Healing Combat Trauma

The Washington Post Wins Pulitzer Prize for Its "Walter Reed and Beyond" Series

On Tuesday it was announced that the Washington Post won a total of six Pulitzer Prizes this year, including one for its outstanding series on Walter Reed, by the reporting team of Dana Priest, Anne Hull, and photographer Michel du Cille.  The Post series won the Pulitzer's public service medal "for documenting in vivid detail the substandard treatment for wounded soliders and poor living conditions marked by cockroaches and mold."  The series, wrote the Post, "sparked a political uproar, prompting Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to fire Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, and a presidential commission later recommended numerous changes."  The link to the story about the Post winning the six Pulitzers is here.  The link to the Post's complete series of stories and photography called "Walter Reed and Beyond" is here.  Well-deserved congratulations to journalists Priest and Hull, and photographer du Cille, on a groundbreaking and vitally necessary series.

Journalism As the First Draft of History

"Journalism is the first rough draft of history" -- attributed to Phil Graham, publisher and co-owner of the Washington Post.

I read this quote for the first time today and just loved it.  In the context of all the good journalism that's come out lately, particularly from the Washington Post and the Boston Globe and NPR, but also CNN and CBS and others, documenting the plight of returning combat veterans and the care they receive (or don't), it's wonderful to know that ultimately what the journalists are doing is writing the first rough draft of history.  In the case of the recent series in the Boston Globe by Charles Sennott, the Globe gave Sennott a year to cover the return of a Marine battalion, the 1/25th, from Iraq -- and really absorb the adjustment experiences of the group, in order to write a full, comprehensive and compelling series of stories about them. 

In the future, we're going to be able to look back on this time as when individuals who maybe didn't have any direct relationship to a returning combat veteran nonetheless got educated, informed, or even become activists for the cause of veterans issues, particularly as they concern aftercare for combat-related injuries, both bodily and psychological.  Wouldn't that be a wonderful turn of events?   Making history is better than reading about it, certainly, but interestingly enough, journalists get to write its first draft.  We owe them a certain amount of thanks for that effort, especially when previously dark areas like veterans' care have the blinding light of public criticism finally shone upon them.  Not everyone looks up to notice how often it was journalists holding the spotlight.

Reporters Help Move a Nation to Care, Too

If you were in Harvard Square tonight, you could have gone to hear Dana L. Priest, one half of the outstanding duo of Washington Post reporters, who, along with Anne Hull, have been contributing so many excellent stories on the health care and combat veterans at Walter Reed and beyond.  Until I read the blurb from Harvard's Institute of Politics ("IOP"), part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where Priest is speaking, I didn't realize that she had won a Pulitzer Prize last year for her reportage.  Belated congratulations for some truly excellent work.  Here's Priest's bio, according to the IOP:

Dana Priest, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for beat reporting, covers the intelligence community for The Washington Post. She spent the previous eight years writing about the U.S. military. Her book, "The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military," was published in Feb. 2003. She has worked at the Post for 15 years, where she was the Post's Pentagon correspondent for six years and then wrote exclusively about the military as an investigative reporter.

(Sources: NY Times, PBS, the Washington Post)

And here's a list of articles she's written recently, from the Washington Post.  Also a list of Anne Hull's  articles, which frequently intersect.  Because reporters don't often get treated like rock stars, no matter how many Pulitzers they get, it's cool that Priest is going to be at the IOP.  Her reportage is actually moving society forward on the topic of veterans right to health care.  More power to her, and her reporting team, for the great work they've been doing, sensitizing us to things we wouldn't ordinarily get to see, unless we were intimately involved.  That's part of the power of great reporting.  In the immortal words of the title to Ilona Meagher's book on the subject, it's part of "Moving a Nation to Care."

(Military readers and others often pooh-pooh or villify the "mainstream media" for missing all the good stories, in favor of preferring to read bloggers, who often have no journalism background whatsoever.  However, in defense of the mainstream media -- or at least good journalists like Priest and Hull -- check out what happened AFTER their recent article was published in the Washington Post, one we blogged about here.  The subject of the article, Troy Turner, suddenly went to the head of the line, in a pretty impressive fashion:

In addition to granting Turner a coveted spot in a residential treatment program at the Martinsburg VA Medical Center, the department is increasing his disability rating from 70 percent to 100 percent, according to a VA spokeswoman, raising his monthly check from $1,352 to $2,781. The new rating also means that Turner's wife, Michelle, and their two children are eligible for medical insurance and educational benefits.

Why did this happen?  NOT because Turner was strangely more deserving than other vets, not because the VA had been sitting around with nothing to do and the Post story galvanized them into action, but because the media spotlight made the situation uncomfortable, touched hearts, and spurred action and change.  Would that every returning veteran have the same opportunity.  We really do have reporters like Priest and Hull to thank for that.  Soapbox over.  Read the new article, though, it's great.)

