I wish I could read fewer stories about Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan and more stories by Anne Hull and Dana Priest. This unlikely team is in the process of sweeping journalism's most prestigious honors, and deservedly so.
Their stories on the shameful care of wounded soldiers will stand, I predict, among the greatest investigations our time.
I call Hull and Priest an "unlikely" pair based on their radically different perspectives on their craft. At a keynote session at the Nieman Narrative Conference, Priest described herself as a reporter not that much interested in language and storytelling, but dedicated to uncovering government secrecy and corruption and passionate about the search for truth and justice. She described her partner as someone who begins with people as a way into impenetrable institutions and as someone whose attention to words, scenes and the complexities of character astonish her.
As I sat and listened to them describe each other, tell the story of their investigation, and describe their differences it occurred to me that together they reconcile the most significant cultural divide in the history of journalism, the one between "reporters" and "storytellers." This divide is as least as old as the creation of the penny press and the human interest story, both considered by traditionalists as subversive to the more serious democratic purposes of the fourth estate.
If you read the first two stories in their Walter Reed series, you can easily identify the primary drafter, even if you were not guided by the order of their bylines. (I'm thinking now of how easy it is to identify a Lennon song over one by McCartney.)
The first story, introducing us to the scandal, has the sound of Priest's investigative style: pointed, accusatory, at ease with collapsing buildings and broken promises:
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss.
The second story sounds more like Hull:
In Room 323 the alarm goes off at 5 a.m., but Cpl. Dell McLeod slumbers on. His wife, Annette, gets up and fixes him a bowl of instant oatmeal before going over to the massive figure curled in the bed. An Army counselor taught her that a soldier back from war can wake up swinging, so she approaches from behind.
"Dell," Annette says, tapping her husband. "Dell, get in the shower."
"Dell!" she shouts.
Finally, the yawning hulk sits up in bed. "Okay, baby," he says. An American flag T-shirt is stretched over his chest. He reaches for his dog tags, still the devoted soldier of 19 years, though his life as a warrior has become a paradox. One day he's led on stage at a Toby Keith concert with dozens of other wounded Operations Iraqi Freedom troops from Mologne House, and the next he's sitting in a cluttered cubbyhole at Walter Reed, fighting the Army for every penny of his disability.
The tick-tock set off by the alarm, the scene of devoted wife and wounded husband, the dialogue, the attention to detail, the ability to perceive conflict and contradiction -- all reliable characteristics of Hull's reporting and writing style.
The reporter and writer in both of them become visible in the powerful use of what I'll call "narrative numbers."
Tom French and I sat in the back of a conference ballroom listening to Hull and Priest read from their work, and I was suddenly struck by the power of phrases such as "Building 18" and "Room 323." In such specific details, writing and reporting find their match. For Priest, Building 18 is a hall of government secrets about to be invaded. For Hull, Room 323 is a little world in which worthy characters struggle to survive what their country has done to them, but failed to do for them.
As we listened, Tom and I built a quick list of familiar narrative numbers that began with Building 18: 007, Client #9, Catch-22, 9/11, 24, High Noon, 12 midnight, Stalag 17, the Sixth Sense. I opened a copy of the new collection of literary journalism, "True Stories," and came across a story by Michael Paterniti,
"The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy." [PDF]. The narrative describes the famous and mysterious crash of an airliner over the Long Island Sound: "What these people held in common at first -- these diplomats and scientists and students, these lovers and parents and children -- was an elemental feeling, that buzz of excitement derived from holding a ticket to some foreign place. And what distinguished that ticket from billions of other tickets was the simple designation of a number: SR 111."
Writers and editors have come to think of numbers as the enemies of good narrative, little blood clots in the flow of interesting language. But here we see that just the right number at just the right time can drive the story forward and reconcile journalism's most important fraternal twins: writing and reporting.
"What's the point of this?" he asked. "I mean you...
