Nick Turse is an award-winning journalist, historian, essayist, and the associate editor of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. 

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). 

Turse 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.

He has previously been a fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. 

Turse 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, The Washington Post and U.S. News and World Report.

Additionally, Turse has authored works on everything from drone warfare to how the global economic crisis has affected U.S. food banks. He has reported from locales as diverse as street protests in New York City to a military “urban operations” conference in Washington, D.C. to 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.” 

The late Chalmers Johnson called Turse’s The Complex “a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon’s pervasive influence in our lives,” while Patrick Coburn called The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan a “fascinating and essential guide” to understanding the war.