Nick Turse

Nick Turse
Born	1975
Alma mater	Columbia University
Occupation(s)	Journalist, historian and author

Nick Turse (born 1975) is an internationally known, award-winning investigative journalist, historian, and author. He is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and a fellow at the Nation Institute.

Education

Turse received a Ph.D. in Sociomedical Sciences from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. As a graduate student, Turse was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in 2000-2001 and at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He also worked as an associate research scientist at the Mailman School’s Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health.

In 2001, while researching in the U.S. National Archives, he discovered records of a Pentagon task force called the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group that was formed as a result of the My Lai massacre. These records became the focus of his Ph.D dissertation, Kill Anything That Moves: United States War Crimes and Atrocities in Vietnam, 1965-1973.

Career

Articles by Turse have appeared in many newspapers, including the The Los Angeles Times. He has also written for the British Broadcasting Corporation. He is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and author of Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013), The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (2010), and The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008).

Awards

In April 2009, Turse became the recipient of a Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction for his years-long investigation of civilian killing by U.S. troops in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, in 1968-1969, during Operation Speedy Express. In his article for The Nation, “A My Lai a Month”, he additionally exposed a Pentagon-level cover-up of these crimes that was abetted by a major news organization. In 2009, he also received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College. He was also awarded grants and fellowships from Guggenheim, Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War.

Writing

Kill Anything That Moves

In 2013, Henry Holt published Turse's Kill Anything That Moves, a history of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War. While researching the book, Turse uncovered new archival materials and interviewed eyewitnesses in the U.S. and Vietnam, including 100 American Vietnam War veterans. He did not receive much help from the Pentagon during ten years of his research, however, most of the veterans were cooperative.

Some reviewers considered the main argument of the book that slaughter of civilians in Vietnam was a routine part of American war policy, which one described as provocative. Other reviewers variously described the book as "indispensable," "harrowing," "powerful," and "one of the most important books ever written about the Vietnam conflict."

Writing in Proceedings magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Naval Institute, Richard Ruth, a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy wrote: "Turse argues that the enormous toll of civilian victims was neither accidental nor unpredictable. The Pentagon's demand for quantifiable corpses surged down the chain of command, through all branches of the U.S. military, until many units had become fixated on producing indiscriminate casualties that they could claim as enemy kills. Under this system, killing was incentivized: those with high body counts not only got promoted more quickly, their units were treated better and enjoyed greater safety than those who missed their 'killing quotas'... The incentivizing of death encouraged some U.S. soldiers to rack up thousands of kills over multiple tours. In a telling detail repeated in many of the case studies examined, the alleged Viet Cong eliminated by these American super killers often had no weapons on them when they were gunned down. Turse makes it clear that such high numbers would have been all but impossible without the inclusion of innocent bystanders."

In the introduction Turse wrote,

But the stunning scale of civilian suffering in Vietnam is far beyond anything that can be explained as merely the work of some "bad apples," however numerous. Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, imprisonment without due process - such occurrences were virtually a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American presence in Vietnam.

The book became a New York Times bestseller, and Turse was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work.

Criticism

Kill Anything That Moves has been criticized by a lone reviewer for downplaying some related aspects, for example, the scope and importance of the contribution Vietnam veterans made to the antiwar effort in the United States. Looking back in time, the U.S. antiwar movement was continuously acknowledging and repeatedly pointing to atrocities Turse claimed to have "discovered". Another criticism is that his book focuses on crimes done by individual U.S. soldiers, while ignoring the larger narrative that the Vietnam war itself was viewed by the antiwar movement as one gigantic atrocity that eventually claimed many lives. Namely, the saturation bombing of North Vietnam ordered by both Presidents Johnson and Nixon reportedly killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians according to best estimates, not to mention free-fire zones, artillery barrage, air strikes, destruction of food sources and village relocation in South Vietnam, among other, caused high noncombatant casualty rate. According to Turse, in 1972 a U.S. Senate subcommittee on refuges and war victims made public a figure of 1.4 million civilian casualties, including 415,000 dead.

Los Angeles Times series

Turse is the co-author of a major series of articles for the Los Angeles Times which was a finalist for the 2006 Tom Renner Award for Outstanding Crime Reporting from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. This investigation, based on thousands of declassified records from the Army chief of staff's office, scores of interviews and a trip to Vietnam, found that U.S. troops reported more than 800 war crimes in Vietnam, yet many were publicly discredited even as the military uncovered evidence that they were telling the truth.

One article from the series, entitled "A Tortured Past", exposed many months of torture carried out by the U.S. 172nd Military Intelligence unit of the 173rd Airborne Division. Members of that unit used water-boarding and electrical torture on Vietnamese victims. Turse wrote, "Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time." Another article exposed the U.S. massacre of close to 19 Vietnamese women and children by members of B Company. Military investigators determined that many men could be court martialed but official records give no indication that action was taken against any of them.

