Good Wars, Bad Wars: A Special Conversation

On Tuesday, the Dart Center hosted a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Dale Maharidge and Ridenhour Prize-winning journalist Nick Turse about their acclaimed new books which revise our understanding of two very different wars. In Bringing Mulligan Home, Columbia Journalism professor Dale Maharidge goes in search of the ghosts that haunted his WWII veteran father. In Kill Everything that Moves, journalist and historian Nick Turse uncovers secret Pentagon records and tracks down survivors and perpetrators, revealing the brutal consequences of America’s military policy in Vietnam.

BRINGING MULLIGAN HOME

Dale Maharidge has been teaching at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University since 2001. Before that he was a visiting professor at Stanford University for ten years and spent fifteen years as a newspaperman. Several of his books are illustrated with the work of photographer Michael S. Williamson. His first book, Journey to Nowhere: The Saga of the New Underclass (1985), later inspired Bruce Springsteen to write two songs; it was reissued in 1996 with an introduction by Springsteen. His second book, And Their Children After Them, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1990.

The video below, created by Mahardige for the upcoming "Good Wars, Bad Wars" evening, features two men who served in his father's company:

KILL EVERYTHING THAT MOVES

Nick Turse is the author of The Complex and most recently Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. He is  managing editor for TomDispatch.com, and a fellow at the Nation Institute. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Nation, among other publications. Turse's investigations of American war crimes in Vietnam have gained him a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at Harvard University's Radcliffe Instittue for Advanced Study. He lives near New York City.

 

Below is a portrait from Kill Everything That moves of Bui Xich, who lost two sons when artillery shelling destroyed his family’s bomb shelter in Thanh Son hamlet.

Tam Turse 

The conversation was moderated by Bruce Shapiro, Executive Director, Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.