Here are a few good feature stories to peruse as we think about writing our own. I was exposed to these way back at the beginning of the semester when I attended the "When Veterans Come Home" conference at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Although they are both quite lengthy, they are great examples of finding human faces to place with larger issues.
The first was written by a guy named Dave Philipps who spoke at the conference and writes for the Colorado Springs Gazette. The article speaks for itself. A must read.
Without giving it away, the article started with a few incidents near an army base, and as Philipps got farther and farther into it, he found this whole huge trend of things happening to soldiers returning from war zones. You never know what you are going to find when you look into something. I imagine that there are weird factors lurking behind almost everything these days.
The next is by a Denver Post journalist named Miles Moffeit. As he explained it, the story also started as something small and snowballed into the story of widespread rape of women GI's in the military, and the subsequent covering up of those rapes by people at the top.
Both of these articles exposed major problems with how the military deals with traumatized and violent veterans returning home after war and affected Army policies.
A good blog about living with PTSD is by Michael Jernigan, a severely wounded Marine who spoke at the conference. The blog is very entertaining. The articles are listed in reverse chronological order, so start from the bottom of the NYT page if you are interested.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/michael-jernigan/
Maybe a little off topic, but good stuff.
The Dave Philipps story is one of the best features I've read in a long time. And what's remarkable is that he researched it on his own time because it was off his beat.
ReplyDeleteThanks for all of the good reads!
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