Nick Turse is a journalist, historian and author. He is the editor of The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Verso, 2010), which brings together leading analysts from across the political spectrum, and the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008).[1]
Turse is the associate editor of the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com and his writing frequently appears on that website. His writing has also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Adbusters, GOOD magazine, Le Monde Diplomatique (English- and German- language), In These Times, Mother Jones and The Village Voice, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Contra-Costa Times, The Fort Worth Star Telegram, The Hartford Courant, The Indianapolis Star, The Knoxville News Sentinel, The Salt Lake Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Tampa Tribune, among others.
Turse was the recipient of a Ridenhour Prize at the National Press Club in April 2009 for his years-long investigation of mass civilian slaughter 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 also exposed a Pentagon-level cover-up of these crimes that was abetted by a major news magazine. In 2009, he also received a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College for the same article.[2]
The Ridenhour Prize foundation said of Turse:
With his Nation article “A My Lai a Month”, Nick Turse proved Ron Ridenhour’s long-held conviction that the massacre at My Lai was not an aberration. Turse uncovered declassified documents that disclosed an Army investigation of “Speedy Express,” an offensive in the Mekong Delta—mere months after My Lai—in which the Ninth Infantry Division claimed an enemy body count of 10,899 while only capturing 748 weapons. In his article, Turse writes, “The investigation paints a disturbing picture of civilian slaughter on a scale that indeed dwarfs My Lai, and of a cover-up at the Army’s highest levels.”[3]
Turse has previously been a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study and New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He has a Ph.D in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University and is an internationally-recognized authority on U.S. war crimes during the Vietnam War. He has provided expert commentary on U.S. atrocities in Southeast Asia for such publications as The New York Times and U.S. News and World Report.[4]
Turse is currently at work on Kill Anything That Moves, a history of U.S. atrocities during the Vietnam War for Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.[5] He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on Kill Anything That Moves.[6]
Turse is also the author of an exposé of a 1970 massacre by U.S. Marines. In an article for In These Times magazine, Turse wrote:
In another of the central provinces, Quang Nam, we headed to Le Bac hamlet. I had long suspected something very dark happened there.
During the war, the Liberation Press Agency — the communications wing of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) — reported that U.S. Marines “shot 38 persons[,] mostly women and children[,] in Le Bac hamlet, Quang Nam Province on April 15, 1970.” Only weeks before those alleged killings, Marines had carried out a massacre in a neighboring district.
In his book, Son Thang: An American War Crime, Gary Solis, a war crimes scholar and veteran of the war, laid bare the details of that massacre — of 16 unarmed women and children at Son Thang — by a Marine Corps “killer team.”
Only after a group of Vietnamese complained about the deaths to Marines based near the hamlet did the Corps launch an investigation into the killing of civilians in Le Bac. The Marines eventually claimed, according to press reports at the time, that an unspecified number of civilians had indeed been killed, but that it could not be ascertained if they were killed by the Marines.
An official Marine Corps history, produced later, states that “Company B, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines engaged enemy troops near Le Bac (2) … The company called in jets and Cobra gunships; a dozen enemy troops died in the action, but so did about 30 people in the nearby hamlet.”
In 1971, during the Paris Peace talks, the PRG gave U.S. Rep. Robert L. Leggett (D-Calif.) an awkwardly translated copy of the Vietnamese document that provided information for the Liberation Press Agency broadcast. He, in turn, sent a copy to the Pentagon, which I found in the Army’s files. The typo-ridden source mentioned a survivor — a young girl named Hoang Thi Ai. Locals informed us that Hoang was not a hamlet surname, but pointed us to a woman named Ho Thi A who lived in Le Bac as a child.
She said she remembered Marines entering the hamlet on March 10, 1970, on the lunar calendar — the equivalent of the solar date of April 15, 1970. She recalled civilian deaths, too — but not the way the Marines claim they occurred. Just 8 years old at the time, Ho Thi A said she was playing in her home that morning when the aerial assault began. People ran for their bomb shelters and waited out the attack. When the bombardment ended, U.S. troops entered the hamlet on foot and people scrambled from their bunkers, fearing the Americans would throw grenades inside.
“There were three of us standing at the entrance to the bunker: me and two old women — my neighbor and my grandmother,” Ho Thi A said. One of the American troops was standing only 15 feet away when he fired. “Miss Chay was shot dead,” she said. “Then he shot my grandmother. She died too. At that moment I was so scared and ran into the bunker and hid.”
The U.S. troops threw grenades into her bunker, but because of its shape, she was shielded from the blast. Later, after the Americans left the area, she emerged just as local guerrillas, who had been hiding nearby, also appeared. She followed them to the front part of the hamlet. What they found was a scene of horror.
Lying at the entrance of a bunker were nine bodies — two families — who had been shot. All were women and children. All were civilians. In total, Ho Thi A said, Marines killed 15 people that day.[7]
Turse is the co-author of a major series of articles for the Los Angeles Times on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam that 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.
The War Crimes Files used to write the story are "part of a once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known."
They detail 320 alleged incidents that were substantiated by Army investigators — not including the most notorious U.S. atrocity, the 1968 My Lai massacre. They are not a complete accounting of Vietnam war crimes, but the archive remains the largest such collection to surface to date.
The records describe recurrent attacks on ordinary Vietnamese civilians — families in their homes, farmers in rice paddies, teenagers out fishing. Hundreds of American soldiers, in interviews with Army investigators and letters to commanders, described fellow troops who murdered, raped and tortured with impunity.
