How to Tell War Stories

Here’s how I met Nick Turse.  I have a friend who’s a professor of public health and one day in 2003 he asked me if I’d be willing to spend a little time with one of his graduate students who was doing some curious work on the Vietnam War. ...

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‘They All Looked Alike’

Review: Kill Anything That Moves by Nick Turse Metropolitan Books, 2013, 320 pages On August 18, 1980, Republican candidate for president Ronald Reagan addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In his speech, Reagan identified a disease...

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Nick Turse: Exhuming Vietnam

Conventional wisdom insists that war crimes and atrocities by U.S forces in Vietnam were isolated, committed by a "few bad apples" and "rogue units." In fact, for 40 years the American public has been collectively assuring the veterans of that war...

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Memory Failure at the Pentagon

Call it a mantra, a litany, or a to-don’t list, but the drip, drip, drip of Afghan disaster and the gross-out acts accompanying it have already resulted in one of those classic fill-you-in paragraphs that reporters hang onto for whenever the next little catastrophe...

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The Afghan Syndrome

Take off your hat. Taps is playing. Almost four decades late, the Vietnam War and its postwar spawn, the Vietnam Syndrome, are finally heading for their American grave. It may qualify as the longest attempted burial in history. Last words — both eulogies and curses —...

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Light at End of Afghan Tunnel Recedes

“Now we can see [success in Vietnam] clearly, like the light at the end of a tunnel.” - Gen. Henri Navarre, commander French forces in Vietnam, May 20, 1953 “A new phase is starting … we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view … there is...

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Lemmingly, We Roll Along

When soldiers die, the politicians who sent them to their deaths typically use euphemisms and circumlocutions — like “lost,” “fallen,” or “ultimate sacrifice.” On one level, the avoidance of blunt language can be seen as a sign of respect, but on another, it is just...

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Like Nixon, Obama Will Waste Lives to Get Reelected

No one needs to tell the public that politicians are slick — and the ones who get elected are the oiliest. President Obama, in a recent speech announcing the phased withdraw of 33,000 U.S. surge forces from Afghanistan by September 2012, told the country that the...

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