Operation Speedy Express exposé

From December 1, 1968 through May 31, 1969, the U.S. 9th Infantry Division and allied units carried out Operation Speedy Express in Vietnam's Mekong Delta. The U.S. military claimed 10,889 enemy dead, with only 40 soldiers killed in this operation, but only 748 weapons were recovered (a ratio of enemy killed to weapons seized of 14.6:1). The U.S. Army after-action report attributed this to the fact the high percentage of kills made during night hours (estimated at 40%), and by air cavalry and other aerial units, as well as admitting that "many of the guerilla units were not armed with weapons". The commander of the 9th Division, Julian Ewell, was allegedly known to be obsessed with body counts and favorable kill ratios and said "the hearts and minds approach can be overdone ... in the delta the only way to overcome VC control and terror is with brute force applied against the VC."

One whistleblowing veteran who served in that operation told the Army’s top generals that Ewell’s use of heavy firepower on the countryside resulted in a “My Lai each month." That veteran’s allegations were kept secret and a nascent inquiry into them was suppressed by the Pentagon.

A later Newsweek investigation would conclude that as many as 5,000 civilians were killed during Speedy Express. A secret internal military report, commissioned after Newsweek published its account, suggested that the magazine had offered a low-end estimate. The document, kept secret and then buried for decades, concluded:

“While there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000).”

During the war, efforts by U.S. senators to look into Speedy Express were thwarted by Pentagon officials.

Secret Special Forces Missions

Turse became the first journalist to reveal the true number of U.S. special forces operations in foreign countries in a 2011 article at TomDispatch.com. In 2010, the Washington Post claimed that that U.S. Special Operations forces were deployed in 75 countries, up from 60 at the end of the Bush presidency.

U.S. Bases Overseas

Turse has written many articles that investigate aspect of what Chalmers Johnson called the U.S. "empire of bases". In 2010, Turse was the first journalist to reveal there were more than 700 military bases in Afghanistan. In a separate article Turse also revealed the number of U.S. bases by their size and the number of troops based on their premises.

U.S. arms sales in the Middle East

Turse has written extensively on the U.S. arms trade in the Middle East, including investigations of U.S. military-brokered arms sales to Yemen and Bahrain.

Robot Drones

Turse investigated U.S. military drone bases around the world and found there were more than 60 of them.

Columbine High School Massacre as "Revolutionary Task"

In the winter 2000 issue of the academic journal 49th parallel, Turse wrote of the Columbine High School massacre: "Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold may be the Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman figures of today".

Who would not concede that terrorizing the American machine, at the very site where it exerts its most powerful influence, is a truly revolutionary task? To be inarticulate about your goals, even to not understand them, does not negate their existence. Approve or disapprove of their methods, vilify them as miscreants, but don’t dare disregard these modern radicals as anything less than the latest incarnation of disaffected insurgents waging the ongoing American revolution.

Historian David Farber of Temple University said Turse's description was "ludicrous." He wrote, "It only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any rage against society can be considered radical."

Works

Books

• Turse, Nick. Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co, 2013.
• Turse, Nick. The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare. Chicago, Ill: Haymarket Books, 2012.
• Turse, Nick, and Tom Engelhardt. Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050. Dispatch Books, 2012.
• Turse, Nick. The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan. London: Verso, 2010.
• Turse, Nick. The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008.

Articles

• Turse, Nick. (2010). Books & the Art: The Pentagon Book Club. The Nation, 290, no. 19: 25.
• Turse, N. (January 1, 2009). Exchange - Vietnam Revisited, Part Two. The Nation, 288, no. 2: 2.
• Turse, Nick. (2008). "A My Lai a Month: New Evidence of Civilian Slaughter and Cover-Up in Vietnam". The Nation, 287, no. 18: 13.
• Turse, Nick. (2007). "The Secret Air War In Iraq: The United States Bombs, Civilians Die". The Nation, 284, no. 23: 14.
• Turse, Nick. An Index to The Nation publications.

See also

• Vietnam War
• Vietnam War casualties
• American war crimes
• United States perpetrated crimes
• List of massacres in Vietnam
• Phoenix Program
• Operation Wheeler/Wallowa
• Operation Speedy Express
• Pentagon Papers

External links

• Nick Turse Official website. Accessed August 2, 2013.
• Interview with Turse by Dave Davies. NPR Fresh Air, January 28, 2012. Accessed February 8, 2013.
• Radio interview with Nick Turse by Amy Grunder, first aired live on Sounds of Dissent, WZBC 90.3 FM Boston, January 12, 2013. Accessed January 14, 2012 on Internet Archives.
• Nick Turse accepting Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, 2009 YouTube. Accessed January 14, 2012.