Kill Anything That Moves

Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling and sure to be controversial history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians. 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.

[nickturse]

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For your listening pleasure: I talk to Bob Garfield from WYNC’s On The Media about the Pentagon’s attempt to peddle a counterfeit history of the Vietnam War. 

For more, read my latest article: “Misremembering America’s Wars, 2003-2053.”

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“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.” 

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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.

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Forty-five years ago today, March 16th, roughly 100 U.S. troops were flown by helicopter to the outskirts of a small Vietnamese hamlet called My Lai in Quang Ngai Province, South Vietnam. Over a period of four hours, the Americans methodically slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. Along the way, they also raped women and young girls, mutilated the dead, systematically burned homes, and fouled the area’s drinking water.

But that’s only a fraction of the story.  For more on the unknown atrocities of Vietnam and beyond, please take a look at my new op-ed for The Daily Beast: “My Lai 45 Years Later—And the Unknown Atrocities of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan”

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Journalist Nick Turse describes his personal mission to compile a complete and compelling account of the Vietnam War’s horror as experienced by all sides, including innocent civilians who were sucked into its violent vortex.

Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans — including many accused of war atrocities — and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

“American culture has never fully come to grips with Vietnam,” Turse tells Bill, referring to “hidden and forbidden histories that just haven’t been fully engaged.”

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After a brief hiatus, Kill Anything that Moves is back on the New York Times best sellers list at #31. 

Thanks to everyone who supported this book and made it possible!

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Reporting America at War . Gloria Emerson . Copters Return from Laos with the Dead | PBS

Gloria Emerson: Copters Return from Laos with the Dead

Originally published in The New York Times, March 3, 1971

KHESANH, South Vietnam, Feb. 27 — The dead began to come into the emergency field hospital here today after 1 P.M.

The first South Vietnamese soldier, killed yesterday in Laos, was wrapped tightly in an American Army poncho held by bandage strips used as string. All that could be seen were his small, bare feet — dark with dust — hanging over the stretcher's edge.

He lay on the reddish earth while a Vietnamese officer of the hospital at the airborne division's forward command post looked at a large tag and wrote down one more name and unit.

Fifteen minutes later — raising a furious blizzard of dust that stings the eyes and whips the face — another United States medical evacuation helicopter landed. Two more dead, then 10 more dead.

By 3 P.M. there were 30 dead and over 200 wounded.

A small despairing scene, it is being repeated every day in the face of mounting Communist resistance to the South Vietnamese drive into Laos. This week the South Vietnamese command reported a total of 320 dead, 1,000 wounded and 99 missing in action since the operation began on Feb. 8. It is suspected that the figures are unrealistically small.

At this hospital, an emergency station with a few tents and an underground surgical bunker with only stretchers for the critically wounded, the Vietnamese orderlies stand in groups near a small helicopter pad.

They seemed uncertain of how to remove the dead and the wounded most quickly from the choppers, which are flown by American crews.

One young orderly kept rushing toward the craft holding a stretcher in front of him as a shield against the dirt, but then he dropped it as he came closer and did not seem to know what to do next.

Other orderlies did not bother with the stretchers. Some carried the wounded in a stumbling file of piggyback rides. Those Vietnamese who were wounded but could somehow walk made the few hundred yards by themselves, weaving a little in the scorching sun.

In one tent, where the day's wounded lie on American cots waiting for Vietnamese medics or Dr. Tran Qui Tram, who is 21 years old, to help them, there were more than a dozen men in the stifling heat. Some closed their eyes and were silent but others would not restrain their groans.

The most seriously wounded man, a North Vietnamese, Third Lieut. Mac Thang Nong, a member of the 35th North Vietnamese Commando Battalion, a demolition outfit, was on a wooden table as the medics dressed his wounds. They did not give him an anesthetic — no one had that.

"I was on a reconnaissance mission with three others," he said, whispering slowly in Vietnamese. "We were near Hill 30 when I was hit by fire from the hilltop. I considered myself as already dead. From now on I do not worry about anything."

He was captured by the South Vietnamese on the hill, where heavy fighting has been going on this week.

Lieutenant Nong, who said he left North Vietnam only a month ago, declined to talk about his family and closed his eyes.

The South Vietnamese wounded paid no attention to the enemy officer. They were too busy with their own thoughts and their own pain.

Pvt. Nguyen Huu Thanh, a combat engineer supporting South Vietnamese airborne troops in Laos, does not know the name of the place where he was hit by rocket fragments. The tears rolled down his face as he muttered in Vietnamese.

"Do you know whether they will amputate my arm?" he pleaded. "I am afraid they will cut off my arm here."

But he could not bring himself to put the question to the medics. When they bent his arm in a splint — no one knew if it was fractured or only full of steel splinters — he cried out. There was no one to soothe him and no one to give him water.

Pvt. Tran Van Gu, a Ranger with the 21st Battalion, which fought on Hill 30, was wounded by North Vietnamese recoilless-rifle fire. "The North Vietnamese are frightening," he said. It was hard to hear him because of the bandage around his face.

