The real Vietnam War

Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse is a new book, apparently carefully documented, that reveals that atrocities against civilians during the Vietnam War was much more common than most people realize.

Here is a review in the Washington Post, and here is the "Fresh Air" interview, which I heard on the radio Monday.

The "Fresh Air" site includes a downloadable MP3 and also a transcript.

After Turse stumbled across records in the National Archives that documented many atrocities, his advisor wrote him a check and advised him to make copies of the records right away. Excerpt from the transcript:


So within 24 hours I was in my car and I drove down to the National Archives, and I put every cent that he gave me into copying. And I would copy from the moment the archives opened in the morning until they kicked me out at night, and then because I put all the money into copying, I went and slept in my car in the archives parking lot.

And I did this for a couple of nights, and by the end of it I had the whole collection, and you know, I thought my advisor was being a little paranoid, but you know, it turned out to be excellent advice because sometime after I published my first article on this, the records were pulled from the archive shelves, and they haven't been on the public shelves since.