Confronting the Uncomfortable Truth: Lessons from "Kill Anything That Moves"
In his groundbreaking work, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam , journalist Nick Turse challenges the long-standing narrative that American atrocities in Vietnam, like the infamous My Lai massacre, were merely "isolated incidents". By digging through secret Pentagon files and conducting extensive interviews with veterans and survivors, Turse reveals a much darker reality: a systematic pattern of violence against civilians driven by official U.S. military policies. The Machinery of Suffering Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War...
Turse argues that the widespread killing of non-combatants was the predictable consequence of a military machine obsessed with one primary metric: . This focus incentivized units to inflate numbers, often leading to the intentional targeting of civilians to meet quotas. Key elements of this "machinery of suffering" included: 'Anything That Moves': Civilians And The Vietnam War - NPR The Machinery of Suffering Turse argues that the