Hidden in Plain Sight

Bruce Shapiro:  Nina … I was thinking about … how difficult it is in any kind of reporting to get the kind of trust that enables people to be so unselfconscious and to speak so close to the heart about their own experiences, and all the more so with people who have been traumatized, have been injured and sometimes betrayed by a system and so on. How did you do this? What enabled you to take these pictures?

Nina Berman: Well, I would always interview them before I photographed them. And the interviews were very open ended, and I told them that they can tell their story, they can say whatever they want. I would just ask them initially their names, how they were wounded, where they were wounded. And then the conversation just went on from there.

I think the reason why they spoke with me was because most of these soldiers had just gotten home and they wanted their stories to be remembered somehow.

I think that by just not having a particular outline for the interview allowed them to speak freely.

Shapiro: Did you have to overcome shame, the discomfort of being photographed?

Berman: I used a camera which isn’t used very often these days in journalism. It’s a Hasselblad camera. It’s a large camera. It’s clunky. It’s slow. It’s a film camera. They had never seen a camera like this. It slows everything down.

Something happens with this camera — and, I think, in the process of being photographed — where their defenses crumble. And seeing this camera, I think, gave them a sense that this was a serious endeavor.

Shapiro: Mark, you’ve had a lot of families come to you as sources and you’ve had to seek out a lot of folks. What’s that been like. You didn’t come into this as a journalist with a lot of experience talking with veterans and their families. What did you have to learn along the way?

Mark Benjamin: There’s a big difference reporting on people that are out of the army or out of the military and people that are still in. One of the things I learned very early on —when I first started doing this stuff in Fall 2003 — is that  people that are active duty in the military, when they are coming to the press, there is so much at risk.

If you know anybody who’s ever run into the wrong chain of command, what can happen to you is just awful. They can end your career. They can throw trumped up charges at you … There’s so much at risk there.

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.

Shapiro: Matt and Lisa, you faced a particular challenge because many of the soldiers you wrote about were dead. You had to both come up with a way of approaching their families, and that was probably a challenge, and then you also had kind of an investigative challenge. How do you report on the cases of people who are no longer on this earth to testify as to their own experience? How did you handle those two challenges together?

Lisa Chedekel: We got some of the sort of off-the-record cooperation from active duty soldiers that Mark talked about … helping us to be able to understand the system of mental healthcare in the military.

We were sort of focusing in on flaws in the way the military screens soldiers before they go in for mental health, and how they treat mental health in the war zone and also the recycling of troops on multiple tours who have mental problems. We made a decision that one of the ways we could tell that story was through suicide cases, which the military doesn’t identify. We had to go sifting through all the death notices from the Pentagon and try to identify suicides. So, we were dealing with dead soldiers, but we were dealing with dead soldiers who we believed committed suicide — which is another hurdle for approaching families and their friends, because mental health is a taboo topic and suicide is very much taboo, especially in a community of military people.

These were families who buried their kids as heroes in small towns all over the country. And we basically made a decision that we were going to approach these families and get them to talk about: Was it in fact a suicide? And were there mental health problems before your son went over, or your brother, or your daughter? Were there mental health problems while they were over there?

Matt and I, we had no prior experience in dealing with the military community, and everything we heard from all the reporters was: “It’s a closed community. They’re not going to talk to you. They don’t want to talk about mental health.” But we said let’s try, and we did.

We started what ended up being eight months of phone calls to families on our list … and it was the opposite of what we thought. The number one lesson I guess is: Don’t listen to what everybody tells you. We didn’t, obviously, start the conversation with: “Did Jeff commit suicide?” We started the conversation with: “We’re reporters from Connecticut who think we see some problems in the way the military’s treating mental health, wondered if your son daughter, husband — whatever — may have had any kind of problems while they were over there, that you knew, about or any problems before they went over, or between tours …”

There would be a lot of questions back about: “Why are you writing this?” and “Are you antiwar?”