"The North Vietnamese were hit by three waves of B-52 bombers last night, but still they survived and they shelled us early this morning," he related.

"Many of the Rangers wish that they would be ordered to withdraw," he continued, "because all of us are surrounded and cannot figure out a way to fight back against the North Vietnamese. They don't fear air strikes or artillery. I am convinced that we cannot fight them in Laos."

An infantryman with the First Division fighting at Hotel 2, where the North Vietnamese have attacked ground forces 18 miles southwest of Laobao, told of the assault.

"They fired on us day and night with rockets, mortars and recoilless rifles," Pvt. Tran Van Ngo said, sighing. "At 4 P.M. yesterday I was wounded. So were seven others. The choppers couldn't land all day to get us out because of the enemy fire."

The soldier said he was 49 years old though his papers say he is 40. "A long long time ago my father changed the age on my papers from 28 to 19 to keep me from being drafted by the French to fight the Germans," he said. "I am far too old to be in the army now as a private, with all the hardship that comes to a man. I dodged one war only to be caught finally in another."

Copyright ©, 1971 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.

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Oliver Stone’s Vietnam Photos

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Questioning a VC suspect.

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Two Vietnamese women struggle to salvage items from their home in Quang Tin Province after it was set on fire by members of the U.S. Army’s 1st Squadron,1st Cavalry, and allied South Vietnamese militia.

© 1970 Richard Brummett

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In this March 19, 1964 photo, one of several shot by Associated Press photographer Horst Faas which earned him the first of two Pulitzer Prizes, a father holds the body of his child as South Vietnamese Army Rangers look down from their armored vehicle. The child was killed as government forces pursued guerrillas into a village near the Cambodian border. (AP Photo/Horst Faas) #

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Sad Song of Yellow Skin

A film about the people of Saigon told through the experiences of 3 young American journalists who, in 1970, explored the consequences of war and of the American presence in Vietnam. It is not a film about the Vietnam War, but about the people who lived on the fringe of battle. The views of the city are arresting, but away from the shrines and the open-air markets lies another city, swollen with refugees and war orphans, where every inch of habitable space is coveted.

Director: Michael Rubbo

1970, 58min 5s

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When The War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge Revolution, Revised Edition by Elizabeth Becker

Summary:

Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker started covering Cambodia in 1973 for The Washington Post, when the country was perceived as little more than a footnote to the Vietnam War. Then, with the rise of the Khmer Rouge in 1975 came the closing of the border and a systematic reorganization of Cambodian society. Everyone was sent from the towns and cities to the countryside, where they were forced to labor endlessly in the fields. The intelligentsia were brutally exterminated, and torture, terror, and death became routine. Ultimately, almost two million people this is a book of epic vision and staggering power. Merging original historical research with the many voices of those who lived through the times and exclusive interviews with every Cambodian leader of the past quarter century, When the War Was Over illuminates the darkness of Cambodia with the intensity of a bolt of lightning

This book can be purchased from Amazon for $16.64 and Barnes and Noble for $16.47.

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Nick Turse talks to Bill Moyers about his book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam and about the ghosts of people and issues not properly put to rest in the years following the Vietnam war. In Vietnam, says Turse, a person who dies outside his or her home dies “a bad death,” and it’s the responsibility of the deceased’s relatives to make peace with the person’s “wandering ghost.” The multi-decade war with Vietnam, Turse says, is America’s wandering ghost, a conflict with which America has never managed to make peace.

For more, click here.

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Troops in the field regularly carved their unit’s initials or numbers into corpses, adorned bodies with their unit’s patch, or left a “death card”— generally either an ace of spades or a custom- printed business card claiming credit for the kill. Company A, 1st Battalion, 6th Infantry of the 198th Light Infantry Brigade, for example, left their victims with a customized ace of spades sporting the unit’s formal designation, its nickname (“Gunfighters”), a skull and crossbones, and the phrase “dealers of death.”

— Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

[nickturse]

This weekend on Moyers & Company, journalist Nick Turse joins Bill to describe his unprecedented efforts to compile a complete and compelling account of the Vietnam War’s horror as experienced by all sides, including innocent civilians who were sucked into its violent vortex. Turse, who devoted 12 years to tracking down the true story of Vietnam, unlocked secret troves of documents, interviewed officials and veterans – including many accused of war atrocities – and traveled throughout the Vietnamese countryside talking with eyewitnesses to create his book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam.

 ”American culture has never fully come to grips with Vietnam,” Turse tells Bill, referring to “hidden and forbidden histories that just haven’t been fully engaged.”

(For more, see: Preview: Who’s Widening America’s Digital Divide? | Moyers & Company | BillMoyers.com)

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U.S. Marine wields a flame thrower during Operation New Castle, 03/26/1967.

Photo courtesy of NARA, Records of the U.S. Marine Corps, 1775 - onward.

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