Hidden in Plain Sight

From catastrophic physical injuries to the invisible wounds of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, the Iraq war has exerted a heavy toll on hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. At a recent Dart Center event at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, four pioneers in reporting the human impact of the Iraq War discussed the challenges of reporting on these veterans.

From catastrophic physical injuries to the invisible wounds of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression, the Iraq war has exerted a heavy toll on hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. At a recent Dart Center event at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, four pioneers in reporting the human impact of the Iraq War discussed the challenges of reporting on these veterans.

The May 9 discussion, following presentation of the 2007 Dart Awards for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence, included Hartford Courant reporters Lisa Chedekel and Matthew Kauffman, winners of the 2007 Dart Award, Dupont Award and Broun Award; Salon.com national correspondent Mark Benjamin, the reporter who first broke the Walter Reed scandal; and photojournalist and author Nina Berman, whose images of disabled Iraq veterans gathered in the book Purple Hearts won the Press Photographers Foundation Award. The panel was moderated by Dart Center executive director Bruce Shapiro.

All four journalists described some of the methods they have used to gain the trust of their sources. Benjamin described how he begins by having all conversations with a source occur off the record:

You don’t throw the rules of journalism out the door, but you have to let the person — in order to engage with them — have a feeling that they have some control over the story. You obviously maintain control of the story, but I literally say to people “everything that we talk about is totally, totally confidential. All the documents, medical records will stay with me. I’m not going to put anything in my story, ever, unless you and I have a discussion about it.”

Once you have established that level of trust, then you can move forward. I think that’s the most important thing. It’s something you would never have to do or think about doing in other stories.

Kauffman described a similar method:

Without anyone asking, it was always: “Let’s just talk completely off the record.” And you would sort of do what you could to win their trust … and then saying — and we kept to it — nothing will ever go in the paper, no matter how much we talk, no matter how good your story, unless you’re comfortable having it in the story.

Chedekel added:

We talked to some families over time. Our interviews were not one hour. I mean, they were over a period of months. You get a little bit, and then call them back and get a little bit more. In cases where they were kind of not sure if they wanted it for publication … we’d sort of tell them: “I’m going to use this part about the drugs. I’m going to use this part, but not to that degree.”

But it is a lot of waste. You know, it’s a lot of notebooks that filled up that never got into the paper. But that’s the way it is, whether you’re on or off the record, I think.

All four journalists said that the response to their work has been largely positive. Kauffman said:

From the general public, you never know what you’re going to get when you do a big project like this and if it’s 50-50 favorable you can count yourself lucky. And we were really surprised … the response was overwhelmingly positive from every constituency, and really no more so than from the military people. That one guy named Frank who called us “low-life, communist, pinko, scum of the earth” — I just emailed him back: “Frank, thanks for your thoughts.”

In response to an audience question, Benjamin outlined his “current operating theory” on why there was a three-year gap between his initial reporting of problems with outpatient care at Walter Reed and the story being picked up by other media this spring:

What was happening, I think, is reporters were going to the Army, early in the war, saying: “We want to do a story on these soldiers coming back who are wounded.”

“Great. Come on over to Walter Reed.”

They bring them to Walter Reed. They walk them up the front gates. They take them up to Ward 57, which is the amputee ward. They bring them to the rehabilitative area — fabulous facility, excellent people doing the best work in the business. They’ve got some pre-screened soldiers in there. They know what they’re going to say: “I love this. As soon as my leg gets back on, I’m going back to my unit.” Dat dat da. Take your photos, get your pictures. Go back to the bureau, type it up.

Everyone was doing that story. And it wasn’t that that story wasn’t true. It is true. It’s just that’s a small, little part of what’s happening in this war. The whole, big mess was everywhere: Fort Knox, Fort Benning, Fort Stewart. You know, all these places. Fort Carson: disaster.

And I think what happened was people were looking at, frankly, papers like the Washington Post running these big stories showing how great Army medicine was, and then you’ve got Mark Benjamin over here going: “It’s a disaster, man. You can’t imagine how horrible it is out there!” I think a reasonable person would look at those and say: “Well, somebody’s gotta be wrong. Both these stories can’t be right. Army medicine can’t be great and horrible.”

Berman described some of the difficulties she faced trying to get her work published:

I was devastated, actually, by the response I received from several of my kind of steady freelance clients — Time, Newsweek, New York Times Magazine. When I first pitched the story in the summer of 2003, they were completely not interested.

Newsweek said: “Well, you can use our name, maybe, if you visit one soldier.” So, it was a pretty lonely road. But I did it anyway.

And then I got a small Time assignment in October 2003 — when I first met Mark, actually. I was in D.C. at Walter Reed for a day and Time did a story very much like the stories that Mark is talking about. They profiled three soldiers. Each lost their limbs. Each lost a leg in one attack in Fallujah, and it was basically this great medical care. And that was my first look at Walter Reed.

At that time I showed them all these other pictures I had already done from different places around the country, and they laid it out as a kind of seven-page spread — which  would’ve been enormous back then. And then, like what always happens, Russell Crowe had a movie and it knocked it off. And so the first to publish my work was Mother Jones, and then I funded it through sales to European publications — who were very interested in the story, but could not get access because, you know, who’s gonna talk to a French reporter in 2003?