On April 16, 2009, journalist and researcher Nick Turse accepted a Special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction from The Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation. You can watch his remarks in the video below.
Nick Turse
2009 recipient of a special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction
Nick Turse has been awarded a special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction, which was created this year to honor him for his investigative reportage on the systemic atrocities of the Vietnam War.
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.”
A historian, journalist and the associate editor and research director of TomDispatch.com (a project of The Nation Institute), Turse is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Mother Jones, The Village Voice and other publications. Turse is currently at work on his next book, Kill Anything That Moves, a history of U.S. atrocities in Indochina during the Vietnam War.
Turse has a Ph.D in Sociomedical Sciences from Columbia University.
Text of the speech given by Nick Turse in 2009
Thank you so much, Randy. I can barely express my gratitude in accepting the special Ridenhour Prize from the Fertel Foundation and the Fund for Constitutional Government.
For someone who has spent the better part of the last decade investigating U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, there can be no greater honor than to receive an award that bears the name of Ron Ridenhour. It's a profoundly humbling experience.
So many people in so many ways helped to make this article a reality. So I'd like to recognize a few who are here and a few who are not, and in the process talk a little bit about Ron and the truth of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam.
I want to express my gratitude to Kevin Buckley for not only sharing with me his files and memories, but most of all for his tireless efforts as Saigon Bureau chief for Newsweek in reporting the story of Speedy Express and fighting the Pentagon spin machine and his own magazine's reluctance to upset the Nixon Administration in order to expose the truth of mass killings of civilians in his 1972 article "Pacification's Deadly Price".
I also want to offer my gratitude to Kevin's reporting partner, the late Alex Shimkin, an extraordinary student of the war, a dedicated journalist, who first called Kevin's attention to Speedy Express, who was killed in Vietnam shortly after the article was published.
Kevin and Alex are among a pantheon of truth tellers like Ron Ridenhour who endeavor to tell the true story of about Vietnamese suffering that the American people to this day still haven't fully grappled with.
Ron was distraught over what people took away from his exposure of the My Lai massacre. After a few years, he realized people would say: Isn't that where Lieutenant Calley went crazy and killed all those people? And Ron would say: No. He would explain that what happened at My Lai was an operation, not an aberration.
Another person who recognized the same truth and has my gratitude is someone I know only through documents as the Concerned Sergeant. He wrote a series of letters to top military commanders in which he exposed killings that added up to nothing short of, in his words, a My Lai each month for over a year.
Unlike Ron, this whistle blower kept his complaints within the Army, fearing, he wrote, that going public would get the Army in more trouble. His faith was betrayed by the Pentagon and they might have buried the story forever if not for the work of Buckley and Shimkin who traveled into the Mekong Delta to talk to Vietnamese witnesses and survivors of Speedy Express.
Last year, my wife, photo journalist Pam Turse and I did much the same, even traveling to one of the same villages that Kevin and Alex visited almost 40 years ago. Pam's work ensures that Asian witnesses will not be nameless faceless victims who are lost to history. I cannot thank her enough for reporting with me from Vietnam and supporting my work in every possible way for years on end.
I want to also take this opportunity to thank the Vietnamese in the Mekong Delta and elsewhere who opened their homes and lives to us. These men and women shared their deepest traumas and most painful memories, without apparent anger, resentment or mention of recompense upon their request of so many that we tell the American people their truths.
It's increasingly difficult to tell such stories when most publications would rather pursue newer lighter fare than invest in intensive investigations of decades old war crimes. Luckily, The Nation and The Nation Institute aren't afraid of historical investigative journalism. And they understand that just because a government conspiracy lasted for decades doesn't mean that silence should reign forever.
I especially want to thank Katrina vanden Heuvel for sending my proposal to Roane Carey, who supported my article from the outset and provided expert guidance. I want to thank Esther Kaplan at The Nation Institute. Like Roane, Esther was a superb advocate from the outset. Her support made it possible for me to track down key additional witnesses and her editing skills were invaluable.
So many others, including my friend and mentor Tom Engelhardt, and my Columbia University dissertation advisor, David Rosner, who first enabled me to begin this effort aided this project. To them I can only offer my gratitude. To the Fertel Foundation and the Fund for Constitutional Government, the Ridenhour judges and all of you, I just want to thank you again for this great honor. Thank you.