The floodgates opened in about 90 percent of the cases — 95 percent of the cases. Not all on the exact themes we were looking for, but as Nina said, they kind of want, especially when it’s the case of a dead soldier, they kind of want the story told. It’s just been a name in the paper, a name on a list.

The military is claiming to safeguard soldiers’ mental health, yet the families know in reality that wasn’t happening. Once we tapped into that — their feeling of being betrayed by the system that they trusted — the stories just came. And once we got one, and two, and then could call the third family and say we’ve actually talked to a couple of families, and here’s what they say their concerns are, then the third is easier, the fourth is easier. We got great cooperation out of that closed community that wasn’t going to talk to us and, I mean, we’re still mining that community, and they’ve found us too. The soldiers and the war are far away but these families are right here among us and, you know, the source of some great stories.

Matthew Kauffman: It sort of went against everything we would have expected to hear: Military community talking about mental health, talking about suicide.

There was one woman who never went in the paper, who both Lisa and I talked to. Very similar to what Mark was saying, because we started also the same sort of way: “We are interested in this issue, we’re curious if you’re concerned about what you’re hearing from the military, if there’s something that doesn’t sound right to you.”

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.

There was one woman, who, to this day, has never had her name in the Hartford Courant, who had emailed me at one point after long, long backs and forths, saying: “I think you’ve probably figured out by now that I kind of use you as the compassionate stranger that I can talk to about this.” And what I wanted to write back is … “Join the list, ma’am!” I mean there were a lot of people.

Shapiro: You are all compassionate strangers, to use that nice turn of phrase, but you’re also bearing witness for them. Part of the job of each of you as a journalist is to go from being the compassionate stranger to publicly portraying these stories. What kinds of responses did you get once the stories and once your photographs have appeared?

Berman: I received lots of different kinds of emails. Some that was very mean: “We’re watching you” kind of emails. Then I once got an email from a medic in Fallujah saying “Wish I could buy your book, but I’m here.” Which is so odd. Then, you know, a mother of a Vietnam vet saying: “I could never reach my son.” So, all different kinds of things.

But then I have exhibitions that travel and I’ve been challenged by some military members about whether I had some other agenda in showing my pictures. So, they often want to know: “Why did you take these pictures? What are you trying to do? What’s your view on the war?”

I always respond in the same way, which is:” I let the soldiers tell their own stories. I’m just making their pictures. You can view it whichever way you want. But I’m not going to be boxed in by you saying that I have an antiwar or pro-war view.”

Shapiro: Mark, you’ve gotten a certain amount of flak

Benjamin: Yeah, I have gotten a certain amount of flak and the reaction I think from the Pentagon, if you will, at least to my work, has been pretty much the same since the beginning. It was almost an outright attack in the very beginning, in the Fall of 2003. I mean, they did everything from, literally, high-level generals calling, not the editorial chain of command — at that time I was at UPI — but the people that pay my bills, and lying about what I was doing, and how I was doing it, and saying that I was illegally going on military bases, and so on and so forth, which was not true … saying stuff to other reporters: “Hey, you don’t want to follow Benjamin’s stuff.” The standard routine.

In fact, I was on a panel with a Newsweek reporter really early on. He was a Pentagon correspondent. Right before the panel started, he put his hand on the mic and said: “You won’t believe what they’re saying about you in the Pentagon.”

From the soldiers that appear in the pieces, and the soldiers that read the pieces and the families, I would say [the response has been] incredibly, overwhelmingly positive. I would say also overwhelmingly positive from military officials that know what’s going on, or retired generals … as any reporter knows who does this beat,  there’s a big community now of retired generals that are very pissed off, and they’re good sources.

In 2003, I did a piece … very similar to what ended up happening in Walter Reed, because the outpatient medical system is broken in the Army. I had this piece called “Fort Stewart Soldiers Held in Squalor,” or something.

