“The Lord giveth and the 20mm taketh away. Killing is our business and business is good.”

Nick Turse offers one of the most raw and devastating examinations of the Vietnam War, which makes it unsurprising that this book is more often sought out than formally taught. I don’t think I have ever been so angry while reading something so well written. There are many aspects of the Vietnam War that have long disgusted me, but throughout this book there were multiple moments when I had to set it down and take a walk just to process what I had read.

Turse challenges the public memory of the Vietnam War by arguing that the true war was the staggering number of civilian casualties inflicted by the United States—casualties that began accumulating well before the first official troop deployments in 1965 and were ultimately covered up. He traces this violence back to the 1950s and follows it until 1971 as the cover-ups turned from systematic to panic, reframing the conflict as one defined not by battlefield heroics but by egregious civilian death.

Organized thematically, Turse guides the reader through his investigation of the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and his attempts to make sense of its records. Through correspondence, firsthand accounts, veteran interviews, and his own travels to Vietnam, Turse reconstructs a disturbing picture of the United States’ gross misuse of power throughout the region. He draws on the public familiarity with the My Lai Massacre to argue that it was not an anomaly, but rather a representative example of what soldiers routinely experienced and were expected to carry out. My Lai was simply the incident that made the front page.

The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group documented over 300 allegations of war crimes committed by U.S. forces, a staggering figure that challenges any notion of isolated misconduct. One might optimistically assume that the committee existed to bring American servicemembers to justice. Instead, it becomes abundantly—and devastatingly—clear that the group largely functioned to manage press fallout in the wake of My Lai rather than to pursue accountability.

The concept of “body count” appears repeatedly throughout the book, with Turse relying on servicemembers’ own words to reveal how the term was actually used. In Vietnam, “body count” did not simply refer to enemy combatants; it meant the death of anything that moved, with little regard for innocence.

Turse addresses how this reality came to be in his second chapter, detailing how young servicemembers, who were often not much older than those they indiscriminately killed, were shaped by boot camp conditioning, abusive command structures, and the systematic dehumanization of Vietnamese people. Many veterans described this process as brainwashing. While the war contains countless nuances, nothing can justify the events documented across these 250 pages and Turse does not even cover everything contained in the committee’s records.

Some historians have approached this book critically due to Turse’s background in journalism rather than academic history, a bias I initially shared when I first picked it up. However, the material Turse presents is far more important than any pretentious predisposition about disciplinary boundaries. He draws extensively from primary sources, supplementing them with secondary materials where necessary to fill gaps or reinforce shared experiences. It is evident that Turse conducted exhaustive research.

Many claim that history is written by the victors, but Turse’s work demonstrates that this sentiment does not hold true in the case of the Vietnam War.

“Was Iraq the new Vietnam? Or was that Afghanistan? Do we see “light at the end of the tunnel”? Are we winning “hearts and minds”? Is “counterinsurgency" working? Are we applying “the lessons of Vietnam”? What are those lessons, anyway?”