huffington Post, Peter Van Buren called the book "one of the most important books about the American War in Vietnam." [39] John Tirman of The Washington Post wrote, "Turse forcefully argues the narrower question of how the government failed to prosecute crimes committed in Vietnam or Cambodia." [40] This book is a game-changer for the Vietnam War. No one can read it and ever view that war in the same way again. Every American owes it to himself to read Kill Anything that Moves. Kelley B. Vlahos, the managing editor at The American Conservative, called Turse "by far the most dogged reporter of the U.S. military operations in Africa." [47] Special Operations Forces [ edit ]

One marine remembered finding a Vietnamese woman who had been shot and wounded,” Turse writes. “Severely injured, she begged for water. Instead, her clothes were ripped off. She was stabbed in both breasts, then forced into a spread-eagle position, after which the handle of an entrenching tool — essentially a short-handled shovel — was thrust up her vagina. Other women were violated with objects ranging from soda bottles to rifles.”In recent years, careful surveys, analyses, and official estimates have consistently pointed toward a significantly higher number of civilian deaths.36 The most sophisticated analysis yet of wartime mortality in Vietnam, a 2008 study by researchers from Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, suggested that a reasonable estimate might be 3.8 million violent war deaths, combatant and civilian.37 Given the limitations of the study's methodology, there are good reasons to believe that even this staggering figure may be an underestimate.38 Still, the findings lend credence to an official 1995 Vietnamese government estimate of more than 3 million deaths in total—including 2 million civilian deaths—for the years when the Americans were involved in the conflict.39 Meticulously researched, Kill Anything That Moves is the most comprehensive account to date of the war crimes committed by U.S. forces in Vietnam and the efforts made at the highest levels of the military to cover them up. It's an important piece of history.” — Frances FitzGerald, author of Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam 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

Indeed, Calley, whose unit cold-bloodedly murdered 104 civilians, ultimately ended up serving less than four years on house arrest. He was even pardoned by President Nixon. At his trial, Calley stated:

Editorial

In his spot-on review, Vietnam: A War on Civilians, Chase Madar sums up the war, as portrayed in KATM, thus: “The relentless violence against civilians was more than the activity of a few sociopaths: it was policy.” The same could be said of over 400 years of US history, both domestically and internationally, from 1607 to the present, especially for non-whites. As the inspector general's report concluded in this particular incident, the "Vietnamese victims were innocent civilians loyal to the Republic of Vietnam." Yet, as so often happened, no disciplinary action of any type was taken against any member of the unit. In fact, their battalion commander stated that the team performed "exactly as he expected them to." The battalion's operations officer explained that the civilians had been in an "off-limits" or free-fire zone, one of many swaths of the country where everyone was assumed to be the enemy. Therefore, the soldiers had behaved in accordance with the U.S. military's directives on the use of lethal force.