It was about these soldiers who couldn’t get doctor’s appointments for weeks and weeks and weeks … and they were keeping them in these facilities that didn’t have running water, and so on and so forth. I must have gotten 200 — literally, easily 200 — pieces of just hate email. It was: “You’re a communist, you’re a pinko, you’re a liar, you hate Bush.” You know, you can’t make up 600 soldiers in a barrack at Fort Stewart. And the Army ended up flying people down there and having press conferences on it, and so on and so forth. I mean it’s as real as your big toe. But people then, I just think, frankly, some people were not ready to read that stuff yet.

Chedekel: Initially, it’s sort of safe to be talking to reporters from the Hartford Courant if you’re in Choctaw Oklahoma because your friends and neighbors will never find out that Jeffrey was really messed up and killed himself. But it ended up — because it got picked up widely by wire services and others — that it did circulate around. So, among the families and some of the soldiers, I think it was like: “Holy cow! This is now out publicly that there were mental health issues for my war hero husband, or son.”

But really, like Mark, from that community it’s been mostly positive. In fact — and our series ran a year ago — we still get tons of emails from other families and soldiers with mental health issues or related to our project. That’s never stopped.

The military: Our favorite story is that, a few days before the series ran, we wrote an email to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs saying we’re going to do a seven-part series that’s going to start Sunday in the Courant that basically indicts your system for screening and treating troops, and says you’re giving out psychotropic drugs without monitoring, and we have suicides and other cases — and got no response.

The series started on a Sunday and it made a big bang. We were on ABC News and CNN and everything Monday morning, and at about eight o’clock, my cellphone rang and it’s: “The Assistant Secretary of Defense would like to talk to you immediately.”

It was good to have sort of stayed below the radar. I don’t think they knew what we were up to. We had put in a lot of requests for data and information, but we did it — Matt did most of that — to different departments, so I don’t think each department could put together the picture of what we were looking at.

We didn’t get any help from the military, or seek any help from the military. As I’m sure Mark knows, or Nina, in getting access to these soldiers, you’re on your own. You don’t call the military and go “I need five guys to open up about mental health.” You have to go around them, and try not to be detected by them, and try to protect the soldiers that you do end up talking to.

We caught ‘em by surprise, and caused a big to-do, and it did end up resulting in a change in policy and congressional action. And it was the Assistant Secretary of Defense who actually revised the deployment guidelines in a way that basically closed a lot of the flaws that we had brought up in the series. But it’s adversarial to this day, I think, with the decision makers, but positive with the larger military community.

Kauffman: 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.”

Shapiro: Questions from the room?

[Audience question about the genesis of the Courant series …]

Kauffman: That’s an excellent question. We get asked a lot and we wish to this day that either of us could remember the genesis of the story. We remember the timing at which it came up, we remember — I feel like I’m talking about some drunken college escapade — we both had an interest in mental health issues. We sort of remember step two. Step two had to do with lowering standards for deployment and enlistment. We know we were doing something separate and then started talking and, at some point … we knew they were lowering standards on education. There was something of a man-power crunch. That they were lowering standards on health and physical fitness, weight standards; if you had a petty criminal record you could get in. We knew that there was a great mental health toll when you send people to war.

And we just wondered. We were just curious: If they’re lowering standards in other areas … might they be sending people over there with mental health conditions who should not be there? And then [we] kind of let the reporting take it where it did and sort of expanded it.

[Audience question about the risks of starting interviews off the record …]

Benjamin: So, in other words, you’re worried that somebody would be off the record then the military would shut them up?

Yes, there’s always that risk. There’s lots of risks in reporting that way. One of the issues that I thought would come up — and that frankly hasn’t — is: Will this person try to control the story too much?

I’m trying to tell the story as accurately and as fairly as I can, and what if these people — when I go back with them and I’m saying: “I won’t stick anything in the story without your permission” — basically try to control where the story is going? That was actually my biggest fear. And the answer is: You have to be prepared to walk away. Walk away from the story. If you can’t do it right, walk away from the story.

I haven’t had a problem with the military finding people. I think you end up doing lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of work that never shows up in any stories. That’s certainly true. It’s not necessarily a drawback. But in the long run you find that those people … end up being your moles.

