Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

A story that needed to be told. Listen to the Fresh Air Interview with Nick Turse. After you finish crying, consider the war reparations we need to make to Vietnam. 50,000 American dead, 3-5 Million Vietnamese - most women and children. 200 atrocities recorded in this book made possible by the US National Archives.

"It's suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, and it was generally due to heavy firepower," Turse says. "It's not these microlevel atrocities in most circumstances."

"I asked the archivist, I said, 'Who's worked with this before?' And he told me that people had looked at one or two individual case files, but that no one had really worked with the records in total. And when I looked at them, I realized that these weren't in the secondary literature anywhere. Most of these cases had never been written about by historians, so I knew that this was a significant collection. And it took me a while, but I knew that I needed to work with it." Turse eventually interviewed more than 100 veterans, and says that the killings "stemmed from deliberate policies that were dictated at the highest levels of the U.S. military" — and that those policies prioritized body count.