authorphoto Who Is Nick Turse?
Nick Turse is an award-winning journalist, historian, essayist, and the associate editor of the Nation Institute’s Tomdispatch.com.  He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2008) and has written for 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, among other print and on-line publications.  His articles have also appeared in such newspapers as 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. 

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.  He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for work on Kill Anything That Moves.

Turse is also the author of an exposé of a 1970 massacre by U.S. Marines and 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.

Starting in the fall of 2009, Turse will be a fellow at 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 wrote a 1,000-page dissertation on the topic, and 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 as well as to fellow scholars and professionals in the fields of international humanitarian law and the laws of armed conflict, including Cornell University’s Workshop on “Human Rights at War: A Comparative Study of the Effectiveness of the Geneva Conventions.”  

Additionally, Turse has authored works on a range of topics, including how the global economic crisis has affected U.S. food banks, the militarization of MySpace.com, and human experimentation in Hawaii during the late nineteenth century.   He has reported from locales as diverse as a military “urban operations” conference in Washington, D.C. and rural hamlets in Southeast Asia. 

Turse’s work on “The Rise of the Homeland Security State” received special mention in Bill Moyers’ 2004 “Journalism Under Fire” speech at the annual conference of The Society of Professional Journalists (as well as his book Moyers on America), while Norman Solomon of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) praised his coverage of the U.S. air war in Iraq at TomDispatch.com for “pull[ing] no punches” and for “shin[ing] a bright light on fundamental aspects of a U.S. air war that has seldom seen any light of day in big American media outlets.” 

Note from Nick Turse to right-wing bloggers: Far too many of you are obsessed with answering “Who is Nick Turse?”  Often, you 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.