Reporting Veterans: "Beyond the Battlefield"

  
      In April, 2012, the Huffington Post senior military correspondent David Wood won the journal a Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for his 10-part series on wounded veterans called "Beyond the Battlefield: Rebuilding Wounded Warriors" assembled from several months of reporting and interviews. The seven year-old web-based news journal is the first of it's kind to win the Pulitzer and there is talk that the award signifies that web-based reporting is gaining relevance and respect.

      "Beyond the Battlefield" boasts a quantity of photographs in sizes that rival the bucksome spreads of online tabloids. Though this adds immediate intrigue and click-ability, this is a site which could use a table of contents and a reduction of 'sponsored links' which make it easy to confuse Wood's stories for others advertised by the Post. But lo' a yonder internal order doth emerge in everything, and once "Beyond the Battlefield's does, it holds mature.

                     The series explores how veterans and their families heal from the mental and psychical strains of war. Wood reminds readers of his heady purpose unceasingly, linking the intensity of each article to the weight our society must carry collectively. He writes in an article on veteran caregivers:

                     No one, a decade ago, anticipated that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would produce more than 50,000 battle casualties, among them some 16,000 young Americans so badly injured -- "ripped out of the hands of death" by advanced trauma care, as a Navy surgeon put it -- that many of them would require lifetime care.

Wood gravitates towards explicit, uncensored details of combat scenarios down to the macabre paths of stray shrapnel and the gruesome symptoms of chronic medical illness. He reveals something that glamorous movies trying to be unglamorous, like the highly praised Hurt Locker (2008) which valorizes the intensity and skill needed to participate in war, cannot do. That is, to bring the focus away from combat and make war into something that extends far beyond the front lines where most war reporters are sent.

                   This approach embraces the enduring interest of most people on the affect of war on public psychology and the institutions and programs that cope with our losses after the fact. In this way, Wood recognizes something that intellectuals have been getting at since WWI- that war is a totalizing force that we all take part in on the home-front and bear the weight of in our own homes even if we choose only to follow the news on the battlefront.