Kill Anything That Moves Quotes

“Producing a high body count was crucial for promotion in the officer corps. Many high-level officers established “production quotas” for their units, and systems of “debit” and “credit” to calculate exactly how efficiently subordinate units and middle-management personnel performed. Different formulas were used, but the commitment to war as a rational production process was common to all.11”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“In Vietnam, the statistically minded war managers focused, above all, on the notion of achieving a “crossover point”: the moment when American soldiers would be killing more enemies than their Vietnamese opponents could replace.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“The true purpose of the various directives, regulations, and pocket-sized codes of conduct handed out to troops was not to implement genuine safeguards for noncombatants, but to give the military a paper trail of plausible deniability.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“Could there really be that many “bad apples” with the same inclinations? Or was something more sinister at work? Could America—the world’s “good guys”—have implemented a system of destruction that turned rural zones into killing fields and made war crimes all but inevitable?”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“For all those who shared their stories - and for those with stories yet to be told.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“Are we supposed to kill women and children?” And Medina’s reply: “Kill everything that moves.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“Brown told investigators that he, Tackett, Carmon, and Robert Carey had employed water torture and administered electrical shocks to prisoners with the knowledge and consent of Bowers, and that Bowers had personally subjected noncombatants to electrical torture.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“On September 1, 1969, for example, members of the 196th Infantry Brigade in Quang Tin Province spotted a group of Vietnamese. Officers and sergeants, peering through binoculars, conferred about the situation. After about ten minutes of observation the senior officer, Captain David Janca, ordered his machine gunners to open fire and called in an artillery fire mission. A small patrol was then dispatched to the kill zone. “Upon arrival,” assistant machine gunner Robert Gray said later, “we found dead and wounded Vietnamese children.”28 Patrol member Welkie Louie described the scene: “I observed about four to six Vietnamese children lying in one pile, dead. About five meters from this position were two or three wounded Vietnamese children huddled together.”29 Afterward, artillery forward observer Robert Wolz told army investigators that he saw an official document in which “the dead were listed as VC.”30 Another report even referred to them as “NVA”—that is, North Vietnamese army troops.31 In death, this small group of children had morphed into guerrillas and then into uniformed enemy soldiers as the body count wound its way through the military’s statistics generation machine.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam

“Bumgarner’s shootings of civilians, Donaldson’s “gook-hunting” missions, and Ewell’s blood-soaked Speedy Express were emblematic of the entire American enterprise in Vietnam. If one man and his tiny team could claim more KIAs than an entire battalion without raising red flags among superiors; if a brigade commander could up the body count by picking off civilians from his helicopter with impunity; if a top general could institutionalize atrocities through the profligate use of heavy firepower in areas packed with civilians—then what could be expected down the line, especially among heavily armed young infantrymen operating in the field for weeks, angry, tired, and scared, often unable to locate the enemy and yet relentlessly pressed for kills? Indeed, in this atmosphere, it is remarkable that some U.S. soldiers did nevertheless blow the whistle on atrocities, lodging complaints and writing letters to commanders who bore a responsibility to investigate. But the rank-and-file troops who spoke out against murder were, for the most part, essentially powerless in the face of command-level cover-ups.”
― Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam