Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead

Book excerpt: “[A] vivid, gripping account of inhuman cruelty, laced with rays of hope and courage and dignity amidst the horrors” (Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hopes and Prospects). A dramatic true story of men and women trapped in the grip of war, Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead is modern crisis reporting at its best. For six weeks in the spring of 2015, award-winning journalist Nick Turse traveled on foot, as well as by car, SUV, and helicopter, around war-torn South Sudan, talking to military officers and child soldiers, United Nations officials and humanitarian workers, civil servants, civil society activists, and internally displaced persons—people whose lives had been blown apart by a ceaseless conflict there. In a fast-paced and emotionally powerful fashion, Turse reveals the harsh reality of modern warfare in the developing world and the ways people manage to survive the unimaginable. Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead isn’t about combat. It’s about the human condition, about ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and about death, life, and the crimes of war in the newest nation on earth. “The average journalist follows the herd of others. A bold one like Nick Turse goes to where the herd isn’t. His searing reporting in this book brings alive the suffering of a country that the United States, midwife to its birth, has largely forgotten.” ―Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost and Mirror at Midnight