In 2025, I officially ended my blog after over 9 years, 300 posts, and nearly 100 book reviews. It would take me months to finish a book, and even when I did, I rarely felt like I had anything worthwhile to say about it. Kill Anything That Moves is not one of those books. I couldn’t look away or put it down even when I wanted to — like the handful of times it made me physically nauseous. So today I feel obligated to tell you about it.
Inventing Vietnam
Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse is on one of the most widely known topics in the United States. Actually, known might be too generous. There is a version of the war widely depicted in media, a version praised on holidays, a version taught in schools. There is the version on Wikipedia, where massacres by the US and its allies are always alleged, disputed, or perhaps controversial. Those blamed on the so-called “Viet Cong” — a derogatory term that includes a conglomeration of Vietnamese fighters, most of which were the People’s Liberation Armed Forces — are presented as fact, often with added gruesome details about rape and torture.
The only massacre that’s widely known by the American public is the massacre at My Lai, in which
[…] the Americans entering My Lai encountered only civilians: women, children, and old men. Many were still cooking their breakfast rice. Nevertheless, [commanding officer Ernest] Medina’s orders were followed to a T. Soldiers of Charlie Company killed. They killed everything. They killed everything that moved.
Advancing in small squads, the men of the unit shot chickens as they scurried about, pigs as they bolted, and cows and water buffalo lowing among the thatch-roofed houses. They gunned down old men sitting in their homes and children as they ran for cover. They tossed grenades into homes without even bothering to look inside. An officer grabbed a woman by the hair and shot her point-blank with a pistol. A woman who came out of her home with a baby in her arms was shot down on the spot. As the tiny child hit the ground, another GI opened up on the infant with his M-16 automatic rifle.
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, pp. 2-3
Even My Lai was almost lost to history. Turse details how veteran Ron Ridenhour, only 22 at the time, had investigated what had happened at My Lai and gathered testimony that he was determined to bring to the public, despite not having been present there himself. Arizona Republic, Life, Look, Newsweek, and Harper’s all refused to run Ridenhour’s story. Only when renowned journalist Seymour Hersh brought the story to a small left-leaning agency did it catch fire and run in 35 newspapers on one day. (Turse does not detail how the story gained this momentum.) Life and Look had passed on Hersh’s story as well.
“A My Lai a month”
The thesis of Kill Anything That Moves is that the My Lai massacre was only one of hundreds, a drop in the bucket. Turse and his sources describe the sheer number of atrocities as “a My Lai a month,” as eclipsing My Lai throughout the country, and as “a haystack of needles” when Turse had first started his research, thinking he was searching for a needle in a haystack.
Top officials in Washington spent decades doing their worst to cover up the rest of America’s atrocities in Vietnam after the truth about My Lai came out. Even then,
[,…] almost immediately after the exposure of the My Lai massacre, war crime allegations become old hat—so commonplace as to be barely worth mentioning or looking into. […] What had been previously brushed aside as propaganda and leftist kookery suddenly started to be disregarded as yawn-worthy common knowledge, with little but the My Lai massacre.
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, pp. 5-6
It seems this is where we remain today, whether it’s regarding the US and Israel’s war on Iran or their genocide in Gaza and Lebanon. It is either a leftist conspiracy or it’s old news — or, somehow, both.
I won’t spoil the book for you. I was going to share examples, but if I’m being honest with myself, I really don’t want to. I don’t want to have to revisit the things I read — that made me physically recoil — that US soldiers did under orders of bloodthirsty officials.
The real American War in Vietnam
You might think you know the Vietnam War. There’s a chance you fought in it. There’s a greater chance that your father or grandfather fought in it. You may have briefly covered it in school, or maybe you’ve learned about My Lai. But Nick Turse’s level of meticulous research is rare. He writes,
There have been 30,000 nonfiction books published on the Vietnam War since the conflict began, but only a tiny fraction focus on American atrocities. Of these, nearly all the ones written since 1975 concentrate exclusively on the My Lai massacre, or narrowly investigate a particular subject. And while some of the texts on atrocities written during the war cast a wider net, they were necessarily anecdotal, fragmentary, and speculative, lacking official documentary evidence and a comprehensive picture of the war’s entire duration across the various regions of the country. Only by combining veterans’ testimonies, contemporaneous press coverage, Vietnamese eyewitness accounts, long-classified official studies, and the military’s own formal investigations into the many hundreds of atrocity cases that it knew about can one begin to grasp what the Vietnam War really entailed.
Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, pp. 257-258
The real America
Even in hundred-degree heat, the celebration of this empire’s 250th birthday feels palpable. I’m not allowed to forget it. I feel as though I am being gaslit by everyone and everything from social media posts to yard signs to cereal boxes. In my community band, I’m expected to play the Armed Forces Salute and America the Beautiful, but I won’t. Because the US is not a beacon of democracy. It was not founded on religious freedom. It does not value justice or liberty. Sometimes I envy my bandmates and their audiences, wishing I lived in their facade. In reality, the US is an agent of global terror. This fact is reinforced to me again and again, with every new horror I find. I’m glad I can see past the smoke and mirrors. The reality of this entity is not fireworks and banners, parades and cookouts. Only by peeling back the curtain and learning our true history can we begin to create a better world. And this book is a great place to start.