Just have to share from this amazing conference...I just sat in an amazing keynote by the investigative journalists, Anne Hull and Dana Priest, who broke the Walter Reed story for the Washington Post. They talked about hanging out in vet bars, creating bonds with overmedicated, underappreciated men and women coming back from Iraq, sneaking into Building 18--the most notorious of the falling-apart buildings housing our injured vets.

I was so moved--not just because these smart, dedicated journalists spent months getting an important story, and changed the world in the process, but because they are women who wouldn't have been given access to this "beat" or these stories in an earlier America. They weren't relegated to "women's issues" or the Style section. They were writing about war. They were doing hard-nosed investigative journalism. And they did a damn good job.

3 Comments

March 15, 2008 2:59 PM

[0+]  mernlar said:

It's Walter Reed, not Reade

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March 15, 2008 3:45 PM

[0+]  CourtneyEMartin said:

Thanks mernlar. Writing too fast.

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March 15, 2008 11:18 PM

[0+]  religiarchy said:

Thanks for the shoutout to these journalists. They definitely did some awesome work that, as you say, wouldn't have been possible from "mere girls" even a couple decades ago.

Now, someone should do a story on the forgotten spouses and children of the war veterans. I know firsthand that if you live near Walter Reed, and are on military insurance, you are required to use that hospital. No matter how dilapidated the facilities or abysmal the care.

Let's send Anne Hall and Dana Priest back in for some recon...

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