About the Book

In February 1968, a month before the infamous massacre at My Lai, a U.S. Army unit in central Vietnam came upon a tiny hamlet where they found nineteen unarmed civilians—women, babies, young children, and an old man. The soldiers’ orders that day were to “kill anything that moves.” They herded the villagers into a clearing and opened fire. Army investigators later collected sworn statements from dozens of soldiers who described the scene in haunting detail. Yet the investigation was buried and no one was charged.

Their accounts—and those of hundreds of other Vietnam veterans who witnessed massacres, murders, rapes, and torture—are contained in an extraordinary archive secretly amassed by the army staff’s office in the 1970s and kept under wraps for most of the subsequent thirty years. Now declassified, the little-known collection represents the largest compilation of U.S. war-crime reports from the Vietnam conflict ever to surface. The files include substantiated cases involving more than 300 allegations and implicate members of every major army division that served in the war.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Deborah Nelson and military historian Nicholas Turse joined forces in 2005 to learn the truth behind the records. The War Behind Me describes their search for answers from the men accused of committing atrocities, the witnesses who reported them, and the higher-ups who covered them up.

Both a shocking exposé and an unsettling looking-glass on America’s current involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, The War Behind Me offers an unflinching look at the darkest secrets of the Vietnam War—perhaps of all wars.