Swamplanders may have noticed a post from a new name this afternoon, TIME’s National Security correspondent extraordinaire Mark Thompson.
Mark is a Pulitzer Prize winner for his 1985 Fort Worth Star-Telegram five-part story about a design flaw in Bell helicopters that went uncorrected for a decade and claimed 250 lives during that time. He’s written number of cover stories including this one three years ago about the V-22 Osprey, this one on the army being stretched too thin in 2003 and this one in 2008 about the increasingly medicated armed forces.
From Mark’s google page:
He has hopscotched by helicopter across Afghanistan and Iraq, reporting on the wars’ progress and U.S. military’s surprising lack of armor. Beyond profiling the wars’ leaders, he has written of the heroes on the ground.
He has written major pieces on the hidden toll of the nation’s recent wars — an early look at U.S. troops wounded in Iraq, a study of the U.S. troops killed in a single week, the lonely vigil of an Ohio family whose son was the first American soldier in Iraq to be listed as missing in action (whose remains were ultimately recovered in March, 2008), the death of a GI at the hands of Army medicine a year after he was slightly wounded, suicides among Army recruiters, and the pressures on the Army’s mental-health corps.
Thompson has scoured the skies near northern Iraq with the United States Air Force and rolled into Kosovo with the United States Marines. He was written about the highs — and lows of women in command of U.S. Navy warships. He has taken an F-16 jet fighter for a spin above the Gulf of Mexico and detailed the Air Force’s troubled T-3 trainers, scrapped in the wake of Time’s story. He has written poignant tales of life-crushing military jokes, snafus and hatred, as well as revelations of tragic blunders laced with arrogance, asininity and avarice that killed innocents. He has reported on the “softening” of boot camp, the rash of domestic violence in military families, and abusive recruiters. He has witnessed U.S. troops at war and work around the world and written about national security for three decades.
Please join me in welcoming Mark!!
