Written with a clear bias, which given the extent of atrocity and human rights violations that occurred, is not exactly unforeseen. It is a truly robotic person who isn't the slightest bit disgusted by reading Turse's recitation of what happened at My Lai, (one of the most well-known operations of the Vietnam War) or really, any tiny hamlet US troops were told to "search-and-destroy". All that death and destruction rained down on an undeserving people, culminating in a ultimately failed venture of "democracy".

"The United States never wanted to admit that the conflict might be a true "people's war," and that Vietnamese were bound to the revolution because they saw it as a fight for their families, their land, and their country."

I was constantly moved to put this down, disturbed yet unsurprised by the machinations of my government. They used racism and general xenophobia as a way to make a proving ground for new US military technologies, all while pretending to fight the good fight against communism. This conflict ruined the lives of the (young, so incredibly young) soldiers they brainwashed to this nightmare and the thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese civilians who had the audacity to exist where the US wanted to firebomb/bulldoze/defoliate. None of this is news, really, but I can see echoes of it in the way OEF and OIF is presented by our media; Turse makes oblique reference to it in the very end: "Never having come to grips with what our country actually did during the war, we see its ghost arise anew with each successive military intervention. Was Iraq the new Vietnam?"

This book was an experience I wish had never happened. As Sherman once said, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it." But it did happen and we should at least do the victims of this cruelty the favor of remembering it fully, without mitigation.