If something is going to happen at Fort Benning, I’m going to know about it. Because a lot of people are going to call me, because they know that they can trust me. So it hasn’t been that much of a risk.

I would say the only other problem that you have when you get in really deep with folks, and you’re working with them for a long time, and there’s an incredible amount at stake, is: When is it crossing the line into advocacy? It’s not an issue of being on the record or off the record.

I had a situation … where a soldier in Iraq became suicidal related to her chain of command thinking she was talking to me. And then her husband, who was at Fort Benning, threatening to go on a shooting rampage and it was a very dicey situation. It put me in a strange place where I had to say: “I’m not a reporter here anymore. I’m not working on the story anymore. I’ve gotta try to make sure these people don’t kill each other, or other people.”

That sometimes comes up and you have to be really, really careful about that. Is it OK, if somebody’s about to be deployed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, is it OK to email them the document that says that the Army can’t do that? I think it is. But you always have to continually check what you’re doing … with your conscience or some people call it your editor.

[Audience question about the three-year gap between Benjamin’s initial stories in 2003 and the Washington Post’s coverage of Walter Reed in 2006. Is it a result of the difference between Salon and the Washington Post? …]

Benjamin: I think the last part is almost certainly true: the difference between Salon and the Washington Post. I don’t think there’s any question that there’s still incredible power in the large, large news organizations.

[After his stories on Fort Stewart] in 2003, the Army had to do something. I mean they had 600 guys there living in horrible conditions. Interestingly enough, what happened is the Army fixed the stuff that was easy to fix. They moved the guys out of the barracks; they put them in new barracks. They didn’t fix the mental healthcare … it was the beginning of the outpatient care system in the Army breaking down. I feel like I’ve been continuing to write that story, frankly, on and off since then. I was just saying to some folks here tonight that I’ve just about had enough. Is that enough of an answer?

[Audience question why it took the Washington Post and the rest of the media three years to do pick up on the Army healthcare story …]

Benjamin: Good question. I get that question a lot. Here’s my current operating theory on that:

Part of it was that I was working for media outlets that aren’t as big. But, if you think about army health care — without sounding like too much of a nerd — what has been a terrible disaster, an unspeakable disaster — this is what I’m trying to get in my stories — is outpatient care: invisible wounds, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, traumatic brain injuries, horrible things that are as real as your big toe and that will be problems for the rest of these people’s lives; or general outpatient care for bad backs and stuff that are serious injuries but that aren’t as evident.

What’s interesting is that the Army pumped tons and tons of resources into acute battlefield medicine. And, believe me, if you get your leg blown off tomorrow, you want to be in the Army. They will get you off that battlefield; they will have you at Walter Reed in 48 hours; you will have the best surgeons; you will have the best rehabilitative stuff.

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.”

What’s crazy is that’s what was happening. Army medicine was great and horrible. My theory now is that that’s what happened. People just figured Benjamin’s off his rocker and it didn’t help any that that’s what the Pentagon was saying.

[Audience question about methods for going on the record with sources. When you go back to sources, do you read what you’ve written? …]

Benjamin: In some cases I do. I never send anybody any copy, but I do. I do that with just about everybody. I go through stories with targets of investigations, people I’m interviewing. I want everybody to know exactly what I’m doing. Basically I try to do that the whole time I’m reporting the story out.

It’s a great way to fact check. But also, if somebody’s going to come back on you and say “No, Mark” … let’s say you don’t have something tape recorded or something like that  … if I’m gonna have that fight, I want to have it before we go to press.

Shapiro: Nina, how much control did you give your subjects over the oral histories that appear in the book.

Berman: Zero. No, I edit it the way I want to edit it and I edit it based on the whole package.

Chedekel: We did not read back our quotes to families, or soldiers, or the military or go over in that level of detail that Mark was talking about. We don’t routinely do that.

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.

[Audience question for Berman about the obstacles she faced getting her work published. Also, is there some sort of inherent advocacy in this type of reporting? …]

Berman: 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?

