The My Lai massacre, in which US soldiers gunned down hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, shocked America and helped turn public opinion against the Vietnam War. Now, a new book by Nick Turse, an Investigative Fund Fellow at The Nation Institute, has revealed that My Lai was not an isolated atrocity: The United States deliberately killed civilians throughout the course of the conflict.

The killing of non-combatants "stemmed from deliberate policies that were dictated at the highest levels of the US military" and was amplified by excessive firepower, Turse said in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air. The author also recounted how he slept in his car in the National Archives parking lot for several nights in order to copy files on atrocities that were later removed.

—Alec Luhn

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam came out on Metropolitan Books earlier this month.

The Nation recently published an excerpt from Kill Anything That Moves.