And it took me a while, but I knew that I needed to work with it." Most of these cases had never been written about by historians, so I knew that this was a significant collection. And when I looked at them, I realized that these weren't in the secondary literature anywhere. "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. The cases, says Turse, "were closed with little or seemingly no investigation done." Turse wrote the book after stumbling on a previously unexplored cache of documents in the basement of the National Archives that detailed allegations of atrocities in Vietnam.
Nick Turse is the author of Kill Anything That Moves, about the Vietnam War. "It's not these microlevel atrocities in most circumstances." "It's suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, and it was generally due to heavy firepower," Turse says. In his new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Turse argues that the intentional killing of civilians was quite common in a war that claimed 2 million civilian lives, with 5.3 million civilians wounded and 11 million refugees.Īnd as Turse tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies, "as many as 4 million exposed to toxic defoliants like Agent Orange." government has maintained that atrocities like this were isolated incidents in the conflict. Army in what became known as the My Lai Massacre. On March 16, 1968, between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by members of the U.S. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Kill Anything That Moves Subtitle The Real American War in Vietnam Author Nick Turse
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