Empathy versus Sympathy

It was interesting to read in Kimberly Dozier's story on NPR recently, one comment that she made about empathy versus sympathy.  We've talked about that before on this blog, somewhat obliquely; and it was nice to hear the same sentiment expressed by another.  Dozier, you'll remember, is the CBS news reporter who was seriously injured in a car bomb explosion in Iraq.  She recently published an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, simply entitled, "War's Wounds Need More Study," a topic she could speak about from intimate experience.  In the question and answer session that followed, here's one interesting snippet of what she had to say::

On a personal note, I hate sympathy, thanks, and so do the injured troops I've met. Makes my stomach turn. Empathy is welcome, however, and appropriate for anyone injured in that conflict, whatever any of us think about ...it....

(Click here to read the NPR story; or listen to the audio file.)

What is it about those two words that makes them so different?  Language arts teachers would probably say it has something to do with the difference between connotative and denotative meaning.  What the words literally mean is one thing -- denotative -- but it's the accretion of context that's changed them in our ears, so that when we hear them, we hear something different - perhaps the difference between compassion and pity?  "Sympathy" is basically, "I feel sorry for you," emphasis on "I" (the 'me').  Empathy has come to mean, "I'm sorry with you," emphasis on "you" (the 'other').  There really is a difference.  Some say, as Dozier's comment underscores, that it's a difference you can actually feel.

"Sh*t, Meet Fan"

Independent "journalist" Jay Shaft has been passionately pursuing a cause of his own recently, sharing the trials and tribulations of troops who apparently got quite a bit more than they bargained for, when they signed up to go to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Shaft, who paints himself as a counter-culture revolutionary with little obvious background in conventional journalism, nevertheless claims to have interviewed military members with bad attitudes about the war, extensively, and shares their letters in some of his writings. (The article in question is "Letters from Iraq, Part I.")  It's tempting to apply the expression, "like watching a train wreck," to the letters he produces.  They are written by people on the verge -- and sometimes seemingly past -- full emotional collapse.  They don't want to be in war, they're fully traumatized by what they've seen and done, and they feel like no one is listening to their pain.  Shaft is.  (Can that be his real name, or is this a bad sixties reference?  Can you dig it?!)  And Shaft is equally hell-bent, and more power to him, on making sure those voices get heard.  Now, for whatever its worth, the only we became aware of Shaft's work was through a website based in New Zealand.  Maybe what he's saying is just too radical for the American media to pick up.  Not really sure.  But his compilation of outraged cries for help is highly worth reading, if only to sensitize us to what it feels like to be somebody who really doesn't want to be there, well after the fact they've figured that out, and for whom war has become true personal and psychological torture of the self.  The scary sensation in Shaft's writing is that we're encountering people with fullblown PTSD symptoms, and they're frequently still very much in the military, contemplating anything, including sadly suicide, as a way to get out.  These people are desperate, and Shaft is giving them a voice -- their own.  Not to be missed, for the sheer power of the content.  It's like listening to real-time interviews with passengers on the Titanic as they drown.  Very intense stuff.  So far Shaft's work is the most radical we've read, about how participants feel about the war when it's lost its appeal for them, to put it mildly.  It'll be interesting to see whether Shaft's work will be discredited or sought out.  In either case, he's a radical man on a radical mission -- and it'll be worth watching to see what comes of it.

Trauma Affects War Correspondents Also

The Dart Center for Journalists and Trauma, housed at the University of Washington's School of Communications in Seattle, WA, has a website and blog about trauma resources for journalists who have worked in war zones.  As you may already be aware, the war in Iraq has been a deadly assignment for many journalists already.  The link to the Dart Center's blog is here.

Another good place to read about effect of the current war on reporters worldwide (with a more international focus than that Dart's information), is the organization, Reporters without Borders, whose website is here.  They have a grisly graphic on their site of a long-lensed camera covered in blood, with the count accelerating of how many reporters have died or injured in the Iraq war so far -- 82 to date.  I realize this doesn't compare with the incredible sacrifices of the military, but journalists generally don't expect themselves to be targets in wartime, and in this war, they've been exposed to many of the same dangers and trauma as the military themselves.

For an example of how reporters following the story get caught up in the relationship with the people they've covering, even when the subjects are the military, take a look at photographer Rob Curtis' site.  He's been following a number of new Marine officers into combat for his recently-released documentary, "Class 186: The Making of a Marine Officer" (no connection with the similarly-named book by Nathaniel Fick).  One of the young officers whose career he profiled in that documentary, 2nd Lt. Almar Fitzgerald, was recently killed in Ramadi, Iraq, just a few weeks before his combat tour was up, and you can read Curtis' heartfelt, touching tribute to Fitzgerald on his blog, which also includes a video tribute to Fitzgerald.