Impressive Salon.com series looks at the dark side of Fort Carson soldiers returning from Iraq
A colorful view of journalist Michael de Yoanna.
Every nanosecond of every day, new writing appears on the Internet -- and for the most part, that's a good thing. All too often, however, important reportage gets lost in the flood. Today's, for instance: "Coming Home," a series of investigative reports on Salon.com about "preventable deaths at Fort Carson, a U.S. Army post in Colorado, among troops who have returned from combat tours in Iraq." The reports, which appeared throughout this week -- click to access the introduction, part one, part two, part three and today's concluding installment -- offer stark, unblinking looks at tragic cases of violence that may seem anomalous at first glance, but prove to be part of a larger pattern when viewed as a whole.
The journalists responsible for this major piece of work are Salon national correspondent Mark Benjamin, and Michael de Yoanna, a Colorado-based scribe who worked for a number of area publications, including the Colorado Daily, before going the freelance route in 2007. In addition to tackling stories of the sort exemplifed by the Fort Carson series, he oversees MileHive.com, which he describes in the site's bio as "a nonpartisan experiment in 'citizen journalism' and creative expression at a time when traditional forms of media, especially newspapers, face regrettable cutbacks."
"Coming Home" is journalism of a more traditional sort, even if the articles come through a new-media portal. Amid the deluge of material on the 'Net, it should rise to the top.
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