The investigation of the records found that these abuses were not confined to a few rogue units. They were uncovered in every Army division that operated in Vietnam.[8]
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."[9]
The operation caused controversy when in 1972 Kevin Buckley, writing for Newsweek in the article "Pacification's Deadly Price", questioned the spectacular ratio of U.S. dead to claimed NLF (Vietcong) as well the low number of weapons recovered, and suggested that perhaps over 5,000 were innocent civilians (quoting an U.S. official).[10]
In 2008, Turse published an article in The Nation magazine that revealed an American whistle-blower had contacted the Pentagon to offer evidence of a mass killing of civilians even larger than Buckley's source indicated.
In a letter to Army Chief of Staff General William Westmoreland, the whistle-blower wrote not of a handful of massacres but of official command policies that had led to the killings of thousands of innocents:
Sir, the 9th Division did nothing to prevent the killing, and by pushing the body the count so hard, we were "told" to kill many times more Vietnamese than at My Lay, and very few per cents of them did we know were enemy.... In case you don't think I mean lots of Vietnamese got killed this way, I can give you some idea how many. A batalion would kill maybe 15 to 20 a day. With 4 batalions in the Brigade that would be maybe 40 to 50 a day or 1200 to 1500 a month, easy. (One batalion claimed almost 1000 body counts one month!) If I am only 10% right, and believe me its lots more, then I am trying to tell you about 120-150 murders, or a My Lay each month for over a year.... The snipers would get 5 or 10 a day, and I think all 4 batalions had sniper teams. Thats 20 a day or at least 600 each month. Again, if I am 10% right then the snipers [alone] were a My Lay every other month.
Turse revealed that in this letter, and two more sent the following year to other high-ranking generals, the Army informant reported that artilery, airstrikes and helicopter gunships had wreaked havoc on populated areas. All it would take, he said, were a few shots from a village or a nearby tree line and troops would "always call for artilery or gunships or airstrikes." "Lots of times," he wrote, "it would get called for even if we didn't get shot at. And then when [we would] get in the village there would be women and kids crying and sometimes hurt or dead." The attacks were excused, he said, because the areas were deemed free-fire zones.
He continued: "None [of] us wanted to get blown away," he wrote, "but it wasn't right to use...civilians to set the mines off." He also explained the pitifully low weapons ratio:
compare them [body count records] with the number of weapons we got. Not the cashays [caches], or the weapons we found after a big fight with the hard cores, but a dead VC with a weapon. The General just had to know about the wrong killings over the weapons. If we reported weapons we had to turn them in, so we would say that the weapons was destroyed by bullets or dropped in a canal or pad[d]y. In the dry season, before the moonsons, there was places where lots of the canals was dry and all the pad[dies] were. The General must have known this was made up.[11]
Turse revealed that the U.S. military had buried this evidence for decades and lied about it when contacted by Buckley.[12]
In a subsequent article, Turse revealed that the U.S. went further and investigated Operation Speedy Express themselves and also found evidence of mass killing greater than that suggested by Buckley, vindicating the Newsweek reporter.[13]
Turse won a Ridenhour Prize and a a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College for his work on exposing the mass killing of Vietnamese civilians during Speedy Express.
In the winter 2000 issue of the academic journal 49th parallel Nicholas Turse, then a doctoral candidate at Columbia University wrote of the Columbine High School massacre: "I propose that kids killing kids may be the radical protest of our age, and that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold may be the Mark Rudd and Abbie Hoffman figures of today." Turse wrote: 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.[14]
Turse has disavowed the sentiments expressed in that article and publicly responded to those who paint his more than a decade-old article as representative of his thinking or his work as a whole, writing that some critics “ignore the scores of articles I’ve written in recent years and seize on the first (and worst) thing I ever published -- an ill-conceived, poorly written piece on violent radical youth that fails to accurately reflect my beliefs today. I’d disown it if I could, but I can’t, so if that’s the best you’ve got, have at it.”[15]
In a 2011 expose, Turse interviewed U.S. congressmen who fought against the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" on behalf of 9/11 families and like-minded Americans but supported the training of Saudi pilots in the United States despite the fact that 9/11 families were against it.
"I do not believe the construction of this Islamic centre so near to Ground Zero is proper," said Senator Mike Crapo. "This construction proposal is proving highly divisive to Americans across the political spectrum who are still seeking to recover fully from the emotional, economic and social scars caused by the terrorist attacks."
Peter Gadiel, whose son was killed in the World Trade Center attacks told Turse: "Americans will die and the people in Washington don't give a damn."
But Crapo touted the economic benefits to Turse. "Saudis will have to build and pay for their own infrastructure and housing that will enhance the bases' [sic] capacity for many years," he wrote. "In addition, [Royal Saudi Air Force] members and their families personal spending will boost the local community."[16]
Turse has written many article 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.[17] 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.[18]
In 2011, Turse broke a story detailing the whereabouts of more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world.[19]
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.[20]
Turse's interview with a Special Operations spokesman revealed that the true number was 120 countries. “We do a lot of traveling -- a lot more than Afghanistan or Iraq,” the spokesman told Turse. Turse would go on to note that this revelation mean that the U.S. military's most elite warriors, including Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets, were active in "about 60% of the world’s nations" and this was "far larger than previously acknowledged."
“We’re obviously going to have some places where it’s not advantageous for us to list where we’re at,” the source told Turse. “Not all host nations want it known, for whatever reasons they have -- it may be internal, it may be regional.”[21]
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.[22]
Turse investigated U.S. military drone bases around the world and found there were more than 60 of them.[23]