In terms of advocacy, I would sometimes meet certain soldiers that I knew were in really bad shape. So, what I would try and do, when I got back to New York, is hook them up with somebody I knew that could try and help them. I just felt that’s a decent thing to do. So, I had no problem doing that.

Shapiro: Mark and Lisa, how did you deal with the advocacy question, either individual case advocacy or even thinking about this project, which is crusading journalism?
 
Benjamin: I try to come up with tools to help me feel like I’m not being an advocate. I don’t know how effective they are. For example, if there’s a really troubled person, as opposed to becoming an advocate myself, I’m not sure there’s necessarily a problem with me knowing a lot about the veterans advocacy organizations out there and knowing who’s really helpful and saying to a soldier: “Call this guy, he’s actually an advocate and he will help you. And when you call, say ‘Mark Benjamin said that.’”

Chedekel: We didn’t do any personal advocacy. We maybe directed some people to resources as needed. The great thing for us in tackling PTSD and mental health was we didn’t have to advocate for the military to do a better job. The military, luckily, since the beginning of this war … had said to the American people that they are going to do an unprecedented job in safeguarding troops mental health and protecting them from trauma and helping them with PTSD. That’s not us, you know.

So, we didn’t hold them to sort of a standard that we created, we held them to the standard that they said they were going to have … as journalists covering this stuff, we don’t have to be advocating against a system that isn’t doing the stuff they’re claiming … So, we didn’t feel like we were advocating on behalf of soldiers with mental illness, we felt like the military’s made these assurances to the families and soldiers that they’re going to safeguard mental health and we’re just gonna see if they’re doing what they say they’re doing.

Kauffman: These were specific standards. It wasn’t even just sort of a broad: “We’re going to take mental health seriously.” We sort of sidestepped the advocacy issue. We did not want to — and our consciences, our editors, didn’t want us to, either — be the ones saying it’s a bad idea to send someone to war on Selexa; or someone who has bipolar disorder should not go to war.

So, we hunted around a lot and found out that the military, in fact, had specific standards that they simply weren’t following. So you can sort of sidestep the thorny issue of whether or not you’re falling into an advocacy role that you’re uncomfortable with. Our favorite line in the entire seven-part series: “In violation of their own policies.” That sort of settles that debate. They said this is the standard, this is acceptable, and we’re simply revealing they’re not doing it. And that, I’ll tell you, made the project a lot easier on that sort of psychic level.

[Audience question about how sources sometimes treat a journalist like a therapist …]

Chedekel: Some of these families had not even told their own, you know, close friends and relatives, so we were an outlet for them to disclose that, in fact, Jeffrey didn’t seem right when he came home, and he didn’t look right, and he was acting weird, and the little tidbits that they had heard from the military. We sort of could help them put the pieces together in that way.

The family that I’ve stayed in the most touch with is the Henthorn family in Oklahoma, and I do stay in touch with Warren. In fact I shut my cellphone off because he usually calls me around this time every night just to talk. I think the grieving that goes on after you lose a kid — these are young kids, 21-25 — is horrible.

We didn’t think anything was really going to come of this series. But some good things did come of it, in terms of changes in policies and awareness … you never talk to families about that while you’re doing the reporting, and you never promise them anything. You assume that nothing’s ever going to happen. The only guarantee we ever gave them was: “We’ll publish.” But you don’t know if it’s ever going to lead to anything, and we certainly didn’t expect that it would, but it did lead to congressional action and policy getting changed.

Kauffman: We racked up a lot of billable hours as untrained therapists. We used to sort of joke about that: Maybe we could do this full-time.

It’s an odd role for a journalist to be in, but there’s no question you’re dealing with people dealing with — for the parents of soldiers — I think the worst thing any human being could go through: the suicide and the death of a child. And when you are asking to be invited that deep into the heart, I mean, you’re simply going to end up going to places that average folks — and even prying journalists — typically don’t do and are kind of the province of therapists. We sort of often felt like that. But that was OK. Truly and compassionately, we wanted to hear their stories. And then, if they were willing to share them, we wanted to tell them. If they wanted to call us up out of the blue and talk, no matter what we were doing we’d stop it and listen to them.

