The best way I can think to describe this book is "unbalanced." Turse's project is obvious from the get-go, which isn't a bad thing, but his argument isn't particularly strong and sometimes fades into the background so it feels like he's just describing atrocity for the sake of the shock value. (Moreover, I don't think anyone who has a working knowledge of the Vietnam War is going to be all that shocked by any of what he's reporting.) The bigger problem is his failure to engage or even acknowledge counterarguments. On a slightly pettier note, his prose isn't doing him any favors. It verges on purple in a lot of places and he can't seem to resist the urge to add an ominous coda along the lines of "There were more horrors to come" at the end of every section, which does the opposite of what it's supposed to by undermining the impact of whatever went before it. It reads more like propaganda than good journalism, which is ironic considering his argument that that was how the establishment typically discredited veterans' accounts of atrocity throughout the war. He's clearly done a lot of research and tried to draw attention to some things which have been, yes, disgracefully disregarded, but that's not quite enough to make a persuasive book.