Dossier mode
Kill Anything That Moves
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Drive it with the arrow keys, space, or autoplay. Nothing is cut from the piece — long runs are split across frames. Read the full investigation or open the Crimes of Empire hub.
Kill Anything That Moves
My Lai wasn't the exception. According to the U.S. military's own buried files, it was the visible tip of a pattern — and the rule that made it possible was that a Vietnamese life did not count.
American atrocities against Vietnamese civilians weren't confined to My Lai but were widespread and, in Turse's reading of the Pentagon's own records, the predictable product of how the war was fought — body counts, free-fire zones, and a racial contempt so normalized it had a name.
The killing on one side of the ledger; on the other, the 'mere-gook rule' — the doctrine that a Vietnamese life wasn't a life that counted.
The My Lai massacre killed hundreds of unarmed civilians — and only one man was ever convicted.
On 16 March 1968, Charlie Company killed unarmed civilians at My Lai — women, children, elderly men — the Army's figure 347, Vietnamese accounts 504. The killing was stopped in part by a US helicopter crew (Hugh Thompson) who put themselves between soldiers and villagers; the massacre was covered up over a year until Seymour Hersh exposed it. Of everyone involved, only Lt. William Calley was convicted, serving ~three years under house arrest — wildly out of proportion.
The dehumanizing doctrine had a name soldiers used: the 'mere-gook rule.'
The dehumanization is in the perpetrators' own words. The 'mere-gook rule' (MGR) was real military slang for the operating principle that a Vietnamese life — routinely met with the slur 'gook' — simply did not count, so killing one carried no moral or legal weight. The racial contempt was pervasive, documented in soldiers' testimony and scholarship. When a population is reduced in the fighting men's own vocabulary to a killable category, the atrocities aren't mysterious — the licensing doctrine is spoken aloud in the field.
The Pentagon's own secret archive documented hundreds of atrocities — My Lai was not unique.
Turse's central claim rests on the government's own paperwork. After My Lai the Army created the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group, which compiled files on hundreds of substantiated atrocities — killings, rapes, torture, mutilations — across many units and years. That the archive exists and records these is fact; Turse's broader reading — atrocities widespread and the predictable result of policy, not isolated aberrations — is a strong, heavily-evidenced interpretation of the pattern, graded PROBABLY TRUE. The Army's own investigators found far more than one rogue company.
The way the war was measured rewarded killing: body counts and free-fire zones.
The system supplied the incentive. With no territory to capture in a guerrilla war, command measured success by the 'body count' — creating relentless pressure to produce corpses and a temptation to count dead civilians as fighters. 'Free-fire zones' designated whole areas where anyone present could be killed on sight. Both are documented features of how the war was run — a machine in which killing civilians could be rewarded as success, the structural half the 'mere-gook rule' completes.
A huge body count with almost no weapons recovered is a red flag — Operation Speedy Express reported ~10,899 'enemy' killed, and the civilian toll is fiercely contested.
The empire that told itself it was the exception.
This extends the hub's method from the European colonial powers to the American one, and finds the same machinery. Where a British general at Amritsar spoke of a 'moral effect,' American soldiers had the 'mere-gook rule'; where empire elsewhere dressed dispossession as civilization, the US told itself its war was a defense of freedom and its atrocities were aberrations. Turse used the government's own buried files to show the aberration story was a comfort, not a fact. It reaches into CIA Crimes too — the Phoenix Program's targeted killings ran on a kindred logic. An empire that believes its violence is always exceptional keeps the 'mere-gook rule' in reserve, under new names, for the next war.
Help us fill these lines.
- OpenThe 'mere-gook rule' is real military slang, documented in testimony — the doctrine in the soldiers' own words. We don't claim one signed order to massacre; the argument is about incentives and permissions (body counts, free-fire), graded on the Pentagon's own files.
- OpenContested numbers are fenced: Speedy Express's civilian toll is SOME SMOKE; the overall civilian figure is given as an estimate in the millions. Honor and atrocity both existed — some soldiers intervened; the other side committed atrocities too (Huế) — neither erases the documented American conduct.