by Nick Turse
First published 2013
Nick Turse investigates the systematic killing of Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. Drawing from classified Pentagon documents and interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse argues that violence against noncombatants was not exceptional but widespread and deliberate. He traces how official military policies led to millions of innocent deaths and injuries. The book examines boot camps where soldiers learned to dehumanize Vietnamese people, campaigns like Operation Speedy Express where body count obsessions drove monthly massacres, and the military structure that made war crimes routine across American units. Turse moves between Washington archives containing suppressed investigations and Vietnamese villages that suffered the worst violence. His decade of research challenges the narrative that incidents like My Lai were isolated events carried out by rogue soldiers, revealing instead a pattern of institutionalized brutality that affected nearly every major American unit in Vietnam.
Genres: history, 20th-century, non-fiction, military-history, academic, american-history
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: institutional-corruption, systemic-oppression
Setting: Vietnam
Period: Vietnam War
370 pages · Hardcover · Metropolitan Books
Content warnings: graphic-violence, violence