Shapiro: Let me ask each of you one last thing … and you may or may not want to answer this. How has working on this very challenging story — which is at once deeply personal and a huge national story — how has it changed you? How has your sustained attention to this subject changed you?

Berman: Well, I’ve become much more serious about how I conceive of pictures, about how I value pictures. You know, you take a photograph, you do a photo essay and it goes out there and you never hear anything. You don’t know if you made any impact.

And then you take a series of pictures like I did of these soldiers in such a way that’s so disturbing for people. I photographed them all alone, which is, I think, the most disturbing part for most viewers.

And then I at least have taken myself a bit more seriously in how I choose to make a picture, and what it is I’m saying by the things I leave out of the picture and the things I put in. Because the visual telling of this war, or telling of the wounded, has been the wounded soldier, the amputee in Ward 57, being helped by a really capable physician or surgeon or prosthetic therapist, and you get a sense that they’re going to be fine, that the system works. I felt very strongly when I met them that the system was not working, so I made some certain aesthetic decisions. I think that I will be much more conscious of those decisions now.

Benjamin: I don’t know if it’s compassion fatigue, or something. Or maybe I’ve just been doing the story for so long, but I feel like I don’t really have much emotional response, honestly. Like, if a mother called me right now and told me that her son had been set on fire, and he killed himself, and he was deployed without mental healthcare, I would go through the interview and I would say some compassionate things to sort of set the tone for the interview, but honestly I really feel like there’s just — I’m not feeling it anymore. It’s just — I got nothin’ left.

I think, to a certain extent, that’s true with just sort of reporting these days. We were talking about how mature some of the storylines are. You know: torture, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was trying to think: What could you pick up in the paper tomorrow that would shock you? Nothing. Really, sometimes I feel that way, which is a challenging time to be a reporter because if you’re in the business — as we were saying — of uncovering evil … Evil’s just sort of become the status quo. I sometimes feel like that. Somebody called me the other day and asked me — I’ve done some abu Ghraib reporting —  “Oh man! You’ve been all through these documents. How do you feel about this incredible” — he was saying — “cover up?” … Yeah. Yep. It’s a scandal.

Chedekel: We don’t have compassion fatigue.

Shapiro: You guys have award fatigue.

Kauffman: But we are tired.

Chedekel: I think what Matt and I end up feeling is like … you know, it took eight months for us to get that one little area of treatment of soldiers out in a way that people could understand and connect to.

You guys know. This war is very far away. It’s really far away in Connecticut because we don’t have any active duty troops. So, in order to get time to do it, and then energy to do it, you’ve got to convince yourself it’s going to be something that your readers are going to invest in and be engaged by. And they need real people for that, and you need a compelling issue.

And we landed it … that was a big lift. And all we got was, like, a little change in the deployment policy and a little more awareness. And now we want to keep doing big lifts but there’s so much — from TBI to PTSD — so many issues coming back from this war and our obligation and our interest is in bringing the war home to our readers because we’re not over there and it is going to impact this whole generation. So I don’t know. Where to start? What’s the next thing to chip off?

Kauffman: I think we start that with a certain level of energy, which you wouldn’t expect at sort of this time in the industry. It’s not an easy time, certainly, on the print side.

But I do feel that sort of lift of, just the sense of the importance of having sort of a vigorous press that asks questions that might be uncomfortable and goes places that might be uncomfortable. There’s a lot of work and even beyond this panel. If you haven’t read the Dallas work, read the Dallas work and you will be absolutely blown away — and the same with Wilmington.

We’re just not accustomed to getting so deep inside one person’s story and both Wilmington and Dallas did that in a way that you read those, and you go: The press is alive, and what we do is important.

So, in a goofy, touchy-feely sort of way … you know, I’m sure everyone on this panel has cried at least sometime in reporting on these things and bearing witness to some of this. But it has, in a goofy sort of way, reminded me after decades in the business that, after all, this is important. And if we don’t do it, it won’t get done. The nation would be worse for it.